Barry Moser – illustratör

From its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing", to the last, "I am haunted by waters", A River Runs Through It is an American classic. Based on Norman Maclean's childhood experiences, A River Runs Through It has established itself as one of the most moving stories of our time; it captivates readers with vivid descriptions of life along Montana's Big Blackfoot River and its near magical blend of fly fishing with the troubling affections of the heart. This handsome edition is designed and illustrated by Barry Moser. There are thirteen two-color wood engravings. "A masterpiece...This is more than stunning fiction: It is a lyric record of a time and a life, shining with Maclean's special gift for calling the reader's attention to arts of all kinds--the arts that work in nature, in personality, in social intercourse, in fly-fishing."--Kenneth M. Pierce, Village Voice Norman Maclean (1902-90), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forestry Service before beginning his academic career.He retired from the University of Chicago in 1973.

An illustrated edition of Billy Budd featuring woodcuts by celebrated artist Barry Moser.  This edition of Billy Budd, Sailor presents Herman Melville’s iconic tale of the high seas alongside illustrations by renowned artist, publisher, and printmaker Barry Moser.  Throughout his fifty-year career, Moser has illustrated more than three hundred books ranging from novels to children’s stories to the Bible. Through his Pennyroyal Press, Moser designs and prints fine-press, illustrated, and occasionally oversized books in very limited editions, which are beloved by collectors and bibliophiles. To coincide with the centenary of the novella’s posthumous publication, Moser created sixteen original woodcuts illustrating the scenes and characters of Billy Budd, Sailor, and this trade edition now makes these exquisite illustrations accessible to a wide audience.This illustrated edition adapts the text of the critical edition of the novella prepared for the Melville Electronic Library by John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Ohge.

Octavio Paz has long been known for his brilliant essays as well as for his poetry. Through the essays, he has sought to confront the tensions inherent in the conflict between art and society and to achieve a unity of their polarities. The Siren and the Seashell is a collection of Paz’s essays, focusing on individual poets and on poetry in general. The first five poets he treats are Latin American: Sor Juana InÉs de la Cruz, RubÉn DarÍo, JosÉ Juan Tablada, RamÓn LÓpez Velarde, and Alfonso Reyes. Then there are essays on Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, Saint-John Perse, Antonio Machado, and Jorge GuillÉn. Finally, there are Paz’s reflections on the poetry of solitude and communion and the literature of Latin America. Each essay is more than Paz’s impressions of one person or issue; each is the occasion for a wider discussion of cultural, historical, psychological, and philosophical themes. The essays were selected from Paz’s writing between 1942 and 1965 and provide an overview of the development of his thinking and an exploration of the ideas central in his works.

The first collection of Thoreau’s writings on the flowering plants of Concord, with more than 200 drawings by renowned artist Barry MoserSome of Henry David Thoreau’s most beautiful nature writing was inspired by the flowering trees and plants of Concord. An inveterate year-round rambler and journal keeper, he faithfully recorded, dated, and described his sightings of the floating water lily, the elusive wild azalea, and the late autumn foliage of the scarlet oak.  This inviting selection of Thoreau’s best flower writings is arranged by day of the year and accompanied by Thoreau’s philosophical speculations and his observations of the weather and of other plants and animals. They illuminate the author’s spirituality, his belief in nature’s correspondence with the human soul, and his sense that anticipation—of spring, of flowers yet to bloom—renews our connection with the earth and with immortality.  Thoreau’s Wildflowers features more than 200 of the black-and-white drawings originally created by Barry Moser for his first illustrated book, Flowering Plants of Massachusetts. This volume also presents “Thoreau as Botanist,” an essay by Ray Angelo, the leading authority on the flowering plants of Concord.

This trade edition of "Moby-Dick" is a reduced version of the Arion Press "Moby-Dick", which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan". The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of "Moby-Dick" used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.

This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.

The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau's manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau's life and achievement in their full nineteenth century context.

The California edition of the Pennyroyal Press, "Frankenstein" unites the dark side of Barry Moser's art with the classic 1818 text of Mary Shelley's tale of moral transfiguration. In a vivid sequence of woodcuts, the reader witnesses the birth of the 'monster' as Moser shapes him from darkness and gives him a form simultaneously ghastly in its malice and transfixing in its suffering.

The University of California Press is delighted to announce the new publication of this three-act play by one of America's most important and well-loved writers. A highly entertaining comedy that has never appeared in print or on stage, "Is He Dead?" is finally available to the wide audience Mark Twain wished it to reach. Written in 1898 in Vienna as Twain emerged from one of the deepest depressions of his life, the play shows its author's superb gift for humor operating at its most energetic. The text of "Is He Dead?", based on the manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers, appears here together with an illuminating essay by renowned Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin and with Barry Moser's original woodcut illustrations in a volume that will surely become a treasured addition to the Mark Twain legacy. Richly intermingling elements of burlesque, farce, and social satire with a wry look at the world market in art, "Is He Dead?" centers on a group of poor artists in Barbizon, France, who stage the death of a friend to drive up the price of his paintings.In order to make this scheme succeed, the artists hatch some hilarious plots involving cross-dressing, a full-scale fake funeral, lovers' deceptions, and much more. Mark Twain was fascinated by the theater and made many attempts at playwriting, but this play is certainly his best. "Is He Dead?" may have been too 'out there' for the Victorian 1890s, but today's readers will thoroughly enjoy Mark Twain's well-crafted dialog, intriguing cast of characters, and above all, his characteristic ebullience and humor. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin's estimation, it is 'a champagne cocktail of a play - not too dry, not too sweet, with just the right amount of bubbles and buzz'.

This deluxe edition of Virgil's epic poems, recounting the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions after the fall of Troy, contains an introduction by Allen Mandelbaum and fourteen powerful renderings created by Barry Moser to illustrate this volume.

Longtime admirers of Mark Twain are aware of how integral animals were to his work as a writer, from his first stories through his final years, including many pieces that were left unpublished at his death. This beautiful volume, illustrated with 30 new images by master engraver Barry Moser, gathers writings from the full span of Mark Twain's career and elucidates his special attachment to and regard for animals. What may surprise even longtime readers and fans is that Twain was an early and ardent animal welfare advocate, the most prominent American of his day to take up that cause. Edited and selected by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who has also supplied an introduction and afterword, Mark Twain's Book of Animals includes stories that are familiar along with those that are appearing in print for the first time.

Unique among his works, Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1893) was written originally in French. Joseph Donohue’s new translation of the horrific New Testament story has recast Wilde’s shockingly radical drama in the natural idiomatic language of our own day. Presenting a colloquial and spare American English version of Wilde’s consciously stylised French, Donohue’s approach gives full value to the Irish author’s dark ruminations on evil and perversity in a world on the brink of a new, unsettling Christian dispensation.The play was first translated into English in 1894 by Wilde’s young friend Lord Alfred Douglas, but Wilde was far from pleased with the outcome. And yet Douglas’s stilted, inaccurate version has somehow retained a long-standing place on the stage and in the study. Donohue’s lucid vernacular transformation of Douglas’s safe, thee-and-thou faux-biblical language has the quality of a startling modern-dress remounting of an overly familiar classic play. This new Salomé is calculated to bring both readers and playgoers into close, disturbing confrontation with one of the most erotic and bloodiest sequences of testamentary lore. Brilliantly complementing Donohue’s unprecedented approach is a set of engravings by a master illustrator of our time. Barry Moser is an artist who speaks the blunt yet fluent language of present-day communication through the penetrating gestural vocabulary of the graphic arts. The resulting combination of words and images directly engages with Wilde’s characters and their story, setting a bold new standard for the melding of literary and pictorial excellence. At the same time, it leads readers and audiences alike to rediscover perennially significant themes—of love, death, power, and individuality.

First published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is regarded as Jack London's masterpiece. Based on London's experiences as a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness and his ideas about nature and the struggle for existence, The Call of the Wild is a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike.

Skilley, an alley cat with an embarrassing secret, longs to escape his hard life dodging fishwives' brooms and carriage wheels and trade his damp alley for the warmth of the Cheshire Cheese Inn. When he learns that the innkeeper is looking for a new mouser, Skilley comes up with an audacious scheme to install himself in the famous tavern. Once established in the inn, Skilley strikes a bargain with Pip, the intelligent mouse-resident, and his fellow mice. Skilley protects the mice and the mice in turn give to Skilley the delectable Cheshire cheese of the inn. Thus begins a most unlikely alliance and friendship. The cat and mouse design a plan to restore Maldwyn wounded raven and faithful guard in the service of Queen Victoria to his rightful place in The Tower, but first they must contend with a tyrannical cook, a mouse-despising barmaid, and an evil tomcat named Pinch. Will the famous author suffering from serious writer's block who visits the Cheshire Cheese pub each day be able to help?

In The King, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, Donald Barthelme moves the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table to the cruelty of the Second World War. Dunkirk has fallen, Europe is at the breaking point, Ezra Pound and Lord Haw-Haw are poisoning the radio waves, Mordred has fled to Nazi Germany, and King Arthur and his worshipful Knights are deep in the fighting. When the Holy Grail presents itself--which is, in this version, the atomic bomb, "a superweapon if you will, with which we can chastise and thwart the enemy"--they must decide whether to hew to their knightly ways or adopt a modern ruthlessness. Barthelme makes brilliant comic use of anachronism to show that war is center stage in the theater of human absurdity and cruelty. But Arthur, in deciding to decline the power of the Grail, announces his unwillingness to go along: "It's not the way we wage war. The essence of our calling is right behavior, and this false Grail is not a knightly weapon."

Striking in its appeal to the senses, the Song of Songs-the Bible's only book of love poems-is remarkable for its lack of sexual stereotyping and its expression of mutuality in relationships between men and women. Marcia Falk's rich and lyrical translation, praised by poets and scholars alike, is paired here with the original Hebrew text.

The six stories in Outside showcase Barry Lopez's majestic talent as a fiction writer. Lopez writes in spare prose, but his narratives resonate with an uncanny power. With a reverence for our exterior and interior landscapes, these stories offer profound insight into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity and beauty, and, ultimately, life and death. Again and again, whether describing a Navajo rug possessing the essence of its maker, a boy who can change places with his half-coyote dog (named Leaves), or a teacher whose presence brings into question the meaning of friendship, Lopez portrays elemental and sacred places. His prose transcends its simplicity to enter spaces of wonder and mystery. As James Perrin Warren says in his compelling introduction, "Lopez's narrators bear witness to extraordinary patterns and purposes ...The storyteller is vital to the community and to a healthy landscape, but the vital relationship is also reciprocal...We participate, along with Lopez, in the long history of storytelling. We become part of the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself."

The six stories in Outside showcase Barry Lopez’s majestic talent as a fiction writer. Lopez writes in spare prose, but his narratives resonate with an uncanny power. With a reverence for our exterior and interior landscapes, these stories offer profound insight into the relationships between humans and animals, creativity and beauty, and, ultimately, life and death. Again and again, whether describing a Navajo rug possessing the essence of its maker, a boy who can change places with his half-coyote dog (named Leaves), or a teacher whose presence brings into question the meaning of friendship, Lopez portrays elemental and sacred places. His prose transcends its simplicity to enter spaces of wonder and mystery. As James Perrin Warren says in his compelling introduction, “Lopez’s narrators bear witness to extraordinary patterns and purposes . . . The storyteller is vital to the community and to a healthy landscape, but the vital relationship is also reciprocal. . . . We participate, along with Lopez, in the long history of storytelling. We become part of the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.”

Discover how this transitional season can reveal both the abundance and the limitations of our everyday lives.Autumn, with all its traditional images of colorful trees, frost-covered pumpkins, and piles of wood stored up against winter's cold, can be a season filled with anticipation. The harvest, the imminent onset of cold and snow, the resumption of old routines, and the beginning of the school year all require preparation and planning. If summer has been something of a pause, autumn helps us to see the passage of time more clearly.Autumn is a season of fruition and reaping, of thanksgiving and celebration of abundance and goodness of the earth. But it is also a season that starkly and realistically encourages us to see our own limitations.Warm and stirring pieces by E. B. White, Anne Lamott, P. D. James, Julian of Norwich, May Sarton, Kimiko Hahn, and many others in this beautiful book rejoice in autumn as a time of preparation and reflection, when the results of hard labor are ripe for harvest.

Explore how the dormancy and difficulty of winter can be a time of spiritual preparation and transformation.For many, winter is a time of postponed activity―and of shoveling snow, navigating ice, and trying to keep warm. What can easily be forgotten in winter’s cold and occasional dreariness is that it can also be a time of shoring up, of purity, praise, delight, and play.In thirty stirring pieces―from translated Sanskrit and Hebrew poems to Henry David Thoreau and Basho, Jane Kenyon, John Updike, Kathleen Norris, and Annie Dillard―we share in the recognition of winter’s hardships and celebrate the glory of winter as a spiritual gift―a quiet time in the rhythm of life, a time of thoughtfulness, of looking forward, and of unexpected hope.Examining our retreat and hibernation from the world, and our ultimate breaking free from icy paralysis, these inspiring selections help us express and understand our own personal reaction to wintertime. They show us the way from the cold of this season to the warmth of the human soul.

Explore how the dormancy and difficulty of winter can be a time of spiritual preparation and transformation.For many, winter is a time of postponed activity―and of shoveling snow, navigating ice, and trying to keep warm. What can easily be forgotten in winter’s cold and occasional dreariness is that it can also be a time of shoring up, of purity, praise, delight, and play.In thirty stirring pieces―from translated Sanskrit and Hebrew poems to Henry David Thoreau and Basho, Jane Kenyon, John Updike, Kathleen Norris, and Annie Dillard―we share in the recognition of winter’s hardships and celebrate the glory of winter as a spiritual gift―a quiet time in the rhythm of life, a time of thoughtfulness, of looking forward, and of unexpected hope.Examining our retreat and hibernation from the world, and our ultimate breaking free from icy paralysis, these inspiring selections help us express and understand our own personal reaction to wintertime. They show us the way from the cold of this season to the warmth of the human soul.

Discover how this transitional season can reveal both the abundance and the limitations of our everyday lives.Autumn, with all its traditional images of colorful trees, frost-covered pumpkins, and piles of wood stored up against winter's cold, can be a season filled with anticipation. The harvest, the imminent onset of cold and snow, the resumption of old routines, and the beginning of the school year all require preparation and planning. If summer has been something of a pause, autumn helps us to see the passage of time more clearly.Autumn is a season of fruition and reaping, of thanksgiving and celebration of abundance and goodness of the earth. But it is also a season that starkly and realistically encourages us to see our own limitations.Warm and stirring pieces by E. B. White, Anne Lamott, P. D. James, Julian of Norwich, May Sarton, Kimiko Hahn, and many others in this beautiful book rejoice in autumn as a time of preparation and reflection, when the results of hard labor are ripe for harvest.

Explore the gentle unfurling of spring and reflect on how nature celebrates birth and renewal—in this collection of reflections by our greatest writers.As winter's austere power begins to fade, we notice the first signs of vigor and life returning to the world: delicate crocuses pushing through the damp earth; frogs croaking in the barely thawed ponds; the year's first warm breeze on our faces.These first sure signs of spring bolster our spirits and remind us of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, and also—more poignantly—of the steady march of time and our own advancing years. With each successive spring, it seems, we cherish the promise of renewed life more and more.These thoughtfully chosen writings, poems and meditations—from Robert Frost, Lisa Couturier, William Blake and Lady Sarashina to the eighth-century Chinese poet Tu Fu and many others—both celebrate spring's re-emergence of life and evoke the season's delicate balance of growth and decay, youth and maturity, innocence and experience.