THE EPHEMERAL IS THE ETERNAL - Sidney Hunt

THE EPHEMERAL IS THE ETERNAL: THREE ART POEMS by Sidney Hunt

Sidney Hunt is Britain’s lost art deco experimental poet. An artist, engraver, designer and fervent spirit in the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, he worked always on the boldest, most outré edges of art and literature. He contributed to many of the leading modernist journals of interwar Europe, and was known amongst the radical artists and poets of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London. Yet until recently he has been almost completely overlooked.

This new handmade edition offers the first British publication of three works by Sidney Hunt from Contimporanul, the Romanian avant-garde magazine, in 1927-8. They are probably amongst the first “sound poems” and “visual poems” by a British poet. The three typographically adventurous pieces are reproduced in a paper chapbook with black linen card covers, together with an introductory note by Mark Valentine. The design, by Jo Valentine, also includes a hand-produced thermofax silk screen print, in white on black, of one of the poems, ‘Sea on Jetty’. This is housed in a black Canson paper envelope with Nineteen Thirties cambric reinforcers and black hemp cord. The print, envelope and booklet are presented in a hard cover binding in black buckram, tied with black grosgrain ribbon.

This is the sixth handmade publication from the Valentine & Valentine imprint. It is in a limited, numbered edition of 25 copies only (and 3 not for sale). All copies have now been taken.