Interview With Iranian Born Book Artist Alireza Darvish
I first learned of the work of Alireza Darvish in an article by Stephen Gertz in Booktryst. As an avid reader and book collector, I have begun to collect art related to books and reading. I found Mr. Darvish's work to be very intelligent and moving and wanted to share it with you. I also wanted to know a bit more about this artists relationship with books so I contacted him and asked if he would participate in an interview for this post. He graciously agreed and here is the interview:
1. Can you tell me who inspired your love of reading and books.
I was 11 years old when the Islamic Revolution happened and our childhood, quite involuntary, was mixed in with the chaotic games of the adults. Our dramas and fantasies became smeared with the immature desires of our brothers and fathers. The atmosphere was filled with heavy, complicated, but seductive words and phrases. Our toys all smelled of gunpowder or even worse, slogans.
I was born in Rasht, a city in northern Iran, in the Caspian Sea region. This part of Iran, being so close to Russia, has a longstanding leftist tradition. Communism was very fashionable those days among the young, and I was attracted to it as well.
I quite accidentally came across one their greatest libraries located nearby my residence. I became a member and also for two years I was active in their youth department until it was raided and set on fire like many other such libraries. It was where I connected to the world of books in a serious manner. There we had reading groups and I recall after reading each book that we would get together to discuss it.
2. How did your interest in reading and books effect your life?
Society's post-revolutionary chaos and popular disunity over accepting one political force created a cozy open society.
There were thousands of questions needed to be answered. People had said no to the previous regime by their daily street demonstrations. Now after all this turmoil, they wanted to do something quite abnormal, something unaccustomed--thinking about fulfilling their demands and dreams!
Many felt themselves responsible to find the answers to these questions. Political parties and movements, religious groups, and intellectuals each tried to come up with an answer from their own standpoint and views. It was under these circumstances that books and book readings had become such an unbelievable and widespread necessity. The cities were filled with the rows of bookstores and book peddlers. We should also remember that the internet did not exist then and that books and other media still were the leading source of communications and consciousness-raising.
Book reading was becoming a culture in and of itself, though, unfortunately, a short-lived on. Shortly with the establishment of a religious totalitarian regime, book and book reading were also suppressed. The Islamic Cultural Revolution was the last nail in its coffin.
During this period I read miles of third rate leftist and communistic novels that were translated daily. They were all in connection with either the Russian Revolution or other revolutions in the world. I tried even to understand Marx’s Capital, and read Lenin’s collection works. I read Gorky, Solokhov, and Romain Rolland with considerable enthusiasm and absorb as much as I could.
This period of my book reading ended with that library's incineration. Soon the Iran-Iraq was started; the dominant political atmosphere of the day was turning more and more violent, and its horror and pain was spreading to almost every corner of the country and affected all the citizens alike.
And one day, due to my arrest by the religious faction of the army, my brothers, fearing further repercussions, bagged all the books in our library and dumped them in the river. And that was the end of that!
As you see, my connection and disconnection with books both were inhumane. A beginning that neither found a chance to develop well, nor ran its course and left a habit or an experience behind. It just stayed in me as an unfinished affair that needs to be given more time, more thought and more nurturing.
I was only 14 when I left home in Rasht and went to Tehran to continue my education in painting in the only academy of art in the capital. Everyone in my family but my mother was against it. I think her faith and trust in me was the only thing that kept me from going astray. Tehran, with a population of ten million in those days, was a wild city, burning with war fever where the march of death was the only melody of those days I recall. But our Academy of Art was a safe, calm and quiet island in the middle of all this chaos and insecurity. There, I would learn new things everyday, while carried away with the artistic life.
Fortunatley, my art historian teacher, Mr. Samii, was a poet and a literary critic. He played an important role in the development of my thought and contributed to my transformation into who I became. He was the first one who taught me and encouraged me to free myself from the dogmas I had picked up in the early years of Revolution and was the one who thought me to be a free thinker. He introduced me to the contemporary as well as the classic Iranian and world culture and literature. He coached me to start my return to books, with a new perspective, albeit more vivid and more creative.
3. There are many book lovers and readers who cherish their relationship with books but you faced personal hardships we can only imagine. How did this inspire your art?
Few years later, as a young artist, I started working in the prestigious literary magazine “The World of Speech”. This magazine was among the rare literary and cultural publications that had survived and continued to survive with much effort. There, I found the opportunity to meet many of the great names in art and literature. Making a design for an article about book burning was quite shocking to me. It involved me in a subject which I had felt with all my heart and mind, a subject, so close to me emotionally that it became the subject matter of my works today, as you can see.
I wanted to demonstrate that we human beings are like moving and changing words and phrases, that we all are like books that are unwritten, or if written, read badly if at all; they should be read and read well. Of course, all changes occur in the course of time, contexts, circumstances, or new discourses. My painting is a reflection of the same interpretation of words. I have not drawn anything that I have not seen or heard, or read. All my works are my narratives of human being I have represented in my paintings as books. After all, I’m from a generation that has uniquely tasted the three phenomena of revolution: its inception, its turmoil, and finally its consequential loneliness and isolation. I found it quite natural to turn all these impressions into a visual monologue running in my head. However, as much as they are my concerns, they can become yours and even others'; and in this way, they echo and perpetuate themselves. Concepts such as love, loneliness, human rights and human destiny, censorship, uncertainties, our relations with ourselves as well as the world around us, our journeys, our being left out, our philosophical wandering to find an answer to the unanswerable, etc. all are those that we all have a taste of; we read them in books or in people, but I draw them. My drawing, in fact, is my paying respect to us, to my generation, to my children and to the generation to come; with my painting I remind all of us the role that books played in our life.
4. My readers are collectors. Can you tell us how we may purchase your art?
- Anyone interested in my painting could contact my wife, Ms. Carmen Perez Gonzalez at carmenperezg@yahoo.com (or: perez-gonzalez@museenkoeln.de) or contact me via my website at: www.animacal.com to receive more information about my paintings and instruction for ordering them.
5. Do you consider yourself a book collector? What genre do you prefer? What area of collecting? Who are your favorite authors? Favorite Books?
There certainly are plenty of good reasons to keep me from doing this, directly. The most important is that during these past years, we had to relocate several times to different countries because of my wife’s studies or job changes. We have moved from Germany to Spain to the Czech Republic, and back to Germany. But this time our re-location should more permanent. We have to anchor somewhere permanently for our children's sake.
Yes, It is true that my paintings are about books, but it is my wife who collects books. She has an excellent collection of art history books about the history of photography. This is her field of study. She has recently finished her PhD in the history of early photography in Iran.
I myself am interested in poems and novels.
Many writers in various periods have captured my love and admiration. When younger, I was a very passionate reader of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Mayakovski. Later I turned to the magic realism of South American writers such as Borges and Octavio Paz. I spent some time reading Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and, a little later, Milan Kundera who all involved me in their philosophical thoughts and ideas. Arthur Miller, Salinger, Becket, Gunter Grass, and Saramago were all among my favorites. Among the poets, Lorca is even present in my painting. I love Khalil Gibran, Idris Shah, Rilke and Albert. Of the poets and the writers of my homeland, I love Hafez, Rumi, Farokhzad, and Hedayat, who have made a great impression on me that is well reflected in my paintings, but it is still the Little Prince of Saint Exupéry that makes my heart shiver!
6. Do you have any plans of visiting the United States? Are you currently working with any galleries or have exhibits planned?
- In September and October of 2011 there will be an exhibit of my paintings on books in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. This exhibit is sponsored by Ars Libri, Ltd, the largest rare and out of print book collector in the USA .
I have traveled to the United Sates before for the screening of one of my short animation films in the Brooklyn Film Festival, but this in the first time my paintings are on exhibit there.
I have had exhibits in various prestigious galleries in Europe such as Sale Rovira in Barcelona, Spain, and in the International Book Festival in Frankfurt in 2008. However in last few years, I have concentrated more on my animations. I have two short animations, “What if Spring Does Not Come?” and “Footsteps of Water” very much influenced by my paintings of books. Both of these animations have been presented in various film festivals and were received well, and received awards as well, including one Special Jury Award in 2008 from the Brooklyn Film Festival. My latest work has been my participation in making the film “Green Waves” as the main designer of its animation. But to tell the truth, these days I miss painting. I would like to go back to it and become active in painting again and hopefully find more opportunities to exhibit my works
7. Will your art be collected in a book? By what publisher? When?
A catalogue will be printed for the exhibition at Ars Libri.
8. Do you have anything else you'd like to say to fellow book lovers and readers?
For question 8 I have no more ideas… I have said everything that I wanted!
Rare Bible Exhibition Tours the Country
Source: Foxnews.com
By Lindsay Carlton Published April 13, 2011 | FoxNews.com
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/13/rare-bible-exhibition-tours-country/#ixzz1JSJGdlOH
About 17 months ago, the Green family went on a very expensive shopping spree.
But they didn’t burn the money on Bentleys, vacation homes or exotic yachts. They instead bought up 30,000 rare biblical texts and artifacts that now make up the largest private collection of its kind in the world.
The Greens, of Oklahoma City, are owners of the Hobby Lobby Empire, one of the nation’s leading privately owned arts and crafts retailers. Forbes Magazine puts the family fortune at around $2.5 billion.
Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and the leading family member behind the project, was eager to share his family’s new discoveries and pushed to have them featured in a traveling exhibit called, “Passages.”
“We believe the Bible has a positive influence and I think that all people should see what it has to say,” Green said. “We encourage people to make their choice and follow its principals like we do and strive to do.”
Scholars, politicians and businesspeople gathered for a first glimpse of some of the rare religious artifacts when Passages was announced last month at the Vatican embassy in Washington. The formal stage is set to debut at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art on May 16.
Some of the most notable antiquities include: the second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, which are expected to help understanding of the earliest texts in the Bible, and the world’s largest private collection of Jewish scrolls, which includes Torahs recovered from Nazi concentration camps.
It also includes early printed parts of the Gutenberg Bible, one of the first major books printed in movable type in the 1450's, and a comprehensive collection of English bibles through the King James era.
But perhaps the collection’s most prized possession is the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, one of the earliest surviving Bibles. Purchased from a London auction house, Green says the Codex is one of his favorites, and is the fifth-oldest relatively complete bibles in the world.
Like any vintage item, these one-of-a-kind artifacts come with a big price tag. Museums don't disclose the amount spent on individual pieces, and the Green family abides by those standards. When asked how much the collection or even a single artifact was purchased for, Mr. Green declined to go into detail.
“It’s invaluable. We have texts that people have lost their lives to make, what you purchase it for and what it's worth are two different things,” said Dr. Scott Carroll, director of the Green collection. The cost of a single can be staggering. A Wycliffe, which is known as a group of bible translations from 1382-1395, can go for around $2.5 million to $3 million.
Spending millions of dollars on religious artifacts is not new to the Green family. Hobby Lobby CEO David Green is a regular donor to Christian organizations and joined Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and other wealthy Americans last year in ‘Giving Pledge,’ a promise to give away most of their fortunes to charitable causes.
The Greens live by Christian principles and apply them in their thriving business. Christian music can be heard throughout store hallways. They close up shop every Sunday. And while some have wondered if the family aim is more about proselytizing than collecting, others admire their generous efforts.
“If the collection can shed light on how these revered texts came to be, and why they were protected and passed down from generation to generation, that’s reason enough to applaud it,” said Father Edward Beck, a Catholic priest.
The astonishing collection has created buzz in the world of rare book collecting. “Auction season goes in cycles, you get sales in the spring and then they heat up again in the fall,” said Stephen Massey, an appraiser experienced in ancient religious objects. “There was buzz about this last spring, but that same buzz wasn’t repeated in the fall or winter. But now here we are in the spring and the buzz is back.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/13/rare-bible-exhibition-tours-country/#ixzz1JSIyQreW
[Top]Book Thief Swallows Rare Book!
(San Anselmo, Ca.) An alleged book thief was due to be arraigned in Marin County Superior court today on charges of Grand Theft, after police discovered a stolen rare book in his stomach.
The Heldfond Book Gallery,Ltd. a Rare Bookstore in San Anselmo, reported the theft of an important First Edition to authorities upon discovering the book missing from their shelves three weeks ago. The bookstore staff was able to provide police with a full description of a man who had been handling the volume shortly before it went missing. Police discovered the suspect at a Tea Bar during a sweep of the surrounding area.
” We found him at the Eco Green Zen Calm cafe,” said San Anselmo Sgt. Gill Favor.” The guy fit the description we’d been given. He was curled up in a booth, complaining of severe cramps.”
Paramedics were called and the suspect was removed to Marin General Emergency, where an x-ray was taken in order to determine the cause of the man’s abdominal distress. According to ER Physician, Dr. Leo McCoy, what happened next was a medical horrorshow.” Nearly the whole ER staff was standing there, looking and this X-ray with their jaws down to their chests. We’ve seen many different and weird things wind up in people’s stomachs over the years but this was a real shocker.We took him to the O.R. immediately and sliced that puppy outa there.”
The alleged book thief has been identified as John W. Booth, an unemployed actor from San Francisco. According to Doctors, he has recovered sufficiently to appear at his arraignment.
” The swift response by the SAPD is to be commended ,”according to Heldfond Book Gallery Manager, Becky Thatcher. ” We were sure this fellow had taken the book. He’d been acting very strange. The only thing that puzzled us was how he got it out of the store. He was dressed in just a wife-beater tee and spandex bike shorts and there were at least two staff members keeping an eye on him while he was holding the book. We certainly never imagined he would swallow the thing, much less with no one seeing him do it ! This gentleman is the Houdini of book thieves.”
The pilfered First Edition, valued by the bookstore at $5500.00 was H.G. Well’s classic – The Invisible Man.
[Top]Peter Howard, owner of Serendipity Books, dies
Source: Berkeleyside
April 13, 2011 9:00 am by Frances Dinkelspiel
Peter Howard, the eccentric and brilliant owner of Serendipity Books, and a towering figure in the world of rare books, died at home on March 31.
A Giants season ticket-holder for more than 40 years, Howard died with the opening game of the season blaring on television – while the Giants were still beating the Dodgers.
“He died at the bottom of the sixth inning,” said one of his daughters, Kerry Dahm.
Howard’s death at 72 means that there will be changes at Serendipity Books on University Avenue, but the shape of those changes is still unclear.
There are a number of people interested in buying the store and/or the inventory, according to Dahm. For now, the store is still open.
“I doubt it will continue as it was,” said Dahm.
Howard died seven and a half months after the death of his wife Alison, 71, to whom he had been married for more than 50 years. The couple was able to have a 50th wedding anniversary party with close friends in June.
Howard is also survived by another daughter, Esme Howard, and a number of grandchildren.
Serendipity Books Photo: Ken Sanders
Howard and Alison met in 1958 in Alaska on a Friends service project to build houses for the Eskimos, said Dahm. After the project was over, they built a moss-covered raft and floated down the Yukon back to civilization, she said.
They both returned to college – he to Haverford and she to nearby Swarthmore – and married the weekend after they graduated. They moved to Berkeley so Howard could go to graduate school in English at UC Berkeley and Alison could be closer to her family.
Howard was teaching Subject A (entry level English) at Cal and sold a small collection of D.H. Lawrence books he had. He soon realized he got more pleasure matching good books with good owners than either owning the books or studying English. He quit school and started a small rare-book business. Soon, the family’s house on Colusa was overflowing with books. Howard opened a store on Shattuck Avenue in 1967 and moved in 1986 into an old winery on University.
Serendipity Books is crammed top to bottom with books in every conceivable location: on shelves, on table tops, on the floor, in the rafters. The books in the store are only a part of Howard’s vast collection, which he estimated last year was around 1 million volumes. There is a warehouse in Berkeley stuffed with boxes of books as well.
“There are books everywhere,” said Dahm. “There is the store. There is the warehouse with almost as many books in boxes as in the store. Then there is our house with bookshelves in every room, including the stairwell. He would often bring bags and bags of books home.”
Howard soon developed a reputation as an astute rare-book dealer. He discovered and saved many important manuscript collections, as well as collecting and valuing works by both well-known and lesser-known authors.
Howard’s collection covers many areas, including California history and western Americana. He was known for his collection of first editions of American and British literature, and has holdings of Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Shakespeare, North Point Press, and fiction from countries around the world. Serendipity also has large collections of literary manuscripts, screenplays and little magazines.
“He was one of the major antiquarian book dealers of our time,” said Victoria Shoemaker, a literary agent, close friend, and former neighbor of the Howards’.
Howard made some notable purchases in his lengthy career as a bookseller.
In the late 1990s, he bought the 18,000-volume collection of Carter Burden, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and a progressive New York politician and businessman. The size of the collection prompted Howard to install compact shelving, making Serendipity the only bookstore in the world to have such shelving.
In 1991, Howard was offered the archives of Thomas M. Jackson, an Oakland grocer who had served as secretary for the California chapter of the NAACP from 1910 and 1940. After Jackson died, in 1963, someone took his papers to the Berkeley dump. Someone else rescued them and asked Howard to help them find a proper home. Howard sold the papers to the Bancroft Library.
Later in that decade, someone found 946 letters exchanged between two Japanese-American teenagers who met at an internment camp in Utah. Tamaki Tsubokura and David Hisato Yamate were separated for a few years during the war, and they wrote to one another frequently. These letters were also dumped at the Berkeley landfill and later rescued. Howard brokered their sale to the University of Utah.
Howard was a blunt and forthright man. After he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year ago, Berkeleyside contacted him to ask about his health and the store.
“There’s nothing to say,” Howard said by telephone. “People die. We all die. Businesses end.”
Writing on Booktryst.com, in a section called “A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard”, Stephen Gertz, one of his friends, described meeting Howard for the first time. ”He was standing in one of the aisles around twenty-five yards away from my vantage point and looked like an aged, unkempt and unshaven derelict marooned far too long, surviving on a diet far too short on calories,” wrote Gertz.
“He was wearing a sarong-like thing wrapped around his waist, sandals, a rumpled shirt and a knit cap with earflaps. It seemed as if he had just come off a three-day binge on arrack, the liquor made from coconut sap. It was Peter Howard, proprietor of the legendary Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California, who appeared to be shipwrecked on Book Island.”
But the gruff exterior hid a nicer side. Many of Howard’s friends characterized him as generous and helpful and willing to go out of his way to help young book dealers get set up in business.
Gary Lepper, Howard’s lawyer, said Howard helped him compile a bibliographical study of first editions, and then asked if Serendipity could publish it. That led to a lifelong friendship between the Howards and the Leppers that included many games of bridge, delicious dinners, and a friendly rivalry over the Giants, who Howard loved, and the Dodgers, who Lepper supported.
“He didn’t do well with fools, or people he thought were delicatish, but if you hung in there you got a very good friend out of it,” said Lepper.
One indication of the reverence in which he was held by the rare-book community came every two years around the time of the Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco. Howard would throw a huge party at Serendipity Books the Wednesday before the fair. He would clear the books in his store out of the aisles and off of the tables, tent-over the parking lot, and have Poulet cater the meal. He would have a suckling pig, and the printer, Alistair Johnson, would print up the menu, said Dahm. The party was so popular that the store and tent were jammed.
Howard was well enough to throw the party again this year in February. After it was over, he went home and never left the house again, said Dahm.
There will be a private memorial service for Howard in May, said Leppe
[Top]One of the oldest printed books in the world discoverd in Utah
Source: ABC4
Rare book dealer Ken Sanders says he has heard it all. When someone came in to tell him he had a rare and valuable item he said "I'm kind of rolling my eyes and thinking yea, right buddy. I've heard that story before."
The anonymous owner pulled out a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicles published in 1493 it is one of the oldest printed books in the world. That's when Sanders knew he had wrongly judged the man's claim.
"You sometimes find a single page from a book that is five centuries old, rarely an entire book," said Sanders.
Sandy Museum Director Sherry Worthen knew they had found a gem when she saw Sanders excitement.
"He said I think you might want to notify the media because you have a very rare find here" she said.
While the history and long survival of this book are by far the most intriguing things about thsi book to sanders, he estimates it's face value at $100,000.
"This book was published just after Columbus discovered the Americas!" exclaimed Sanders.
All handset type, Sanders says in 1493 someone put each letter together in a form then printed them on an old fashioned cylinder press.
The publisher also included 1,800 wood-cut illustrations. Each picture is first carved into wood, transfered to a platen, inked and placed in the book.
"The labor to create a book under those conditions...how they ever did it I'll never know. I'd give up before I had a page done" added Sanders.
The Nuremberg Chronicles is a German publication. Sanders calls it a marriage of print and illustration. He says it needs to be collated and it's missing a significant amount of pages. Evevn so, he says it's the greatest thing he has and will ever come across in his entire career.
"You live for moments like this" said Sanders.
Sanders says it is up to the owner what to do with the book. He says there are several options including keeping it in his family where it's been for years, selling it to a private collector or donating it to a public or private museum. Regardless of what the owner decides, Sanders says the most important thing is that it is properly preserved and remains living part of our history for centuries to come.
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