BUSTIN’S ISLAND ’68 by LEWIS WARSH

27. BUSTIN’S ISLAND ’68. New York, NY: Granary Books, 1996. 6¼x8½" 72 pages. (A)

Letterpress, spiral-bound. Bustin’s Island ’68 was originally composed and produced by Warsh as a private manuscript book, a single copy, in 1992. The Granary Books edition is based on the original, which is now housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Printed letterpress by Joe Elliot at Soho Letterpress, signed by the author, with 21 black-and-white photographs hand-mounted by Jill Jevne. 20 hors commerce, 50 for sale.

“Bustin’s Island, in Casco Bay, off the coast of Southern Maine. Summer of ’68 Ted and Sandy Berrigan, Anne Waldman and I, rented houses there. The Berrigans were there with their kids, David and Kate. The connection was Lee Crabtree, his childhood summer home. His family had a house there and he was there too. We all ate dinner together every night at one of our houses. Anne and I were there for a month and then we spent the rest of the summer in California, visiting Joanne Kyger and Jack Boyce in San Francisco and then Tom and Angelica Clark in Bolinas. It was my first visit to Bolinas. Some time in the early nineties I wrote a short memoir of that time. I pasted the text into a sketchbook and then added the accompanying photos, including one of my parents, taken out of context, and a few from the summer of ’69 when I went to Europe and Ted Berrigan and I took a trip to Liverpool, England. I showed the book to Steve Clay—it was his first visit to my apartment at 701 President Street in Park Slope—and he immediately initiated the idea of doing it as a book. It was not something I was thinking about when I put it together. He made seventy copies of all the photos. Each copy of the book contains original prints.”