Vagabondi Efficaci

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? –

A facsimile of a 1973 Something Else Press gardening book – the press had then relocated to Vermont, with a shift towards the publication of such lifestyle guides. Hand-drawn and ilustrated by Linda Larisch.

The Consequences is a hybrid collection of prose and poetry; an autofictional examination of the pain of a transatlantic relocation from New York to the blanketing beige of Paris to rejoin a totemic muse. It also focuses on corgi attacks, Maryland, painful anxiety, the struggle to accept the things one cannot change, the third party and the past as adamantine shackles. The "towering sexual iconography of Mike Immerman" looms over the disorientation of a reluctant resident in “the City of Light.”

The Convent of Pleasure is a play written by Margaret Cavendish in 1668. The play is a comedy about noblewomen who choose to retreat to a convent to create their own community in order to avoid the constraints and pains of marriage and men. Lady Happy, the main protagonist, ponders the question of a radical alternative to marriage: “But why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?” This book is a close reproduction of the first printed edition of the play, which was supervised and edited by hand by Cavendish.

“RUSTIQUE” is an artist book created by Nicola Godman. This book is sprung out of a residency in September 2021 at Hôtel Chevillon, a former Scandinavian artist colony in Grez-sur-Loing, France. Barbizon, the village where the painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) lived and died, is located 20 km away from there. The book interweaves the life and work of Millet with Godman’s photographs, drawings and personal anecdotes.

“RUSTIQUE” wishes to put forward the artistic gaze towards rural life by artists who themselves are born peasants. Nicola Godman (b. 1989, Rute) is an artist working with photography, video, books and stories, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. Having grown up on an organic dairy farm, she is researching depictions of rural life in art history and contemporary culture.

A bootleg of the first edition of Country Lesbians, published by WomanShare Books in 1976. It was printed in the context of a 2024 exhibition at Shmorévaz, a Paris-based independent art space, dedicated to the WomanShare collective, taking the book as its starting point, and borrowing its title.

WomanShare Collective is Sue Deevy, Billie Miracle, Nelly Kaufer, Carol Newhouse and Dian Wagner.

Co-published by Ness Books and Shmooks

Graphic design: Espace Ness

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.