IAN HAMILTON FINLAY

ARTIST’S BOOKS

VARIATIONS. 1998.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.8 x 10.6 cm, 12pp, plus card covers and dust jacket. Content of 16 b/w drawings of knots used in netting by Gary Hincks- the subtle differences between them and the sequential way they are presented reminds one of the schematics of Sol Lewitt. The last pages of the book have a line by Finlay:

Variations on a Theme of Diamonds
net

A one line poem which notes the shapes of the netting as the ropes are pulled into diamond shapes. And the value of such nets to the fisherman.

Gary Hincks

A COLOURFUL LITTLE BOAT. 1998. SIGNED BY MILLS.

n.p. : Aggie Weston's, 1997 14.6 x 9cm, 4pp with card covers. There are two texts:

Fun and Colourful
this solid little sailing barge is designed to sail on bath and pond alike

a blurb from a toy company, and then,

Fun and Colourful
this solid little sailing barge is designed to sail on bath and pond and sink". The joke is a visual one, a photograph taken by Rodger Brown shows a small toy boat which has turned over in a sink (sunk).
A joint work with Stuart Mills, this example is signed by Mills on the last page. VG+.

Roger Brown, Stuart Mills

CAMOUFLAGED FLOWERS. 1998.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1998
11.3 x 9cm, 20pp with card covers and printed dust jacket. Five drawings of warboats by Gary Hincks show the battleships with their varying camouflage paints. Below each is an anagram of each ship's name (all named after flowers) which by the jumble has "camouflaged" the names. Finlay kindly gives the answers to the anagrams at the back of the book.
One of 250 copies. VG+.

Gary Hincks

PROEM. 1998.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1998
15.4 x 10.4cm, 10pp, leporello printed one side only with grey boards and tipped on title label. The book reproduces four b/w simplistic but dramatic drawings by Gary Hinks of the prow of a boat - BCK35, a modern fishing boat from Buckie in the Moray Firth named CALEDONIA III.
The title is a neologism made up of two words - Prow and Poem - and the drawings show various abstracted views of the boat's prow. The beauty of that curve appears to have attracted Finlay's attention as well as the coincidence of Poem/Prow.
Finlay also published prints and cards using Hincks' drawings. This is a VG example of a rather lovely book.

FLOWERS. 1999.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.2 x 7.5cm, 12pp, plus turquoise card covers. Content of three codes for different types of flower used in a seed suppliers catalogue (all have only the initial of the word to identify them) below which Finlay has added three names of warships - all from the Flower Class of corvettes - where the names also start with the same letter.

MORE FLOWERS. 1999.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9 x 7.4cm, 19pp, plus turquoise card covers. Content of three drawings of flowers by Jo Hincks along with quotations about warships - all from the Flower Class of corvettes - found in a book by Preston & Raven from 1942. Each quotation gives the drawing its subject - for instance:

Anemone, Bluebell
Ships with
original
sheer and flare.

JO HINCKS

5 X 1. 1999.

Barcelona: Joan Miro Foundation, 1999
16 x 11cm, 48pp, with black boards and tipped on title label. This book accompanied the exhibition "Variations on Several Themes' and is identified often as an exhibition catalogue but this is incorrect - it is an artist's book in itself.
The first pages of the publication have a new concrete poem which is based on Christina Rossetti's devotional works, and Eugen Gomringer's Constellation form of visual poetry. The words boat, net, wind, fire, vine, flock, sun, lamb are recombined in different placings to create five different imagined scenes.
At the back of the book there is an essay by Thomas A. Clark in English who points out that the structure of the poem is from Gromringer's 5 mal 1 konstellation' and the words used are from Rossetti's "Letter and SPirit". That essay is better than I can write here so we shall leave this here although we will point out that in the late 90s religion as a subject begins to be more apparent in Finlay's work.
We have re-classified this book as an artist's book and not just a catalogue

Thomas A. Clark

VARIATIONS. 1999.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999.
29.5 x 14cm, 12pp plus cards and printed dust jacket. Artist's book with a poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and it's English translation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which have linocut illustrations by Jo Hincks and then a variant on the poem by Finlay where the original poem's landscape is replaced by a scene of boats (which are blue lemons):

Do you know the land where the blue lemons ride
A silver fountain springs from the vessel's side?
There, in the stern, the orange net-floats glow,
The brown sail shifts, the salt winds gently blow.
DO you know it well, that land, beloved friend?
"Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend!"

The poem also is a thought of death and heaven. FInlay's version is also illustrated by Hincks - making the boat references more obvious (the fountain for example is the bilge water spraying out)>
VG+ example.

JO HINCKS

A WILD HAWTHORN RE-READER. 1999.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
11.5 x 8.6cm, 8pp, plus card covers and printed blue dust jacket. Three appropriated drawings of named boats by Gloria WIlson from as book published by Fishing News are printed below their names and a short paragraph describing the,. The names together read "PROSPERITY/LEAD US 11/AND GALILEE" which Finlay relates to both the life of Jesus and the Romantic poet Christina Rossetti who wrote many devotional texts.
The title "A WILD HAWTHORN RE-READER" alludes to the appropriation of another's work and a re-interpretation of it.

Gloria Wilson

LARDER/ORCHARD. 1996.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1996

7 x 8.5cm, 12pp plus printed card covers. Artist's book which is printed in green in one direction (Orchard) and once turned around is orange in the other (Larder). The words in both directions are APPLE, PEAR, CHERRY, PLUM, TREE and APPLE, PEAR, CHERRY, PLUM, JAM. The former is denoted as the "Inauguration of the orchard, Little Sparta, Autumn 1999" and the latter "Replenishment of the larder, Little Sparta, Autumn 1999". A small delight. VG+.

EXCHANGES. 1999.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
14.2 x 9cm, 16pp, plus oversize white card covers and floral decorated dust jacket with tipped on title label. Content of six "exchange" poems - three by Thomas A. Clark and three by Finlay where the structure is of a two line poetic phrase where the swapping of the adjectives or a noun alters the meaning in subtle manners. This:

the centuries of the oak/the sermon in the stone
becomes
the centuries of the stone/the sermon in the oak
Each is illustrated by a small painting by Laurie Clark. VG+.

LAURIE CLARK, Thomas A. Clark

HUFF LANE. CHRISTMAS 2000.

Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 2000
15.2 x 21.4cm, 48pp plus red patterned boards. Artist's book with eighteen b/w photographs by Robin Gillanders ofone of the small sections of Little Spartas which Finaly denoted as Huff Lane - in part a joke about being somewhere to go and sit when feeling aggrieved ("In the huff" as Scots say.
Along the lane are five low benches inscribed with epigrams such as:

"A lane cannot be measured in metres"

This line may be related to another bench:

"In a lane one will not encounter Apollo but one may come upon Pan."

The former is a punny musical reference (Pan after all plays the pipes) and a lane is usually shadowed from the sun but also it has music from nature:

"A song of a skylark may return us to Shelley, a lane may lead us back to Clare."

Both Shelley and Clare are romantic poets.
GIllander's photographs are also of flowers found during the (very) short walk.
One of 300 such books published for Christmas 2000. VG+. Finlay gives Pia Simig a credit for being part of the conceptual idea.

PIA MARIA SIMIG, Robin Gillanders