It's time to reserve your copy at the pre-sale price!

The project to re-create the Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay 1913 publication, La Prose du Transsibérien, is in its pre-publication phase. I am planning an edition of 150 copies, with 30 hors commerce. The publication date is January 1, 2018 with pre-sales starting November 1, 2017. The discounted price of $2750 will be in effect from November 1 to December 30, 2017. The price will be $3500 on January 1, 2018. 

To reserve your copy at the prepaid prepublication price of $2750, please email me at twohandspress@gmail.com or by snail mail. The check should be sent to Two Hands Press before January 1, 2018. The delivery date will be subject to the completion of the printing of the booklet and the binding, but is planned be close to January 1, 2018. Delivery of the first 43 will be made in the order prepaid reservations are received. If there is a deluge of pre-sales orders, then the next copies will be shipped by March 2018.

The type for the book was printed last June by printer Richard Siebert in San Francisco. Two Hands Press licensed a high-resolution scan of La Prose from The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Richard removed the surrounding pochoir colors from the Blaise Cendrars poem and then went through the whole text for weeks, cleaning up nearly every letter. Sixteen photo-polymer plates were needed to print the four 16 x 23 inch pages, with each one printed in four colors: orange, ruby red, green and blue. Each of the 1000 sheets was printed four times on his Heidelberg letterpress. The printing is very crisp and uses exactly the form of the original.

The gouache color for the Sonia Delaunay imagery is hand-applied using thin metal stencils (pochoir = stencil in French). There are about 25 aluminum stencils for each of the four sheets, or 100 in all. The 50 or so colors have been selected with great care to match the originals. I worked primarily with originals at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and viewed nine other originals in the US, France and England.

The pochoir for five display copies was completed in France; the pochoir for 43 more copies has been completed at Two Hands Press. The remaining 137 copies in the edition will take another six to nine months to complete. About 75% of the first copies were done in France where Kitty and her assistant Chris Yuengling-Niles spent almost two months working daily with Christine Menguy at Atelier Coloris, who fine-tuned their skills in the pochoir process. The next step is to paint the vellum covers and print the booklet that accompanies La Prose.

The book is folded once down the center and 21 times across to result in a book that is 3.625 by 7.25 inches. On one side you see the Delaunay image and on the facing side you see the Cendrars poem with the enhancing pochoir surrounding the type. The book is held unattached in its vellum cover. A booklet will accompany La Prose and will have a description of the processes.