A Book of Automatic Drawings – Austin Osman Spare (Catalpa Press)

Description

The first-ever publication of one of Austin Osman Spare’s most significant graphic works — a suite of automatic drawings completed in 1925, which then lay unseen for nearly fifty years until the manuscript’s rediscovery led to this Catalpa Press edition.

Produced entirely through Spare’s technique of automatic drawing — each image formed from a single continuous line, conjuring satyrs, hybrid beast-men, and fragmentary self-portraits from the artist’s unconscious — this folio volume reproduces Spare’s own hand-lettered title page, contents, and decorative devices in facsimile, alongside twelve full-page line drawings (the penultimate plate printed in black and green, the final plate in black and brown). Introduction by Ian Law.

Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, though far fewer were ever bound as intended — the cost of cloth binding proved prohibitive at a time when Spare’s reputation had yet to be rediscovered, meaning only around 100 copies were issued in the rarer cloth-spined hardback state, this being one of them.

A landmark publication in the rediscovery of Spare’s work during the 1970s occult revival, and an essential piece for any serious collection of his graphic art.