Venice has entranced poets through the centuries, perhaps none more so than Russian Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. “I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is,” Brodsky wrote. “I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it.” So it was that every New Year’s Eve, the poet tried to be near water, “to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.” He particularly tried to journey to Venice, a favored destination captured in Watermark, his book-length meditation on the city.
Now Stanford Libraries have been drawn into the same Venetian spell, along with Berkeley printer Peter Rutledge Koch. The libraries recently acquired two of Koch’s large, quarto letterpress 2006 editions of Watermark. They are generously illustrated with black-and-white photogravures by Robert Morgan, the Venice-based painter and dedicatee of Brodsky’s book. Volumes like these are as much works of art as literature.
“For some artists, it’s a preferred medium—and it is art, regardless of the media. Some artists don’t like to be called ‘book artists,’ but rather artists who work in the medium of the book,” said Roberto Trujillo, head of Special Collections.
Koch and his wife, Susan Filter, a friend of Brodsky’s, designed the book with exquisite paper handmade especially for the edition, with its own distinctive watermark. Determined to print the book in Venice, the two borrowed a museum press and floated it down the Grand Canal to the studio at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, where they would become artists-in-residence. A Venetian foundry cast the bronze plate attached to the ebony slipcase of the deluxe edition. Only 50 copies were made of the regular and deluxe editions—they’re numbered, just like a fine-art print.
For the consumer, there’s another rationale for book-as-art: “The book is a much more affordable way to collect fine art,” said Trujillo. The libraries do not disclose how much they paid, but the current list price is $7,500 and $10,000 respectively for the two editions. Given the price of a single work of original art, “by the time you frame it for your home or office, you’re probably spending a lot more than the $10,000.”
“Stanford has had a longstanding tradition of collecting fine press and book arts, from the early beginnings of the Stanford Libraries, and this continues that tradition,” said Trujillo. “Ours is a quite fine collection—not comprehensive, but certainly a research collection that can support our teaching and research programs. We have several thousand pieces collected over time.” Because of the small press runs of such editions, which usually range between five and 50, “Nobody I know in the academic world has a really comprehensive collection.”
The libraries have the archives of Peter Koch, and an extensive collection of his fine art books, so the acquisition of Watermark was a natural one.
Brodsky’s own cupfuls of time ran dry in 1996. He chose to be buried in Venice, “this Penelope of a city, weaving her patterns by day and undoing them by night, with no Ulysses in sight. Only the sea.”
