Renaissance Man

larry celebrityAside from baseball, bridge, collecting blues and jazz autographs, and having taught me to cook many years ago, before he tiptoed out of the kitchen for several decades, Larry is also the publisher of hit & run press, and has an extensive collection of broadsides–poems printed on oversize sheets of paper for display, often with graphic ornamentation.  He has published many of these.

He also collects others’ broadsides. His most recent acquisition was of three broadsides done of original calligraphy by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch–three of the “beat poets” of the West Coast. They had all studied calligraphy with Lloyd Reynolds at Reed. Steve Jobs also studied with him, and Jobs’ study of calligraphy led to the wealth of fonts he introduced to the computer.

In any case, these three poems were done by hand, then images made of the originals and printed in editions of 300 each for a reading at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in 1964.  My favorite is the one by Lew Welch–it’s oversized, so I had to reduce it to scan a copy, but you get the idea:

Lew-Welch-Broadside_opt

I like the calligraphy and the poem.  And speaking of poems, Larry has also published a book of poems, Night Train, and written some pretty good short stories. I look forward to more sometime.

 

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