What's happened in recent months is that Feld Entertainment has been able to turn the tables on MG&C and is now suing them. The judge in the case has thrown out their arguments and is permitting an investigation of the firm under the RICO laws, historically used to investigate organized crime, but also notorious as a tool for bludgeoning activists. MG&C faces a grim future if all rulings go against them, and the suit represents a chilling sea change- essentially prosecution of activist legal workers for the suits they've brought.
Donations are needed. If you can help, send email to atwoodlaw@gmail.com.
Featured in the image, clockwise from top left: Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, Mt. Graham Red Squirrel, Pronghorn Antelope, Florida Panther, Manatee, Preble's Jumping Mouse, Bison Asian Elephant- all are species that MG&C has worked to conserve, either directly or through habitat preservation.
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For this fourth and final entry into the books of Seven Seas, I'm going to just run through the rest of the titles I've been able to find. (To see the three previous entries about this publisher, click HERE.) Lets start with Johannes R. Becher's Farewell (1970). The tinted photo and ostentatious frame evoke the early 20th century setting of the novel (and also maybe Haight-Ashbury?), while the cut out and removed head of the young boy toy with the idea of "farewell." By this point, 1970, Seven Seas designer Lothar Reher appears to be extremely confident in his craft, and only does the minimal necessary in text and image work to pull a successful cover together. All the covers here are by him unless otherwise noted.]]>
The cover of Ethel L. Voynich's The Gadfly (1967) is decidedly simple, yet extremely strong. The rough cut black shapes become a top hat and cape, evoking the 19th century setting of the novel, while the miter on the back places the book in Italy. The front image is definitely creepy, and it's amazing how such simple shapes can break up the space and come together into such a powerful image.
Mena Calthorpe's The Dyehouse (1964) is an Australian working class novel, and the cover is most notable for the bold colors and combinations, with the intense green and pink swirling in a mass that is both alluring and vomitous. What I love about this book's design is the title page, which is inexplicably printed in a bright pink to match the cover, and is the only color in the entire interior of the book.
The Forest by William Pomeroy (1965) is the tale of an American involved in the guerrilla war in the Philippines. The cover successfully pulls the viewer into a dense forest, and the scratchy quality of the image and lines adds a bit of foreboding. The line quality actually reminds me of the work of Kevin Pyle (artist and illustrator of political comics like World War 3 Illustrated and kids books such as Blindspot).
Rolf Schneider's Deep Waters (1968) is an East German crime novel, and Reher has really captured a strong noir feeling, with the montaged buildings giving the cover an Eastern Bloc modernist touch. The buildings are almost half-heartily placed around the center circle, but it works visually as it echoes the crooked and broken body. The use of a very minimal amount of red—only for the lines in the target—turns the entire operation sinister. The book appears to be a bit of an anomaly for Seven Seas, being a German popular book translated for an English audience, rather than the more standard reprinting and distribution of international, yet heavily anglo, political texts and novels with communist leanings.
The below two covers are nothing particularly special, but another example of the flexiblity of Reher as a designer, successfully aping modernism on the left, and the more organic and expressionist on the right. The scratchy and uneven look of the Kaufman cover is neither intentional nor part of the design, but instead the product of the peeling off of the top layer of mylar from the cover. All Seven Seas books were printed in the GDR, and it appears that it was standard to give them a gloss coat which was not a finish on the paper (as is standard in printing today) or a coating printed onto the page, but instead a layer of thin plastic which was used to cover and coat the entire book. As that plastic coating ages, it begins to crack and come loose from the cover, often pulling pieces of the printed image with it. You can see the same phenomenon (although not as severe) above in the Schneider cover with the whitish half circles on the ledft side.
It appears as if throughout the period Seven Seas were publishing they had a direct relationship with International Publishers, the primary publishing wing of the Communist Party, USA. A small percentage of the output from both publishers, at least from 1969-78, was both designed and produced in the GDR. The basic design, by Lothar Reher, is exactly the same as the Seven Seas covers, but the text and logo in bottom stripe is replaced by "International Publishers" and their logo. The books are also clearly produced by the same press as the Seven Seas books, as they have the identical plastic coating which so easily cracks and peels off with age. The Montagu, Brecht, and Eisler books below are all International titles, but produced by Seven Seas. Although I don't have copies of the actual German editions, I assume they are identical except for the name and logo at the bottom. The Eisler cover was designed by Klaus Krüger, one of the rare titles not put in the able hands of Lothar Reher.
Then I found this one interesting glitch in the above theory, which is DuBois' John Brown, which was published by both Seven Seas (below left) and International (below right), but the two editions are very different designs and material production. Possibly the above were Seven Seas books which were licensed to International for US sales and distribution, while the DuBois' title is the opposite, an International Publishers book which Seven Seas reprinted specifically for European audiences. Regardless, it is also an anomaly in as much as the US cover is actually superior. Very strange considering how accomplished Reher is, and how many terrible looking books International has put out over the years!
Once again, I'm not going to do a full bibliography of these titles here because most of them are listed on 50 Watts HERE. If you have any questions about titles not there, or any other comments, just drop me a note at josh [at] justseeds.org.
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Wildcat at MeadWildcat at Mead is a 1972 documentary about a seven-week wildcat strike at Mead Packaging Corp. in Atlanta, during which almost all of the majority-Black workforce stayed out and won significant community support. The film was made by the October League, a communist group that played an important role in the strike.
Jim Skillman, who served on the October League (ML) Atlanta District Committee and who helped rally community support for the 1972 strike, will be present for the screening.
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For this third entry into the books put out by East German publisher Seven Seas in the 1960s and 70s, I want to look in-depth at a single title. By far the coolest Seven Seas book I've picked up is Harlem, U.S.A., a huge collection of writings and art by Black cultural icons, most from the Harlem Renaissance period. The book was edited by John Henrik Clarke, and published in 1964 (and largely drawn from work originally published in the Civil Rights Movement-aligned journal Freedomways).
This is the only Seven Seas title I've seen with a cover designed by someone other than their house design Lothar Reher. The cover design is attributed to Oliver (Ollie) Harrington, an African-American cartoonist with an interesting political history. Popular with other Black artists in the 1940s and 50s, Harrington produced editorial cartoons for newspapers, became head of public relations for the NAACP, and eventually fell on the radar of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Fearing for his life, he fled to East Germany in 1961, and lived out the rest of his life in East Berlin.
]]> So the cover is a wrap-around, featuring one of Harrington's comics of a crowd of Black people, looking pensive and closed, largely because of the bars that lock them into the image frame. There is no doubt that Harrington sees Harlem and the US as a prison. While the figures on the back appear to be going about their business, if sullenly, the child on the front seems hunted and penned. The bright bars of orange push the duo-toned image to the back, with the title, in particular the white U.S.A., dominating the cover. The cover is strong, but clearly the work of Harrington alone, a communist in exile in the Eastern Bloc, and likely out of touch with what was going on in the US. It is dark and oppressive, with none of the ascendancy, power, and light brewing in the Civil Rights Movement back home.
The book opens to a great old map of Harlem (originally from Time magazine), with hot spots marked, including Malcolm X's HQ, NAACP HQ, and the Apollo Theater, and a scattering of hypodermic needles (but no key to explain them).
The full title page is clean and expansive, with the title stretching across both pages, and a large amount of content and credit information comfortably listed. The full right justification on the recto, and the mid-page left justify on the verso really work.
Tucked into the book are five sections of images, including cartoons by Ollie Harrington, a survey of Harlem artists, and photographs of Harlem street scenes and the March on Washington. Below is a spread of images of Elizabeth Catlett's sculpture, and below that a spread of John Taylor's photographs of Harlem streets. The photos are so tightly packed into the book they almost function like montages.
And below is a typical spread of the beginning of a written piece, with the author's name in all caps at the top left, the title in a tall gothic to the left, and the text cleanly and evenly spread across the pages. It's simple, but extremely comfortable and easy to read.
Next week I'll finish up the Seven Seas books with a collection of all the rest I've found over the past year.
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Uprisings: Images of Labor, the new set of large-format silkscreen and relief prints that Justseeds created at Union Art Gallery at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, is opening tonight at Broken City Lab's Civic Space, in the heart of downtown Windsor. In addition to the prints, we'll have bandanas and posters that I facilitated printing as part of Mayday, and some prints, posters, and bandanas for sale. All my events in town are part of Windsor's Mayworks festival, a celebration of labor through art. Check out the full events listing and updates HERE.
You can also check out Broken City Lab's site, for ongoing updates on my activities, HERE, including a video of me printing bandanas at the Mayday march!!
Opening Reception
Friday May 10th
7:00-10:00
Civic Space
411 Pelissier
Windsor, ON
Closing Danceparty with DJ Mary Mack
Friday May 17th
7:00-12:00
I thought I'd share a bit of the process of making these prints, specifically where some of the imagery came from, and a bit of the thought process as well.
What those peoples and those creatures are supposed to do after Europe arrives is to provide a pleasantly exotic backdrop to the work of civilized industrial society. They're explicitly not supposed to have their own desires and priorities, and they are relegated to decorative motifs on the walls of the consulate. They are no longer actors, they are scenery, and that goes for everyone- Chiefs, warriors, and wise women as well as elephants, leopards, and forests. They become false versions of themselves. That's why these prints are called "Counterfeit". The text on each print refers to text on the money pictured above- in French and Flemish (Belgium's two languages) it says "the counterfeiter is punished with forced labor" or "the counterfeiter is punished with penal servitude". The real counterfeiters, however, are the colonial powers, building fake versions of their own societies on top of people who have been doing pretty well without their version of "civilization".
The people in these prints are drawn from photos I took while I was in Congo. The woman and child are based on an encounter in a village on the Lomami river. While our big canoe was parked and we were off in the village market amassing supplies, I was asked by a group of women standing on a hill of rice husks to take their photo. I obliged, and then my arm was grabbed by a very striking older woman who asked that I take her picture as well. As I raised the camera, she struck the most defiant and powerful pose I've ever seen a person take. Her gaze was a stake. She towered over the world. A young girl thugged behind her, spidery dreadlocks raking the clouds.
The man with the gun is Koffi, a guard at the camp of the project for which I was volunteering. Koffi is a park ranger, trained by the Congolese military to patrol the country's forests and protected areas and provide security in the face of an exploding trade in ivory and bush-meat. In the forest, he was a joyful giant- every encounter with mammal or reptile or bird brought a beatific expression to his face. He described crawling through mud-flats to watch elephants, and stalking okapi through low, close forests of thin saplings, stepping gently like them, following them as they browsed. We found the huge skin of a python in the bushes on the side of the trail and stretched it out between us, both our eyes widening, moonlike, as we stepped further and further apart to stretch the freshly-shed translucent skin to its full length. We both bent to sniff it at the same time.
I designed and cut the blocks for these prints during a month at the Caldera Arts Center in eastern Oregon- you can see a bunch of process photos here.
For more information on the project I was volunteering with, and an amazing blog about science, nature, and culture in the Congo, check out Bonobo in Congo.
You can also read an interview with me about my time in Congo on international conservation news site Mongabay.com
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Over the last three weeks, I've posted 3 blogs around the creation of a print on our website called "Mass Incarceration is a Labor Issue." Here is the last blog entry about this print.
After the first color is printed, it is hung to dry and I carve away more linoleum to prepare for a second printing for the final color. This is a reduction linoleum block print, so any area that I carve away will stay light brown, and any area I leave on the block will be printed with the final color.
The first color is to the right:
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And finally, here is the images of the print as it's being printed:
And here is Santi teaching me how to print:
You can download a high-res, 11"x17" version of this poster HERE.
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Seven Seas also published a number titles related to Africa, in particular novels and short stories by South African writers. I've been able to find four of these titles, but the Seven Seas bibliography at 50 Watts (HERE) shows at least two additional novels, Enver Carim's Golden City (a great book about the working class Indian experience in Johannesburg, published in the US by Grove Press) and Harry Bloom's Transvaal Episode, as well as James Kantor's autobiography A Healthy Grave. Kantor was Nelson Mandela's lawyer during the Rivonia treason trial.
The gems of the lot are the two novels by South African author Alex La Guma. Both sport great montaged covers by Lothar Reher. The Stone Country (1967) cover is composed of black and white photos of a brick wall crop and cut into basic shapes, the top image is cloud-like, yet heavy, and the bottom is possibly intended to be a tree. The title is snuggled between the two, but appears deeply precarious, as if it will soon be crushed between the rock-like cloud and stone tree. The entire cover is black and white except for the author's name, which sits quietly but proud in red in the bottom right corner.
The Stone Country is a good example to go through to see the overall layout of most Seven Seas books. The interior design of the books is very distinct and largely uniform across titles, but not attributed, so I'm unsure if it is also designed by Lothar Reher, as all the covers are.
The bottom of every cover has a colored band with the words "Seven Seas Books" in thin sans serif and the bold numeral 7 on the fr right. The spines are almost always in the same font as the dominant type on the cover, usually a variation on Helvetica. The colored band wraps around onto the spine and the back. Above the band on the spine is a repetition of the numeral 7, in bold Bodoni Poster font. The back covers are largely variations on the front, with visual elements borrowed from the cover and expository text making up the majority of the visual field.
The initial page of each book starts with "Briefly, About the Book", followed by a solid block of descriptive text, justified hard to the right.
The following spread opens to the half title page, with a standard tagline for the press: "A Collection of Works by Writers in the English Language," with another repetition of the bold number 7 logo. The book's title and author are listed handsomely in all caps at the bottom left.
The full title page is on the next spread, with a thin line bisecting both verso (left hand side of the page spread) and recto (right hand side of the page spread); on the verso is a list of other titles by the author, on the recto is the title above the line, with the author and publishing information below. Its a strong opening, classic and comfortable on the eye.
The second La Guma title is And a Threefold Cord. The cover is another montage, this time a pile of clippings of wood and plank imagery imaginatively constructed into a series of shacks. The varied angles and edges of the wood create a cubist mega-shack, one with no clear beginning or end, which appears to both be expanding and collapsing in on itself. This relatively simply constructed image powerfully evokes the living conditions of most Black people in South Africa under apartheid.
The cover of Ezekiel Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue (1962) evokes the same sense of alienation, but with a completely different set of formal tools. The illustration is raw and hand drawn, filling up the entire field of the cover. We're looking at shacks again, but from the window of another shack, in the dark. A dark and wobbly sun bakes the little huts, misshapen and clunky. The sun draws the eye in, and brings us to the center of the image, but is mysterious, almost like the image burned on the back of the eyelids after looking to closely at the light.
The final book in this clutch of African titles is Come Back, Africa!: Fourteen Short Stories from South Africa (1968), edited by Herbert L. Shore and Megchelina Shore-Bos. Reher is back to maximizing the negative space on the cover, and using the white of the page to solid effect. The simple serifed title is strong, but the faded Africa! that emerges from a black smudge in the center is maybe a bit too subtle. It's hard to read, and although I like the idea of Africa being hard to see—as it obviously is to most of us in the West—it's not obscured in a way that demands further exploration.
Stay tuned next week for more Seven Seas Books.
“Sewing Freedom works on several levels. It is a meticulous biography, a portrait of an era, a sophisticated discussion of anarchist philosophy and activism, and an evocation of radical lives and ideas in their context. Davidson has designed a fresh, crisp book with visual impact, nicely enhanced by Alec Icky Dunn’s wonderful sketches... This beautifully-executed book tells an important story in New Zealand’s political history.” - Chris Brickell, Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Otago University and author of Mates and Lovers
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Sewing Freedom is the first in-depth study of anarchism in New Zealand during the turbulent years of the early 20th century—a time of wildcat strikes, industrial warfare and a radical working class counter-culture. Interweaving biography, cultural history and an array of archival sources, this engaging account unravels the anarchist-cum-bomber stereotype by piecing together the life of Philip Josephs—a Latvian-born Jewish tailor, anti-militarist and founder of the Wellington Freedom Group. Anarchists like Josephs not only existed in the ‘Workingman’s Paradise’ that was New Zealand, but were a lively part of its labour movement and the class struggle that swept through the country, imparting uncredited influence and ideas. Sewing Freedom places this neglected movement within the global anarchist upsurge, and unearths the colourful activities of New Zealand’s most radical advocates for social and economic change.
More information on the book, a sampler, and reviews, can be found at www.sewingfreedom.org
ABOUT THE LAUNCH:
WHEN: Wednesday 15 May - 5.30PM
WHERE: The Boardroom, Museum of Wellington City & Sea, Queens Wharf, Jervois Quay
Books will be on sale for $15 cash on the night.
Free entry. Nibbles and drinks provided.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Jared Davidson is an archivist at Archives New Zealand, a member of the Labour History Project, and author of Sewing Freedom. His first book, Remains to be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill's Ashes in New Zealand, was published in 2011.
Barry Pateman is an anarchist historian, Kate Sharpley Library archivist, and Associate Editor of The Emma Goldman Papers (USA). A prolific editor and writer, he has been involved in a number of projects and publications, including Chomsky on Anarchism, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, and Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.
Mark Derby is the Chair of the Labour History Project and an extensively-published writer and historian, having worked for the Waitangi Tribunal; the PSA; Te Ara, the online encyclopedia of New Zealand; and as South Pacific correspondent for Journal Expresso, Portugal's leading newspaper. His books include The Prophet and the Policeman: The story of Rua Kenana and John Cullen, and Kiwi Companeros, on New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War.
http://www.akpress.org/
http://www.museumswellington.org.nz/museum-of-wellington-city-and-sea/
http://sewingfreedom.org/
Strike Then, Strike Now!Opening Reception: May 3rd
7-10pm
I'm stickin to the Union! Shut It Down! "F*** Work! Si Se Puede! For as long as there has been work, workers have been withdrawing their labor in protest. Interference Archive is excited to present Strike Now, Strike Then!, an exhibition and programing series exploring the use, power, and viability of this tactic, and how it has shifted over time. Over the next three months, we will look at how work has been imagined and represented, how workers have both self-organized and been led, how economic conditions have shifted worker identities, and how “the boss” has been targeted, imagined, ridiculed, and transformed.
]]> For the exhibition we have assembled posters, pamphlets, books, images, jokes, memes, and other labor-related ephemera from Interference Archive and beyond. In addition, we will be activating these materials through a series of events including film screenings, reading and discussion groups, history sessions, a poster critique, storytelling nights with striking workers, and more!Event details will be released over the course of the exhibition, and listed on interferencearchive.org
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In the past two days both the New York Times and the New Yorker have featured the book bloc exhibition at Interference Archive, with a focus on the book shields as part of the organizing being done by students at both Cooper Union and CUNY (the City University of New York).
You can read the New York Times piece HERE.
And the New Yorker piece HERE.