DIESEL HAND by Nico Vassilakis

Description

Poetry

2017

CHAX PRESS announces: DIESEL HAND, by Nico Vassilakis

Diesel Hand is a letterpress book, with visual poems by Nico Vassilakis, accompanied by the author’s text titled “Picabia and Me.”

Foreword from a Note by Karl Young, in which the process of making the work is described, as Young indicates how Vassilakis “takes Francis Picabia’s work as the base for a set of verbal and visual poems. He has surrounded Picabia’s diesel images with text, carrying on an appreciation, a debate, and a critique of Picabia and the drawings. Vassilakis disposes his text around the machine drawings, suggesting simultaneously the mechanics of type and the organic and ephemeral nature of speech. He continues the hard and soft dialectic of machine and word.”

9 such visual/verbal works, each in two colors (4 colors entirely as one moves through the book) are in the book, as well as pages with Vassilakis’s texts. Letterpress printing from polymer plates and foundry metal type, the fonts used are Bernhard Gothic and Gill Sans.

Just 60 copies printed on Vandercook Press and bound by hand in two signatures, with a pattern of stitching on the book spine interspersed by the letters of the word “DIESEL.” Papers used are Rives and French. Each individual copy is press numbered.