Title: Sure as death
Description: "Phil Zimmermann: The book is about the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Willyum Rowe cut up an old Victorian book and rearranged the type and pictures to make a poetic and tragic story about the decimation caused by HIV in the gay community in the early nineteen eighties ... Printed by offset lithography by Kevin Begos Printing in Rhinebeck, NY. Cased-in by hand by Phil Zimmermann in an edition of 500, though only about 150 were actually bound because of production problems. Because of press issues most of the beige second color was misregistered. The book was smythe-sewn by Fort Orange Bindery in Albany NY. (I added foil-stamped spine material and then cased in the books.) At the time that I made this book, no one I knew had ever seen this type of binding with the boards set back away from the separate spine material. I had seen a copy of a book like this at the Newberry Library in Chicago that had been bound in Germany in the 1930s. By now this type of binding has almost become a cliché but at the time it seemed quite radical."--Vamp & Tramp Web site, accessed February 6, 2014.
Subjects: Visual poetry, Artists' books, AIDS (Disease), Epidemiology
Places: United States
People: William Rowe (1946-)