Status | subsidiary of Uitgeverij De Harmonie |
---|---|
Founded | 1948 |
Founders | Stefan and Franciszka Themerson |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | London |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | www |
The Gaberbocchus Press was a London publishing house founded in 1948 by the artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Alongside the Themersons, the other directors of the Press were the translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard who also illustrated a number of the company's publications. [1]
The name is the Latinized form of Jabberwocky and the earliest books were printed at their home on King's Road, Chelsea, London and in 1956 they moved to 42a Formosa Street in Maida Vale, London. In 1959 the basement of their office was turned into the Gaberbocchus Common Room, a meeting place for those interested in art and science. They showed films, plays and held poetry readings. [2]
Over its 31 years the Gaberbocchus Press published over sixty titles, including their own works and those by Oswell Blakeston, the Irish poet George Henry Perrott Buchanan, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Hugo Manning, Heinrich Heine, Raymond Queneau, C. H. Sisson, Stevie Smith, Anatol Stern, Kenneth Tynan, Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters (Themerson wrote Kurt Schwitters in England in 1958), and Bertrand Russell. Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi became one of its most celebrated titles and was published in many editions. [2] The National Art Library owns 20 of their titles. [1] Yearly greeting cards were sent to various contacts in the publishing business and a large set of these have been preserved at the National Library of Poland as Gaberbocchus: some of the old favourites.
The content of the Themersons' own books were often experiments with language and visual effects. The form was tailored for each publication to support and complement the content, using self-produced paper and other techniques. The couple sold their publishing company in 1979 to the Dutch publishing house Uitgeverij De Harmonie, which was also making experimental visual publications throughout the 1970s.
Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of the Dada, Surrealist, and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s and later the Theatre of the absurd In the 1950s and 1960s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
Haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 morae in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a kireji, or "cutting word"; and a kigo, or seasonal reference. However, haiku by classical Japanese poets, such as Matsuo Bashō, also deviate from the 17-on pattern and sometimes do not contain a kireji. Similar poems that do not adhere to these rules are generally classified as senryū.
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German artist. He was born in Hanover, Germany, but lived in exile from 1937.
Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo, notable for his wit and cynical humour.
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form while otherwise deferring to poetic devices to make meaning.
Stefan Themerson was a Polish writer of children's literature, poet and inventor of Semantic Poetry, novelist, script writer filmmaker, composer and philosopher. He wrote in at least three languages. With his wife, Franciszka Themerson, they are regarded as leading husband-and-wife exponents of European Surrealism and publishers.
Ubu Roi is a play by French writer Alfred Jarry, then 23 years old. It was first performed in Paris in 1896, by Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre at the Nouveau-Théâtre. The production's single public performance baffled and offended audiences with its unruliness and obscenity. Considered to be a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms and conventions, it is seen by 20th- and 21st-century scholars to have opened the door for what became known as modernism in the 20th century, and as a precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
Barbara Winifred Wright was an English translator of modern French literature.
John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.
Exercises in Style, written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus, witnesses an altercation between a man with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat. The literary variations recall the famous 33rd chapter of the 1512 rhetorical guide by Desiderius Erasmus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style.
Russell Edson was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson and Gladys Cedar Edson.
Eileen Tabios is a Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher.
Franciszka Themerson was a Polish, later British, painter, illustrator, filmmaker and stage designer.
Jasia Reichardt is a British art critic, curator, art gallery director, teacher and prolific writer, specialist in the emergence of computer art. In 1968 she was curator of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is generally known for her work on experimental art. After the deaths of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson she catalogued their archive and looks after their legacy.
Sidney Hunt (1896–1940) was a British draughtsman, painter, poet and editor who published the avant-garde journal Ray between 1926 and 1927.
Aaron Kramer was an American poet, translator, and social activist. A lifelong poet of political commitment, he wrote 26 volumes of poetry, three of prose, and ten of translations between 1938 and 1998. Kramer taught English at Dowling College in Oakdale, Long Island, New York.
Lawrence Venuti is an American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan.
Gaspard de la Nuit — Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot is the compilation of prose poems by Italian-born French poet Aloysius Bertrand. Considered one of the first examples of modern prose poetry, it was published in the year 1842, one year after Bertrand's death from tuberculosis, as a manuscript dated 1836, by his friend David d'Angers. The text includes a short address to Victor Hugo and another to Charles Nodier, and a Memoir of Bertrand written by Sainte-Beuve was included in the original 1842 edition.
The Mystery of the Sardine is a novel by Polish-English writer Stefan Themerson.