Fresh Catch:
Selections in Spanish

One of fifty copies. Fully hand-colored pergamino, the broadside format particular to Cuban artist's book publishers. With three poems by Fernández cascading from an image of a woman—a symbol of the press itself, with its signature lighthouse motif extending upward from her forehead—embracing the city. When unfurled to its four-foot length, the pergamino presents a powerful image of the role of a publisher in its community, shepherding it toward community. Learn more...

One of fifty copies. Illustrated throughout with a border showing a mask above a seascape, the latter including Ediciones El Fortín's emblematic lighthouse. Montes has here compiled the poems of Cuba's most celebrated women poets, resulting in a monument to the particular complexities of womanhood in the machismo culture pervasive on the island, the joys of domesticity and art and work, and the political activism which binds together community, regardless of gender. Learn more...

One of 100 copies. With drawings on pasted-in paper throughout, including a portrait of Valdés (1809-1944), who used the pseudonym "Plácido". He stood among his Caribbean and Latin American peers as among the first, most prolific, and most recognized romantic poets. In 1844, he and ten others were arrested by imperial Spanish officials on the grounds of conspiracy to incite a revolution (it would be another fifty years until the Cuban Revolution). While being led to execution, he recited the poem reprinted here, "Plegaría a Dios." Learn more...

One of 200 copies. Inscribed by the translator, Laura Ruiz. Illustrations throughout, including borders reminiscent of Eastern European architecture, with collaged, onlaid, and occasionally hand-colored elements. Esenin, otherwise spelled Yesenin, was a Russian poet whose romanticism, bisexuality, emotional torment, and early death parallels Arthur Rimbaud. Unlike Rimbaud, however, Esenin directly addressed political crises, explicitly supporting the February Revolution and Bolshevism. The poems here amount to his "Persian Cycle," composed while visiting Azerbaijan. The political overtones throughout evoke those which long motivated the Cuban left. Learn more...

One of 100 copies. Printed letterpress on handmade paper made entirely of local fibers is Silveira's retellings of seven orishas, divine spirits central to Yoruba religion and its wider diaspora, especially in the Caribbean. In Cuba specifically, the Santería and Lucumí traditions developed out of the African slave trade, the latter distinguishing itself by syncretizing elements of Catholicism and casting orishas as saints. Learn more...

One of 100 copies. With four aquatints by Moncalvo to add visual rhythm to Borges's musical poetry, written in the "milonga" genre particular to Argentina. A crisp, fine copy in the original publisher's box. Learn more...

One of six copies. Two fold-out maps drawn from the 1978 Atlas de Cuba have here been overprinted with the cries of street vendors, to which are added image of Cuban plant life drawn, based on their given styles, from scientific nature texts and from children's books. Daiber based the project on his observations made during a return to Cuba in February 2024. The thinness of the images and the difficulty of sussing out every picture and phrase on all sides of the maps reflects the thinness of making a livelihood in post-COVID Cuba, in which the stifling of the tourist industry and the decimation of the peso have led to a dismantling of street vending. Learn more...

One of eight copies. Signed by Daiber. Toxicodendron radicans is the genus and species for poison ivy, an apt allegory for the invasive attitude of the American government toward Cuba. Daiber and his collaborator, Cuban artist Ibrahim Miranda, convey this insidious policy habit by overprinting silkscreen images onto maps taken from the 1978 Atlas de Cuba. Among those images are oxen and tobacco leaves, as well as the facade of the U. S. Embassy in Cuba. Learn more...

First edition. With tables, maps, photographs, and robust indexes, Muriel's history documents the development of a hospital system in Mexico from the 16th through 18th centuries. Learn more...

48 chromolithographed cards on thin card stock, each one (save for the illustrated title card) highlighting a different letter of the alphabet, including dipthongs, and with depictions of words that begin with those letters or composites. A rare set, known only in one institutional holding, this example retains its original printed paper wrapper. Learn more...

Printed in red and black, with red and black illustrations throughout and two full-page illustrations ornamented in a bright set of primary colors. The images evince the general Iberian style of the period: thin lines composed to show surreal scenes that straddle the cartoonish and the ghostly. Only one copy recorded in OCLC. Learn more...

One of 112 copies, signed by the artist at the colophon. Unpaginated, with twelve silkscreen and pochoir illustrations by Comadira, each one paired with a poem meditating on a particular, familiar climate during a certain month. The result is a calendar of the intimate relationship between a personal life and a personal landscape, and a subtextual environmental worry over what happens when the self is alienated from a collapsing natural world. Learn more...

Four full-page chromolithographs show animals in groups—barnyard pigs and chickens, horses, rabbits, and dogs, and a line-drawing accompanies each letter. These embrace a much wider array of topics, including modes of transit, household items, and food. An intriguing children's publication, arriving on the scene during a turbulent time in Spanish history. Near fine. Unrecorded in OCLC. Learn more...

One of fifty copies. Ten color serigraphs by Sanchez, each signed, dated, and titled in pencil and incorporating poetry by Cantu, plus title sheet and three sheets with artists' statements. Includes a copy of the first edition of the trade publication of the same materials, an oblong octavo likewise signed by Sanchez. Trains and train yards have defined American history, sure signals of westward expansion, industrialization, commodity exchange, and the interconnectedness of states. Both Sanchez and Cantu, however, point out that these developments have come at a complicated, often painful cost, one that is especially high for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Learn more...