Roadkills. A Collection of Prose and Poetry. Illustrated by Alan James Robinson. Texts by John McPhee, Gillian Connelly, Gary Snyder, Madeline DeFrees, William Stafford and Richard Eberhart

Easthampton, MA: Cheloniidae Press, 1981. First Edition, one of 50 Deluxe copies, from a total issue of 300: 50 Deluxe copies bound in quarter leather, with text printed on Sakomoto and the prints on Cha-u-ke plus an extra suite of the prints, signed by the artist and all of the authors; 250 regular copies with text on Mulberry paper, bound in paper, signed by the artist. Page size: 12 inches x 8 3/4 inches. Bound by Gray Parrot: quarter grey morocco with tire tracks blind tooled across spine and title in blind, matching black chemise with blind tooled tire tracks, all housed in grey morocco and black cloth clamshell box. Illustrated with 11 woodengravings (10 roadkills and one tire track/broken muffler as colophon) and one etching, the text was printed in red and black by Harold Patrick McGrath at Hampshire Typothetae in Bruce Rogers' Centaur and Frederick Warde's Arrighi which was hand set in 18 point by P. Chase Twichell. The artist explains in "On the Conception of Roadkills" that he had originally planned a portfolio without text of some of those animals he had encountered during his many drives to and from college. He adds, "Meanwhile, friends began to call my attention to writers who had also been inspired by the casualties of the highways: John McPhee, in Travels in Georgia, and poets Madeline DeFrees, Gillian Connelly, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, and Richard Eberhart. Thus I began to conceive of Roadkills as a book, with images and text interwoven." And what a book it is -- the text in red and black on tan Japanese paper, the black woodengravings on a darker tan paper, red Japanese paper as preliminaries -- all making a powerful statement about "The Dead by the Side of the Road." This is the very rare second book of the press; the deluxe edition with its extra suite and signatures of all the authors has long been out of print. In addition.