Spare Parts.

Presentation copy

First edition, a presentation copy, inscribed:

'for Margie & Hal: / welcome aboard! / Charles Henri'.

Spare Parts is the first published edition of Charles Henri Ford's paste-up poster poems (graphi-poems, or Fordographs), with boards designed by Stan Brakhage. In a contemporary advertisement for this book, Allen Ginsberg describes 'diction so common it's cut out of mass print, then shuffled on the table and recomposed according to Ford's private significances. Spare Parts is genitals. Awareness of the implicit bias and camp of marketplace yatter emerges after decades of unconscious commerce. What's further odd is the surreal charm of the phrasal juxtapositions; eccentric orthography of multitudinous type-fonts accentuates the charm: Ford is a practiced old connoisseur of XX Century ready-made speech. Everything from rosejoint to King Lear's unforgettable cry.'

Ford occupies an interesting position in twentieth-century American art and literary circles. He was a poet, artist, and filmmaker who, with Parker Tyler, edited and published View (1942-1947), the influential art and literary magazine. Ford befriended Andy Warhol in the early 1960s, and the two started attending film screenings together, with Ford introducing Warhol to Jack Smith and other underground filmmakers.

First edition, number 542 of 850 numbered copies and 100 hors de commerce copies numbered I - C, this copy inscribed by Charles Henri Ford in green pen on half-title; 4to (343 x 245 mm, 13½ x 9¾ in); collages, photographs, and paste-up poems printed as lithographs on various coloured paper stock, small abrasion to corner of first page, short tear to one leaf; illustrated endpapers, illustrated paper-covered boards designed by Stan Brakhage, light wear to extremities and bottom edge, top corners tapped, illustrated dust-jacket, wear to edges, chip to top edge of lower panel, an excellent in a good dust jacket; [160]pp.