NEXT TO NOTHING

Kathmandu, Nepal: Bardo Matrix [at Sharada Printing Press], 1976. First Edition. Softcover. Near fine. Maya, Lee Baarslag, Dana Young, Sydney Hushhour, Petra Vogt. [13] ff. (rectos only) including in-text designs and illustrations and mounted photograph. Original pictorial wrappers, side-stitched. Near fine.

Bardo Matrix's STARSTREAMS Poetry Series No. 5, numbered 208 of an edition of 500 copies. Ira Cohen published under the Bardo Matrix imprint throughout the 1970s in Kathmandu, collaborating with Angus Maclise and other fellow expatriates with the help of Nepali craftsmen and woodblock artsts. In his account of the press he wrote for the May/June 1995 issue of NEW OBSERVATIONS, "The Great Rice Paper Adventure Kathmandu, 1972-1977," Cohen highlights the process and production of NEXT TO NOTHING:

"In 1976 Paul Bowles sent me his poem, Next to Nothing, written specially for Bardo Matrix. Although I knew that Paul expressed a preference for an unadorned presentation of the text with little or no graphics, I ended up using six different design elements by six different artists. Beginning with a verifax collage on the cover by Maya who assembled a glove, razor blade, hairpin, emblematic patches including in eagle, several stars and a butterfly rising on the horizon and ending with a Kufic design supplied by Paul on the back cover, there was also a skull colophon drawn by Lee Baarslag from a human skull I had found in Kathmandu, a collage by Dana Young tipped in as a photographic print, an elegant geometric design by Sydney Hushhour, who was visiting from San Francisco and Petra Vogt's rapidograph drawing, Bone Ship Passing."