May 23, 2024 - Sale 2670

Sale 2670 - Lot 84

Price Realized: $ 12,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 8,000
Morrison, Toni (1931-2019)
Five Poems. Silhouettes by Kara E. Walker.

Las Vegas: Rainmaker Editions, 2002.

Limited edition, one of 26 lettered copies, copy E; signed on the limitation page by Morrison, illustrator Kara Walker, and designer Peter Rutledge Koch; bound in half black morocco and silk fabric-covered boards and matching slipcase by Jace Graf at Cloverleaf Studio in Austin, Texas; illustrated; as new with original prospectus; 12 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.

"Five Poems remains largely unknown because of the limited copies produced by Peter Koch Printers and because Rainmaker Editions disintegrated soon after the book was printed. Promotion for Five Poems has been limited to the websites of Peter Koch Printers and the Black Mountain Institute, which absorbed Rainmaker Editions in 2006. Five Poems also does not have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), an identification usually assigned to a text by the publisher, and therefore it does not appear in library catalogs, though a few universities and public collections have the book. [...] The partnership between Morrison and Walker is both remarkable and unprecedented. Although Walker has cited Morrison as a key influence on her artistic development and critics have begun to analyze intersections in their work, Five Poems is the first demonstration of collaboration between two of the most important living African American artists." (Quoted from Stephanie Li's Five Poems: The Gospel According to Toni Morrison, published in Callaloo, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 2011); Johns Hopkins University Press.)