Yellow Barn Press ~ Iowa

Does Literature Exist? The Lurcy Lecture, Amherst College, March 1992
By Julian Symons
1993. Edition of 175

6.5" x 9" Casebound with marbled paper over boards and cloth spine. Paper spine label. Composed in Monotype Romulus. Printed in two colors on dampened Rives paper. Designed and printed by Neil Shaver of the Yellow Barn Press.

Essay by Julian Symons. His lecture is an attack on deconstruction and some of its principal practitioners in literature, a talk by turns indignant and gently ironic. Starting from a point at which, Symons says, we can all agree, "that works offiction say different things to each individual reader," he shows that, as used by deconstructionists, this perfectly reasonable statement can be pushed to the point of absurdity at which crime writer John Creasey compares himself to Shakespeare. Symons makes a pleas for standards of judgement in literature. It is by exercising such standards and acknowledging that there is a "canon of great art," that we deny the destructive levelling tendency of deconstruction, and assert that literature does exist.
$50

A Year at the Sorbonne:
A Proutian Life
By Oliver B. Pollak
2002. Edition of 150.

6 x 9"; 144 pages. Case bound with pattern paper over boards and a linen cloth spine. In a slipcase. Set in 12-point Monotype Garamond by Michael and Winifred Bixler on a Vandercook Universal III press. Wood engravings and pattern paper for the covers by Sandy Connors. Printed on mouldmade Frankfurt white paper. Bound by the Campbell-Logan Bindery. The engraving on the title page is the Church of the Sorbonne.

Elmo Shaver revels in minutiae and idiosyncrasy ever so often revealing the Big Picture. His first trip to France, his junior year abroad in 1937-38 confirmed him as a Francophile. Shaver's diary spans almost two thirds of the 20th century, providing a unique testimony to the world's events.
$150

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Yellow Barn Press Out of print title:
• The Yellow Barn Press: A History and Bibliography
• The Liberty Bell on the Kelmscott Goudy Press