Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
14.8 x 6cm, 1pp, black on blue artist's card. There are two translations from the Greek:

planks which.
were once
pines of Ida
from Aeneid Book X

and

(jacinta, Antusa)
hunters
of deep sea prey
From Homer's Epigrams XVII
Fishing boats and fishermen. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.6 x 14cm, 1pp, black on white artist's card.

The gods went home, and everything beautiful,/everything lofty they took with them, all colours, all life's tones.

A quotation from Schiller written on 13 July 1998. Published in Autumn this card shows regret for the lack of colour as the fall approaches (if we ignore the colours of leaves). VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1999?)
8 x 20.5cm, 4pp outer folded with a black on deep blue drawing of the famous heavy cruiser. Internally there is a 8 x 20.5cm, 4p printed sheet with a poem:

PRINZ EUGEN*
Her nouns were round, her verbs were straight and swift

The poem sees the battleship as a sentence - the actions of this war machine are immediate and once presumes deadly, it's shape and form more aesthetic.
One of Finlay's poems in a folder although the format could be seen as a card. VG+.

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Den Haag: Stroom, n.d. (1999)
27x 19cm, 62pp plus typographic wrappers. A book issued on the installation of Finlay's long planned public sculpture at the Hofvijver where an equally long neglected underground stream re-emerged after being polluted by passing through a municipal dump.
The campaign to improve the water and local environment was eventually successful and Finlay's plaque above the water "ET IN ARCADIA EGO" - usually translated into "I too was in Arcady: is a note that shamed the poverty of the water supply prior to its improvement. Tipped on colour photographs and b/w image throughout as well as texts in Dutch and English by Erik de Jong and Lily van Ginneken.
After some thought we have decided to place this book in the monograph section of this catalogue but it arguably could be an artist's book.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
10.5 x 7cm, 4pp, black on brown artist's card with a poem from Finlay which is based on a Simon Cutts variation on an original by Samuel Palmer the landscape painter and poet:
loosing
the sheets

open-
ing the
hold

fold-
ing the
last

sail

As discussed elsewhere in these cataloguings, the folding of the sail is related both to maintenance of the boats but also the burial of sailors. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
8.9 x 10.2cm, 4pp, black on grey artist's card with text from Finlay about a broken plastic model of a Spitfire that has been put away in a cupboard. Finlay muses that as long as the model is not in the bin-bag but in the cupboard then "there is Hope".
Finlay then references Luke 9:62: "Jesus replied,'No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.'" which encourages the reader to look ahead, be optimistic and not look back to past issues.
A homely which would not be out of place on the daily Radio 4 (UK) morning news section called " Thought for the Day" where religious and humanist ideas are broadcast. Hence the car title. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
12.4 x 8.9cm, 4pp, black on white artist's card with two drawings by Stephen Duncalf of firstly an hat and gloves and cane (a cliche from black and white movies of a "man about town") and then a cockpit of a warplane with two wheels lying against the open glass - as if it has crashed which is labelled "Plane about town".
Possibly one of the least interesting of cards published by the Press. With original unprinted envelope. VG+.

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Eindhoven: October Foundation, n.d. (1999)
42 x 30cm, full colour offset lithograph with an image of a "blue flower". Cornelia Wieg, curator of the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg in Halle, Germany, took a photograph of a tree bark in the garden of the Novalis Haus in Weissenfels. Finlay digitally rotated a fragment of this photograph by 180 degress and found an abstract "Blue Flower" from the unfinished last novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) by Novalis, which became a symbol of Romanticism. If one turns the print then one can see the original carving of a date into the tree! One of only 125 such prints issued. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.5 x 10cm, 4pp, black on white artist's card with a drawing by Kathleen Lindsley of a stone in a ploughed field next to a wall. Inside there is a poem:

A STONE

A stone turned up by the plough
was carried from the shadow to
lie at the field's edge

where it was found and taken as
ballast to the black hold of a boat.

The fate of the stone to go from blackness to blackness is glum to say the least. Nature is cruel even to the inanimate. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
3.2 x 5.1cm, 8pp, single sheet, concertina folded card printed black on light brown. There are three panels which read:
lamp-stook
jug-stook
table-stubble
A stook is a group of sheaves of grain stood on end in a field. The three visual poems seen at twilight (reflecting colour of the paper stock employed here) are the mistaken images from a distance of a lamp and a jug and when the light gets bad, a simple irritation on the flat earth. Evening, the title of the card, can mean two things - the time of day and the evening out of an image towards less detail and more flatness. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
12.7 x 4cm, 4pp card (top hinged) printed black on bright yellow with a poem:
SHORT POEM ON SANDPAPERING


evenly





eventually

The spacing in the typography indicates time passing - and the colour presumably the common beige of the sandpaper. The similarity of the two words seems to suggest one evolves out of the other - which reflects how sandpapering will initially make something even but time is needed for it to work well. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9 x 14cm, 2pp card printed black on bright yellow is the text:
Inside every toilet roll a ship's funnel is waiting to be let out
which indicates Finlay's love of modelling. An earlier card shows three such funnels made to look like funnels in a photograph.. VG+.

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