Green Chair Press ~ California
(Susan Angebranndt)

The Queen of Hearts She Made Some Tarts
and other more or less Suitable Verses
By Susan Angebranndt and Laura Jane Coats
2006. Edition of 100.

5.5 x 3.875"; 104 cards. Letterpress printed on a Chandler and Price Press at the San Francisco Center for the Book on Strathmore soft white 88 pound cover with text set in both Cushing medium and A.T. Handle Oldstyle. Housed in card box for two decks. Colophon on bottom exterior of the box with titles on the lid exterior. Printing by Susan Angebranndt. Design by Laura Jane Coats.

The Queen of Hearts is one of four verses recounting dilemmas which arose and were promptly settled within the courts of the various suits. Kings were made to smart, knaves destroyed, and maids turned out the door, all for their inappropriate behavior. The complete poem appeared in 1782.

Green Chair Press: "There are four verses to the poem, one for each suit, all of which are included in this set of playing cards. The more widely known verse appeared in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland in 1805 [sic – this is a typo and should read 1865], the complete poem having been printed in the April 1782 issue of the European Magazine. Charles Lamb elaborated on the Queen of Hearts verse in his book of nursery rhymes, coincidentally published in 1805, wherein each of the twelve lines served as title for an illustration, below which were six lines of additional verse expanding on the theme. In 1842 three of the verses were included in The Nursery Rhymes of England by James Orchard Halliwell who, curiously, omitted the very stanza that Carroll did not, then added it in his third edition in 1844, only to delete it in a later volume. Lewis Carroll, in his version, made three slight alterations. In his mind, the baking occurred on a summer day, not summer's day, the knave stole those tarts, not the tarts, and took them not clean away, but quite away. In either case, he brought them back."
$52

The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts
All on a summer's day

The Knave of Hearts
He stole the tarts
And took them clean away

The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts
And beat the Knave full sore

The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts
And vow'd he'd steal no more

On the Beach
By Jane Hirshfield
2004. Edition of 50.

5 x 5" in paper slipcase. Printed letterpress in Gill Sans. Each page is a sleeve with a cut out "lens" or view onto a seascape. The seascapes can be taken out of the sleeves for further viewing.

Susan Angebranndt: "Jane Hirshfield's bittersweet poem casts memory as a child rambling along the shore. What pebble, what shell, what sand dollar will she pick up and pocket as a treasure? What will she leave untouched, forgotten? This visual and typographic interpretation echoes the meditative pace of a beachcomber, with its unhurried text, whimsical footprints and the evocative seascapes of Maine photographer George Simonson. Like the poem's shells and pebbles, the images can be pulled out or left in place."
$125

"3" Poems
By Wislawa Szymborska
2003. Edition of 100.

5.5 x 3.5 x 1" with three pamphlets. Each poem/book is identical in size but bound in a different style then boxed together. The paper in each volume is Somerset Each is printed letterpress on a hand-fed press. The dots in A Word on Statistics are printed using offset lithography. Designed, printed and bound by Susan Angebranndt.

Three poems, by Nobel laureate Szymborska, pay homage to mathematics & life.

Susan Angebranndt: "The Nobel-prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska often uses numeric or mathematical images in her work. Through these poems, she speaks to the vastness, the abstractness, the unknowns of the world, but with a wry, humorous touch. These volumes offer a visual interpretation of three mathematically inspired poems, seeking to enhance the poetic imagery with inventive typography and original illustrations."

"The whimsical poem Pi juxtaposes the finite, impermanent world with the familiar never-ending numerical sequence 3.1415... The book's structure and typography echo the poem, juxtaposing the discrete stanzas with the numerical sequence, which starts on the cover and dances across the pages, oblivious to the words, continuing on the back cover, and finally slipping off the edge."

"A Word on Statistics takes a playful look at numbers and human nature. Funny how we think we're so different, yet we're really all too similar. I've used 10x10 grids of dots to illustrate the poem, accenting the accumulation of various foibles that make us human."

"(A Large Number) Despite a world populated by so many other people, we seldom see beyond our own small circumstances. Using typography, I reinforce the poem's message of alone-ness, as the poem asks the reader why the world seems so small."
$200

Green Chair Press Out of Print Titles:
• ABC
• Ballet
• Saturday Afternoons
• Haiku
• To a Friend Going Blind
• Monet refuses the Operation