Gods' Man A Novel in Woodcuts Lynd Ward 1929 1st Edition 2nd Printing*

Description: Gods Man A Novel In Woodcuts Book 1929 First Edition Second Printing Lynd Ward. A beautiful and original novel told in woodcuts by Lynd Ward, the second printing of the first edition. Good condition for age. Inside cover first black page is loose. Top of spine is a little rough as seen in photo. Please look at all pictures as they are part of the description. Smoke free home. Thank you for looking. About this Item: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith - New York, 1929. Hardcover. 1st Edition. Second printing. Original publisher's hard cover with dramatic decorative printed graphics front and back. Small paper title label at top of spine. Illustrated with woodcuts by the author. A wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905 1985) first published in 1929. In 144 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the first American wordless novel, and is seen as a precursor of, and influence on, the development of the graphic novel. First Edition, Second printing, as stated, December, 1929, just after the stock market crash. Gods' Man is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush. Gods' Man was the first American wordless novel, and is considered a precursor of the graphic novel, whose development it influenced. Ward first encountered the wordless novel with Frans Masereel's The Sun (1919) while studying art in Germany in 1926. He returned to the United States in 1927 and established a career for himself as an illustrator. He found Otto Nückel's wordless novel Destiny (1926) in New York City in 1929, and it inspired him to create such a work of his own. Gods' Man appeared a week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; it nevertheless enjoyed strong sales and remains the best-selling American wordless novel. Its success inspired other Americans to experiment with the medium, including cartoonist Milt Gross, who parodied Gods' Man in He Done Her Wrong (1930). In the 1970s Ward's example inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels. The wordless novel Gods' Man is a silent narrative made up of prints of 139 engraved woodblocks. Each image moves the story forward by an interval Ward chooses to maintain story flow. Ward wrote in Storyteller Without Words (1974) that too great an interval would put too much interpretational burden on the reader, while too little would make the story tedious. Wordless novel historian David A. Beronä likens these concerns with the storytelling methods of comics. A black-and-white illustration. Framed by arms raising wineglasses, a dark figure stands at the top of the image, his eyes in shadows and with a depressed expression on his face. The book's unnamed protagonist framed by wineglasses, emphasizing the isolation he feels. The artwork is executed in black and white; the images vary in size and dimension, up to 6 by 4 inches (15 cm × 10 cm), the size of the opening and closing images of each chapter. Ward uses symbolic contrast of dark and light to emphasize the corruption of the city, where even in daylight the buildings darken the skies; in the countryside, the scenes are bathed in natural light. Ward exaggerates facial expression to convey emotion without resorting to words. Composition also conveys emotion: in the midst of his fame, an image has the artist framed by raised wineglasses; the faces of those holding the glasses are not depicted, highlighting the isolation the artist feels. The story parallels the Faust theme, and the artwork and execution show the influence of film, in particular those of German studio Ufa. The placement of the apostrophe in the title Gods' Man implies a plurality of gods, rather than Judeo-Christianity's monotheistic God. It alludes to a line from the play Bacchides by ancient Roman playwright Plautus: "He whom the gods favor, dies young." Plot synopsisA poor artist signs a contract with a masked stranger, who gives him a magic brush, with which the artist rapidly rises in the art world. He is disillusioned when he discovers the world is corrupted by money, personified by his mistress. He wanders around the city, seeing his auctioneer and mistress in everyone he sees. Enraged by the hallucinations, he attacks one of them, who turns out to be a police officer. The artist is jailed for it, but he escapes, and a mob chases him from the city. He is injured when he jumps into a ravine to avoid recapture. A woman who lives in the woods discovers him and brings him back to health. They have a child, and live a simple, happy life together, until the mysterious stranger returns and beckons the artist to the edge of a cliff. The artist prepares to paint a portrait of the stranger but fatally falls from the cliff with fright when the stranger reveals a skull-like head behind the mask. Background Chicago-born Lynd Ward (1905–1985) was a son of Methodist minister Harry F. Ward (1873–1966), a social activist and the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Throughout his career, Ward displayed in his work the influence of his father's interest in social injustice. He was early drawn to art, and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward was "draw". He excelled as a student, and contributed art and text to high school and college newspapers. Ward read Frans Masereel's wordless novel The Sun (1919), while he was studying in Germany.In 1926, after graduating from Teachers College, Columbia University, Ward married writer May McNeer and the couple left for an extended honeymoon in Europe. After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig in Germany, where, as a special one-year student at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking, Ward studied wood engraving. There he encountered German Expressionist art, and read the wordless novel The Sun (1919), a modernized version of the story of Icarus, told in sixty-three wordless woodcut prints, by Flemish woodcut artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972). Ward returned to the United States in 1927, and freelanced his illustrations. In 1929, he came across German artist Otto Nückel's wordless novel Destiny (1926) in New York City. Nückel's only work in the genre, Destiny told of the life and death of a prostitute in a style inspired by Masereel's, but with a greater cinematic flow. The work inspired Ward to create a wordless novel of his own, whose story sprang from his "youthful brooding" on the short, tragic lives of artists such as Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Keats, and Shelley; Ward's argument in the work was "that creative talent is the result of a bargain in which the chance to create is exchanged for the blind promise of an early grave". Publication history In March 1929 Ward showed the first thirty blocks to Harrison Smith (1888–1971) of the publisher Cape & Smith. Smith offered him a contract and told him the work would be the lead title in the company's first catalog if Ward could finish it by the summer's end. The first printing appeared that October; it had trade and deluxe editions. The trade edition was printed from electrotype plates made from molds of the original boxwood woodblocks; the deluxe edition was printed from the original woodblocks themselves, and was a signed edition limited to 409 copies, printed on acid-free paper, bound in black cloth, and sheathed in a slipcase. The pages were printed on the recto face of the page; the verso was left blank. It was dedicated to three of Ward's teachers: his wood engraving teacher in Leipzig, Hans Alexander "Theodore" Mueller (1888–1962), and Teachers College, Columbia University art instructors John P. Heins (1896–1969) and Albert C. Heckman (1893–1971). The book has been reprinted and anthologized in a variety of editions. In 1974, it appeared in Storyteller Without Words, a collected edition with Madman's Drum (1930) and Wild Pilgrimage (1932) prefaced with essays by Ward. The stories appeared in a compact fashion, sometimes four images to a page. In 2010, it was collected with Ward's other five wordless novels in a two-volume Library of America edition edited by cartoonist Art Spiegelman. The book's original woodblocks are kept in the Lynd Ward Collection in the Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., bequeathed by Ward's daughters Nanda and Robin.

Price: 134 USD

Location: Winston-Salem, North Carolina

End Time: 2025-01-01T22:09:51.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.61 USD