30% OFF - Book of Genesis - Siegl/Berliner -2004

Description

Illustrated by Helen Siegl (1924 - 2009). Printed letterpress in Nevada City, California by Harold Berliner (1924 - 2010) in 2004 and bound by the Cardoza-James Bindery in San Francisco.
The 9 illustrations were cut by Helen Siegl in wood with some background blocks in linoleum and required 153 separately mixed inks to print. The full-page woodblock prints, tipped in for each story in Genesis, include: Creation, Creation of Birds and Fishes, Creation of Animals, Adam and Eve in Eden, The Flood, Abraham’s Sacrifice, Jacob’s Dream, Joseph’s Dream, and The Blessing of the Tribes.
The text is from the “New English Bible, with the Apocrypha.” Reprinted with permission from the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press 1961, 1970.
Limited run of 350 plus 25 out of commerce. Each book is numbered and signed by Harold Berliner. Bound with red cloth with title in gold on the spine. Printed 16pt single types in Lutetia. Each copy comes with a protective jacket of archival plastic.
Hermann Zapf: "What a wonderful and perfect publication is your Genesis ... [it] is a complete unit of typography, illustration and binding."
Harold Berliner: "I'd like to tell you more about Genesis, which took 20 years. First look inside the cover of one for Professor Zaph’s commentary on it. Then you should know nearly all the colored pages were printed from hand carved wooden blocks, by Helen Siegl. I know of only one other place where they used such carvings since perhaps 1600. This is my friend Hans-Ulrich who bought my casting equipment and took it to his shop in Switzerland.
"Then the type setting here was done on our Monotypes, and took a long time, as did the printing, registering these wooden blocks while keeping the ink in just the right quantity. As expensive as the book is, we lost money on this great project, but the satisfaction made it worth it."