The Voices of Marrakesh
The Voices of Marrakesh
By Elias Canetti, afterword by Ferdinand Protzman, 29 photographs by Karl Bissinger, and 6 etchings by William T. Wiley, signed, 2001. $650.00
Publication 61
ADD TO CARTThe only work of travel writing by Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh was first published in German in 1968. It is a record of a visit to Morocco by the author best known for his sociological work, Crowds and Power, an ambitious study of the roots of Fascism, and Auto-da-Fé, a novel set in Vienna on the eve of World War II. Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He was born in 1905, in Bulgaria, lived in Zurich and Vienna as a young man, settled in England in 1938, and died in 1994. The Voices of Marrakesh became a classic of literary travel writing and redefined the genre. Canetti provides no historical overview of the city or the country. His description of places and things is vivid, yet economical to the point of minimalism. The events Canetti describes could have taken place 100 years ago or yesterday or tomorrow. Wiley began by making some small watercolors of incidents in The Voices of Marrakesh, then a large preliminary drawing for an etching. He added an underlying map of the walled city of Marrakesh, which is printed in an earthy red, while the drawn images are printed in black. For the book, the etching is partitioned into six pieces, each segment illustrating a story told by Canetti. Karl Bissinger took the photographs that appear in The Voices of Marrakesh while on assignment for Flair magazine in 1949, for a travel piece on Morocco that was published in 1950. Of the pictures taken by Bissinger in Marrakesh and vicinity a selection of 29 photographs was made for this book, 28 in black and white, appearing on every fourth page in the text, and one, as the frontispiece, in color.
FORMAT
Large octavo, 11 by 8 inches, 124 pages, plus 12 unnumbered pages for the colored leaves to which the etchings are attached. The type is Goudy Old Style, printed by letterpress. The photographs appear on verso pages, the etchings on recto pages. The etchings are 9.25 by 6.25 inches. The paper for the text is Mohawk Superfine. The paper for the etchings is Rives Lightweight. The paper for the mounting of the etchings is Fabriano Ingres. The photographs were printed in duo-tone and four-color offset lithography. The edition is limited to 350 numbered copies for sale, signed by the artist and photographer. This is one of 50 copies of the edition for sale accompanied by the print, bound with a brown leather spine, and presented in a slipcase of cloth and paper, with a fragment of the etching attached.
Book with Extra Print: The etching by William T. Wiley, "Canetti in Marrakesh", is printed in two colors, black and red, on Rives Heavyweight paper. The size of the plate is 29.5 by 20.75 inches; the size of the paper is 38 by 27 inches. The intaglio plates were prepared and proofed by Timothy Berry of Teaberry Press in San Francisco and printed by Robert Townsend of R. E. Townsend Studio in Georgetown, Massachusetts. The edition is limited to 50 prints for sale, numbered and signed by the artist, each with a copy of the book, plus five artist's proofs and five publisher's proofs. Price of the book with print is $2,000. Click here to order Book with Extra Print.
POSTAGE: Additional postage may apply; please inquire for details.
Share
