William Allen Word & Image

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William Allen Word & Image

William Allen Word & Image specialises in the works of Ian Hamilton Finlay; Dom Sylvester Houedard; Concrete Poetry; Visual Poetry; European and South American Avant Garde; Conceptual Art; Artist’s books and ephemera; modern poetry; art theory publications and small press archives.

04/09/2025

Noigandres Group (Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Ronaldo Azeredo), Noigandres 4: Poesia Concreta, IRWA industria grafica, São Paulo, Brazil, 1958. 400 x 295mm. Cardboard folder containing silkscreens on cardboard, each 395 x 285mm. Includes poem prints by Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Ronaldo Azeredo (in order pictured slides 4-7), as well as some writing on their theoretical practice. Text in Portuguese and English, with translated word key.

According to Mary Ellen Solt [Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968, Indiana University Press)], Noigandres took its name from a line in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and Noigandres 4 in particular was ‘a synthesis of the theoretical studies and writings of the Noigandres group from 1950 onwards’. The theoretical text is titled ‘pilot plan for concrete poetry’, which the authors refer to as the ‘product of a critical evolution of forms’ and later the ‘tension of things-words in space-time’.

20/08/2025

Jean Toche, Photographic prints, 2001 - 2005. 140 x 102mm. All of these mailouts were sent by Jean Toche from his Staten Island home to various recipients. Each are a numbered edition of 50. Across these numerous dispatches, Toche chronicles life in the US under George W. Bush. Toche was an ardent adversary of the Bush administration, and especially the Iraq War.

Jean Toche (1932-2018) was a radical political artist and poet from Belgium who moved to the United States in 1965. In New York, he founded the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) with Fluxus artist Jon Hendricks in 1969. GAAG held various artistic interventions and protests in the 1970s. Their infamous 1969 work blood bath involved walking into the MoMA and distributing hundreds of flyers with their demands before tearing their clothes and spilling gallons of beef blood around the gallery. These demands called for the immediate resignation of the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees at the MoMA, for their shares and direct ownership of companies which invest in ‘chemical and biological warfare research’. (Reference: Hendricks and Toche, Printed Matter, Inc.)

23/07/2025

Mary Ellen Solt, Flowers in Concrete, Design Program, Fine Arts Dept., Indiana University (Bloomington), 1966. 196 x 187mm. 29pp. Designed and printed by John Dearstyne on multiple coloured stock, edition 120 of 135—though as seen on colophon page, the edition was originally to be of 100, crossed out in pencil and amended to 135. The poems were printed from line cuts, printed letter press in the Graduate Design Program of the Department of Fine Arts at Indiana University.

Mary Ellen Solt (1920-2007) was an avant-garde poet from Iowa, who became involved with Concrete Poetry after encountering the Brazilian group behind Noigandres journal, including Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. Many of Solt’s poems work with the flower as motif and metaphor: ‘For Solt, though, the flower was not just a thing of beauty: writing amid the cultural upheaval of the sixties and seventies, she found in the flower a complex symbol of political and social struggle, a metaphor for change, and an emblem of hope’ (Reference: Luke Allen, Iowa University Libraries).

04/07/2025

A collection of beautiful items from Moschatel Press, 1975-2023.

Thomas A. Clark (poet) met Laurie Clark (illustrator) in the Cotswolds when he was associated with South Street Publications and the Arlington concrete poetry exhibitions in the 1960s. Clark’s refined minimalist poetry, often about walking and landscape, establishes him as a unique voice - combined with Laurie Clark’s extraordinary illustrations the publications inspire and uplift.

The vast majority of publications illustrated are published by Moschatel Press, organised by year.

26/06/2025

Had a wonderful time at the Biblioteka Book Fair last weekend! Lots of bustling activity in the simmering heat, and lots of fun to see friends old and new. It was great to be joined by Silvia on the second day, and to meet up with people I hadn’t seen in a while.

12/06/2025

A sneak peek at some things we’re bringing to the Biblioteka Art Book Fair at next Fri/Sat 20-21 June 2025. Come visit the fair to see them in person!

1-4: Tomasz Konart, ‘T’ series, 1983-1984. Series comprises T1 (Intersubjective Investigations in collaboration with Iwona Lemke), T2 (Film for Birds), T3, T4 (collage with paint, photo and stamps), T6, and T7, each numbered in pencil from editions of 200. Brown packing paper wrappers, with rubber-stamped title, containing mostly xeroxed sheets, with handwritten text and original photos.

5-6: Małgorzata Potocka, Tryptyk / Triptych, Mała Galeria, Warsaw, 1983. Printed in black and white with one page hand-coloured: the nails of a hand, painted a different colour across editions. Potocka is a famous Polish actress who was once married to Józef Robakowski (they later divorced and she dated the rock musician Grzegorz Ciechowski). As part of their project ‘Not Yet Written Stories – Women Artists’ Archives Online’, the Arton Foundation (Warsaw) has commissioned a monograph dedicated to Potocka, bearing the image with glasses first published in this catalogue as its cover.

7-10: Ryszard Wasko (ed.), Fabryka (Signed), published by the artists, Lodz, 1982. Initiated by a group of Polish artists, following the influential exhibition ‘Construction in Process’ which was curated by Ryszard Wasko in Lodz in 1981. Signed and inscribed by Antoni Mikolajczyk with a dedication to Paul Panhuysen, a Dutch composer and artist who founded Het Apollohuis in Eindhoven in the 1980s. Wasko’s page is handwritten, hand drawn in pencil and signed. Contributors include: Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner, Taka Iimura, Tomasz Konart, Antoni Mikolajczyk,Pawel Kwiek, Kazuo Katase, Maurizio Nannucci, Fred Sandback, Les Levine, Richard Nonas, Paul Sharits, Peter Downsbrough, Aleksander Honory, Waclaw Ropiecki and many others.

29/05/2025

A collection of materials from our archive of the Japanese Fluxus artist Yoshio Nakajima (b. 1940, Japan), a key figure in the avant-garde art scene in Sweden and the Netherlands in the 1970s.

Nakajima began his career in Japan, where he produced experimental work such as happenings, street theatre, and action painting, all in the streets of Tokyo. After moving to Sweden in 1966, he became the main organiser of Fluxus Scandinavia, and was active in organising events and exhibitions such as the famous 1974 International Ubbeboda Symposium that lasted 100 days. He participated in a number of important exhibitions, among them the 1964 Venice Biennale and Documenta 5 (1972). His works exhibited the current trends in European and American avant-garde, including Fluxus, Situationist, Mail Art and Performance Art tactics, and he was a friend and collaborator of artists such as Asger Jorn, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Robert Jasper Grootveld, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, Tajiri, Kudo and Simon Vinkenoog. Offset prints similar to those included here formed part of a group show organised by Centro de Arte y Comunicacion (CAyC) in Buenos Aires in 1975.

The provenance of these materials is Agora Studio, Maastricht, where the artist lived for two extended periods, 1975-1976. As well as appearing in Agora’s Fandangos magazine, Nakajima was featured in the 1976 Japanese issue of Schmuck magazine, published in the UK by Beau Geste Press, and was the subject of the 1978 monograph ‘Yoshio Nakajima: Test Kultur’ 1978, published by the influential Omnibus Press.

First slide is a large-format screenprint of the artist in red and dark blue, numbered 2 of 8 hand-stamped and inscribed to Agora Studio, complete with artist’s hair attached by tape. Following slides show just a few of our complete set of 22 offset print works on coloured card, nearly all of which are hand-stamped and signed by the artist.

15/05/2025

G.J. de Rook, Stamp Art, Daylight Press, Amsterdam, April 1976. 295 x 210mm.

A comprehensive stamp art survey edited by the Dutch concrete and visual poet G. J. de Rook, with contributions by over one hundred (mail) artists and concrete poets including Ulises Carrion (original stamped piece in three colours), Hervé Fischer, Michael Gibbs (original work), Klaus Groh, Albrecht d., John Armleder, Anna Banana, Luciano Bartolino, Paulo Bruscky, Jorge Caraballo, Coum, Irene Dogmatic, Bill Gaglione, Paul-Armand Gette, Davi det Hompson, J.H. Kocman, Robert Rehfeldt, Dieter Roth, Endre Tót, Ben Vautier, E.A. Vigo et al. Featuring an original rubber-stamped front by Ulises Carrion and back by de Rook. Interior contains black and white mimeographed sheets, with some original rubber-stamped additions in colour.

Published on the occasion of the Stamp Art Show held from April 27 to May 17, 1976, at the Amsterdam based exhibition space and bookstore Other Books and So (ran by Ulises Carrion). First edition.

01/05/2025

13 Visuelle Texte, Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1964. 48 x48cm. Edition of 40 copies, of which 26 are numbered from A to Z, with each print signed by the artist on verso.

Includes individual prints (listed in order shown) by Augusto de Campos (‘Lygia Finger’, for Lygia Azeredo, a poet of the Noigandres movement and wife of de Campos), Franz Mon, Pedro Xisto, Ernst Jandl, Haroldo de Campos, Helmut Heisenbüttel, Edgard Braga (followed by image of Braga’s signature), Décio Pignatari, Reinhard Döhl, Max Bense, Wolfram Menzel, Hansjörg Mayer, Konrad Balder Schäufellen.

This is the first of an historic sequence of portfolios by Mayer which effectively became a survey of concrete poetry, including the subsequent ‘konkrete poesie international’ (1965) and ‘concrete poetry: britain, canada, united states’ (1966). The design of the portfolio itself served as an inspiration for John Furnival when he later produced his own folios at the Bath Academy of Art. Mayer’s family ran a paper mill in Stuttgart, so unsurprisingly the quality of the paper stock and printing was always of the highest calibre.

Full reproductions of this and Mayer’s other folios can be found in ‘TYPO’, the anthology of Hansjörg Mayer’s work (published by Buchhandlung Walther König 2014, pp. 212-225).

16/04/2025

Françoise Saint-Thibault, performing ‘Vibrespace’, her choreography for the audio-poem of Henri Chopin, original silver gelatine print, 1964. This performance was documented in R***e OU Cinquième Saison, No. 22 (1964), which also featured documentation of Saint-Thibault’s collaboration with Bernard Heideseck and an overview of British works shown for the first time in France, including those by Dom Sylvester Houédard, John Sharkey, John Furnival, Edwin Morgan, and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

27/03/2025

Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Blue & The Brown Poems, Jargon Press, Published by Atlantic Richfield Company, New York, 1968.

Calendar design by Herbert M. Rosenthal, with introductions by Jonathan Williams and Mike Weaver. Jonathan Williams proposed this large-scale collection of prints in 1965 to Finlay, which would feature a collection of his earliest concrete poems. When Finlay published Rapel in 1963, it was the first concrete poetry publication seen in the UK. The poems in this volume were written between 1963-1965 and are often unique in this large-scale silkscreen printed format. Due to various issues with the New York publisher the publication was printed three years later in 1968.

Stephen Bann has described this publication as ‘the most exemplary and remarkable concrete poetry publication of the time’. There are thought to be less than 300 copies in circulation.

21/03/2025

Veronicavan – a poetry reading by Veronica Forrest (aka Veronica Forrest-Thomson) and Cavan McCarthy at Bristol Arts Centre, 1967. Folding exhibition invitation card with concrete poetry designs, bios, and poems by each author. 73x223mm folded, 210x330mm unfolded.

Cavan McCarthy, editor of Tlaloc magazine and typewriter poet, worked at the Brotherton library of Leeds University when he met the author Veronica Forrest-Thomson and published her first book. I was told years ago by the Brotherton librarian that they were a couple. McCarthy is thought to have emigrated to Brazil in the 1980s. presented an excellent paper on ‘Forrest-Thomson’s (Almost) Concrete Poetry’ at the concrete poetry symposium in Cambridge, entitled ‘Between Word and Image – New Perspectives on Concrete Poetry and Women’s Visual Culture’, organised by , November 2024. As well as this invitation, we have added an image of a group of Tlaloc material.

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