London: Coracle, 1989
12 x 17.5cm, 60pp plus pictorial boards. A festschrift for Jonathan Williams's 60th birthday. More than three dozen contributors include: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Glen Baxter, R.B. Kitaj, Thomas A. Clark, Richard Caddel, Roy Fisher, Charles Tomlinson, Basil Bunting, Eric Mottram, and Sandra Fisher.
Finlay's contribution is a single page:

Aram Saroyan pays Homage
to Jonathan Williams
on his 60th Birthday.

undoubtedly
avant-
garde

Aram Saroyan was known for his minimalist works and Finlay here parodies the style in honour of his friend Williams. VG+.

...

Little Sparta: Committee of Public Safety/Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1989) 2.8 x 21.6cm, 4pp. Artist's card with a text:

1989: BICENTERNAIRE DE LA REVOLUTION FRANCAISE
1990: LA LIBERTE DE CELEBRER 1789.

The year after most people define the beginning after the French Revolution the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789) was passed by the National Constituent Assembly thus giving citizens the right of free speech. Finlay's card celebrates that occasion which is usually ignored - putting it on an equal status as a highlight of world history. VG+. ...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
11.4 x 8.9cm, 4pp. Artist's card with a drawing of an abstracted moorland/estuary (very similar to the colourful images used in From 35 One Line Poem postcards published earlier by Finlay - and the text "Birds fly, Waterfoul Ply" - one having the air above the water, the other the water and the moorland but the latter being compared to boats "plying" their trade. Strictly speaking ply means to move regularly over an area or to work steadily - something both boats and land birds tend to do. VG+.

...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
21 x 15cm, 30pp with card covers and printed dust jacket. Ten drawings by Laurie Clark based on the ten names of the first decade (week) in the revolutionary calendar. The English translation of the names of the days of the first decade of the month of Thermidor is beneath each French name and the associated drawing. Thermidor was the month when Robespierre and Saint-Just and their colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety were guillotined effectively ending the period of The Terror.
Finlay suggests in an explanatory note at the back fo the book that those ten days become a "kind of via crucis - a Stations of the Jacobin Cross". VG+.

...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
40 x 52cm, blue, red and black offset lithograph.A French flag drawn by Hincks has the texts "LIBERTY FOR SOME/EQUALITY FOR SOME/LIBERTY FOR SOME" respectively on each coloured section. The colours of the tricolour (invented as a compromise early during the French Revolution) were the red and blue: the colours of Paris allied to the white of the king. Later after the king was deposed and killed the flag was retained as the nation's flag and never retired even after the rise of Napoleon. The three texts of the work remind one that the revolutionary ideals did not really ever succeed - in fact, one might argue during the Terror, they had already been broken. VG.

...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
21 x 14.8cm 8pp booklet designed and with drawings by Gary Hincks after Claude Lorrain. Finlay claims he saw a resemblance between a "coastal area in the south of England and Latium, the leafly coastal country of the later chapters of Virgil's Aneneid." The former presumably is owned by Thompson for whom the proposal was made. Each page has a water colour and a text by Finlay suggesting tree plaques, stone inscriptions and the installation of a "classical gate". Near fine condition.

...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
13.5 x 13cm, 16pp plus printed brown card covers. Four drawings of proposed texts" for a paved area adjacent to a barn." each drawn by Stephen Raw. Included are the works:
Swallows
Little Matelots

Brown barns
Slower than old beige barges

VG+.

...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1989
12.8 x 20.3, 2pp card. The card has an appropriated drawing of a hunt in full chase - the hare has the name De Mann over it. Paul de Mann was an important literary critic who alongside Derrida popularised the concept of deconstruction. Finlay WAs clearly no fan. VG+.

...

Frankfurt: Galerie Lupke, 2010 30 x 21cm, 2pp. Announcement card (on paper) with a b/w installation image of a Finlay exhibition on the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, short text in German on the back and biography. Folded for mailing else VG. ...

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1988
31.4 x 22cm, 52pp plus card covers and dustjacket. A series of "definitions", one of Finlay's innovations in experimental poetry where a word is given an alternative meaning by the addition of a classical or modern quotation. For example:

PATCH, n.
1. A whole part.
The trousers and jumpers of men vary in hue from the brightest orange vermilion to the palest rose pink, and are decorated with every imaginable sort of PATCH.
Peter Anson, The Breton Sardine Fisheries.

As we have noted elsewhere Finlay regards a patch as a symbol of warm, caring as well as poverty.
Slight bumping to corners of the book - else VG+. One of 250 copies published at Christmas 1988....

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1988.
83 x 10.8cm, 4pp - the Xmas card sent out by Finlay in 1988 to friends and clients. The card bears a poem:

A FRAGMENT

When bare black hedgerows
Wear white shadows
And the fields without snow
Face the fire:
a rug

The white shadows are the plumes of snow on the branches and the fields without snow is a visual correspondence of the rug. The other sides of the card are blank - or white like snow. VG+. Scarce....

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