The Ballad of Lemon & Crow

San Francisco: The Arion Press, 2002. First and Limited Edition. Hardcover. New. Bruce Conner and anonymous artists. Octavo, 10.25 by 7 inches. The type is English Old Style, composed and cast in Monotype by Mackenzie & Harris, San Francisco. The text paper is Ruysdael, an all-cotton machine-made sheet. The paper for the prints is T. H. Saunders buff loan, an all-cotton mouldmade sheet. The ink-blot drawings in gray beneath the folios and the rebus on the title page were printed from photopolymer plates. Printing of the type and plates was by letterpress. The book is bound in yellow cloth with an ink-blot pattern in black, from a drawing by an anonymous artist that is continuous front to back, interrupted by a black cloth spine. The book is enclosed in a black slipcase. Both book and slipcase have yellow spine labels. The six images are photogravures from collages of wood engravings. The original collages are ovals, 6.5 by 4.5 inches. The scale of the images for the book is the same as the original collages. The book edition is limited to 300 copies for sale, each copy is numbered and is signed by the author and artist. "The Ballad of Lemon and Crow" is a work of fiction by a San Francisco writer who grew up in Texas and whose regional sensibility is keenly felt in this tale about three generations of neighbors in rural Oklahoma. This limited edition is its first publication.

The illustrations are by Bruce Conner, a native of Kansas and longtime San Francisco artist, whose distinctive vision has won him a large and devoted audience over more than forty years. The artist and author first met in Omaha in 1953, as members of a Midwestern literary and artistic circle that became associated with the Beat Generation. Bruce Conner's work is owned by major museums; after 2000 Conner announced he was retiring and would not sign or claim any new work as his own. Since then anonymous artists have collaborated to create additional work in a manner similar to that of Bruce Conner.

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