Good afternoon everyone,

Last week I went to a modernist editing workshop and saw some terrific books and art by women. This week is all about the best of the books in the National Library of Scotland. The workshop itself was also great and organised by Imprints of the New Modernist Editing and My Bookcase. If you are into modernism you should definitely check them out and if you don't know if you are into modernism maybe this email will help you to make up your mind in either direction!

There is a cool story about our first book. As you can see it's Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, with a cover illustrations by Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson (a man). It's a limited edition of 1,000, hand printed by Virginia Woolf, but even all of this is not the cool thing – the cool thing is that after printing about five of them Virginia Woolf decided that she didn't like the cover illustration very much so missed it off the other 995. I felt a bit worried handling this extremely rare item:

Here's a Katherine Mansfield poem, 'Voices of the Air':

But then there comes that moment rare

When, for no cause that I can find,

The little voices of the air

Sound above all the sea and wind.

The sea and wind do then obey

And sighing, sighing double notes

Of double basses, content to play

A droning chord for the little throats—

The little throats that sing and rise

Up into the light with lovely ease

And a kind of magical, sweet surprise

To hear and know themselves for these—

For these little voices: the bee, the fly,

The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,

The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,

The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47379/voices-of-the-air

I really liked Parallax, this book of Nancy Cunard poetry, with cover illustrations also by Nancy Cunard:

She was an utterly remarkable woman; heiress to the Cunard shipping dynasty, modernist and committed anti-fascist:

In Authors Take Sides, she created a unique political literary genre, calling on famous writers to take a side for or against fascism. She continued her anti-fascist efforts during World War II as a writer and broadcaster of coded material for the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, she fought tirelessly to rescue Spanish refugees from the Franco regime and to find them a homeland in Latin America; she eventually joined a guerrilla movement to restore democracy in Spain. Throughout, she continued writing poetry, essays, and news reports.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12070489&t=1581679563779

More poetry! Ending on H.D., Hilda Doolittle:

There's a great overview of her life and the influences on her work here:

H.D. wrote constantly, and in a letter to her American friend Viola Jordan said, “I sit at my typewriter until I drop. I have in some way, to justify my existence, and then it is also a pure ‘trade’ with me now. It is my ‘job’.”

https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/hilda-doolittle-h-d/

💗MEGA FEMINIST LOVE THIS VALENTINE'S DAY💗

Alex xx.