| Nicholas
Garland, I wish ...
48
pp, 210mm x 297mm Signed
Limited Edition, ISBN-13: 978-1-904130-24-6, £50.00 Unsigned
Limited Edition, ISBN-13: 978-1-904130-25-3, £30.00
The edition
is limited to 400 numbered copies, the first 150 of which are signed by Nicholas
Garland.
It comprises 18 black and white woodcuts, with accompanying verses,
is printed on 170gsm Satimat Club paper,
and is bound in buckram-lined boards.
To
be published on May 24th 2007 Post-free
for on-line credit/debit card orders
I
wish to buy this book
| A
note about I wish ...
Nicholas Garland writes: "There are many snatches of songs and lines of poetry
which lodge in your memory, and that you find running through your head when you're
not thinking of anything much. They are companionable, like old friends. I don't
remember how I learned a couple of the verses included here; probably I picked
them up at school. A year or so ago, I looked them up on the internet and found
that they, and two other verses like them, had been included in The Poet's
Tongue, an anthology edited by W.H. Auden and John Garrett. They were not
exactly as I remembered them, but perhaps, like folk songs, they never have existed
in a fixed version. Auden and Garrett do not say anything about their origin,
but at the end of the four verses add the words "and so ad infinitum ..."
I wrote down and illustrated the two I remembered, and began inventing the rest."
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A
note on Nicholas Garland Nicholas
Garland was born in London in 1935. He moved with his family to New Zealand in
1947 and lived there until 1954, when he returned to London to attend the Slade
School of Art. For some years he worked as a stage manager and theatre director.
Then, in 1966, he joined the Daily Telegraph as their first political cartoonist.
He moved to The Independent in 1984, but in 1991 rejoined the Telegraph,
where he remains to this day. As well as being a cartoonist, Garland is an accomplished
painter and woodcut artist, whose work has been exhibited widely. He has also
illustrated a number of a books, most recently The Coma, by his son, the
novelist Alex Garland. | | |
Praise for I wish ...
"Over the years, Nick Garland has recreated the animal farm of politics with
his gift for seeing our rulers as something else – a rabbit, a bull, a pig
– and nailing down their characters in a line or a gesture. It is a form
of wit, a way of cutting the high and mighty down to size. I wish ... is
a playful variation on a similar theme. Using an open-ended verse form he came
across in Auden and Garrett's anthology The Poet's Tongue, and illustrating
them with a series of brilliant woodcuts, Garland has written a highly original
book of nursery rhymes. They are nursery rhymes for adults but told from a child's
point of view – the grasshopper's view of the camel, the tadpole's view of
the hippo – the view from the bottom up, in short, just like the cartoonist's
take on the great." – Al Alvarezl
"To
me Nick Garland is the cartoonists' cartoonist. He has such a beautiful and interesting
line, and the products of his imagination are always so unexpected. Next to that,
he has a verbal dexterity that continues to colour your mind long after you've
looked up from the page -- that dark, refreshing pool of image and text. His book
I wish ... has all of this and more. It is actually a masterclass in felicity:
look here, those of you who can take delight in delight for its own sake; buy
this book and pass it on, and buy another and keep it for yourself, those of you
who always have time for a perfect distillation of elegance and wit. That is what
you get when you buy Nicholas Garland's book. Buy three. An extra one for me."
– Andrew O'Hagan
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Three of the eighteen spreads in I wish ...
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