MUCKLEFOOT MISCELLANY

New York: Hand set in Caslon Old Face & Priory Text, by M. Martin & C. Skalba, apprentices, & printed at Uranian Press N.Y.C., 1960. 4 broadsides, approximately 20 x 8 1/2 inches, in original printed paper folder, 21 x 8 3/4 inches. Printed on tan paper. Signed and numbered in pencil on front cover of folder by Baer and Kaplan. Front cover of folder embossed with seal of the Uranian Press. Fine.

Numbered 298 of 400 copies.

The first Uranian Press "Broadside Ballads Folio," inspired by the the blackletter broadside ballad of Elizabethan England, advertised in the 1960 Uranian Press Catalogue One, and sold by Uranian Press founder Richard O. Tyler in the Judson Church Yard in Greenswich Village. The poems are composed by Victor Lorenz Kaplan, a.k.a. Ralph Mucklefoot, type set by young apprentices Michael Martin and Conard Skalbo, and illustrated with woodcuts by Dorothea Baer, wife of Richard Tyler and co-founder of the Uranian Press and the later Uranian Phalanstery. The first three broadsides, "Simple Simon," Of Hodge wrack'd by the New Plaguge & Mucklefoot's Prescription of Deliverance," and "Ralph O' Bellvue," bear 1959 imprints and are presumably the items referred to in the Press's 1959 ELIZABETHAN BALLADS broadside. The fourth broadside, "A Fable for Foxes," and printed folder bear 1960 imprints.

Richard Oviet Tyler (1926-1983) established the Uranian Press in 1958 in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side where, by 1960, he had installed four printing presses. Under the Uranian imprint, Tyler, his wife, Dorothea Baer Tyler, and friends produced chapbooks, broadsides, and artist's books through the mid-1960s. Tyler was a fixture in Greenwich Village during this period, selling the Press's wares from a pushcart in the yard of Judson Memorial Church, a nod to both contemporary Jewish peddlers of the Lower East Side and the chapmen of Elizabethan England. He played an important, if still underappreciated, role in the nascent expanded arts movements of the New York avant garde scene with both the Press and its performance arm, the Uranian Alchemical Players. The Uranian circle expanded into a quasi-religious collective incorporating Jungian and Gnostic ideas of creativity and consciousness, LSD, Western astrology, alchemy, Tibetan Buddhism, and the political thought of Charles Fourier, becoming known officially in 1974 as the Uranian Phalanstery. OCLC records six copies.