Bill

Berkson, Bill; Jacobsen, Colter

ISBN 10: 0977744256 / ISBN 13: 9780977744251

Published by Gallery 16 Editions, 2008

About this Item

Fine/As New 4to, 9 1/4" x 7 1/4", SIGNED, pictorial paper over boards with Jacobsen illustration of astronaut on a manilla folder. Pristine aside from mild bumping to head and foot, tightly bound, clean interior. Graphite illustrations are drawing directly into typewritten text. SIGNED and INSCRIBED by Bill Berkson to Whitney Chadwick and Robert Bechtle. "To Whitney and Bob, with love from the 'real' Bill, May 1, 2008. Published the year Berkson retired from San Francisco Art Institute. Acquired from the private library of photorealist, Robert Bechtle and art historian, Whitney Chadwick. A lovely copy with rich Northern California association value.

Seller Inventory # 01721

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bill
• Publisher: Gallery 16 Editions
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0977744256
• ISBN 13: 9780977744251
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: none as issued
• Signed: Signed
• Seller catalogs:
  • POETRY

About this title

Synopsis

Poetry. Art. In the back of BILL, Bill Berkson writes: "The words and title for BILL popped out of a juvenile detective novel Tom Veitch gave me around 1980. Instantly, just flipping through this little illustrated book occasioned an emergency. The editorial imagination went to work. Soon, having typed a series of short sentences, paragraphs and stray phrases towards the bottom edge of unusually thin 8 1/2" by 11" sheets... I set aside the twenty-or-so pages and forgot about them." The story was then shelved in a manila folder for 25 years. Berkson revisited the story in 2006 and decided the blank pages needed artwork. With the help of Mac McGinnes, it was decided that artist Colter Jacobsen would be a perfect fit. Jacobsen found inspiration for the project in a collection of postcards dating from early the 1900s through the 1980s. With a slow and deliberate attentiveness he began a series of drawings: "I felt I was responding to another time, nearer to when I was born, a time thirty years before I was born, and recontextualizing these times into images for today." Within a year, the new BILL emerged, "a fresh creation, in its present splendor."

About the Author

Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic, editor, curator and professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. He was born in New York City in 1939 and entered the worlds of poetry and art and in his early twenties. He is the author of eighteen books of poetry including, most recently, Gloria with etchings by Alex Katz, and Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently. His reviews have been featured in Aperture, Art News, Modern Painters and Artforum. He is a contributing editor for Art in America. His books of criticism include The Sweet Singer of Modernism and Sudden Address: Selected Lectures. Colter Jacobsen was born in 1975 in Ramona, California. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. His work has been exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery, Adobe Books, San Francisco Arts Commission and New Langton Arts in San Francisco, White Columns, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London. Colter currently lives and works in San Francisco.