Damocle Edizioni – Miss Read

Damocle Edizioni

Damocle Edizioni is an independent publishing house making artist's books printed with letterpress and accompanied by graphic works made by international artists and writers (Ai Weiwei, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jorge Luis Borges).
Treadmill Aluminium + Inverted
Ai Weiwei, Treadmill Aluminium + Inverted, Damocle Edizioni, 2022 © Ai Weiwei

Limited edition print on a glossy aluminium, 1mm thick, numbered and hand-signed by Ai Weiwei. In 2022 Ai Weiwei started a campaign #RunForOurRights #treadmill by making a video of himself running on the treadmill and encouraging everyone to upload their videos with the hashtags in defense of freedom of press and human rights.

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Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Eugene Brooks, July 15, 1957
Allen Ginsberg, Letter from Allen Ginsberg to Eugene Brooks, July 15, 1957, Damocle Edizioni, 2021 © Allen Ginsberg

Artist's book limited edition of 99, with three unreleased photographs.

In 1957, when he was thirty years old, Ginsberg made his first visit to Europe. When he left home he was an unknown poet, having published only a handful of poems in obscure little magazines. When he returned a year later, he was world famous as the author of the collection of poems “Howl And Other Poems”. After stopping in Morocco to visit with his old friend, William S. Burroughs, Allen and Peter Orlovsky continued on to Spain, France, and finally Italy where they settled down to stay with Alan Ansen for a few months. They had met Ansen in New York City a decade earlier when he was working as W.H. Auden’s secretary. Ansen himself had just been in Tangier with Jack Kerouac helping Burroughs put together the manuscript for Naked Lunch. Ginsberg and Orlovsky stayed with Ansen at his apartment in Venice for much of the summer and it was during this period that Allen wrote many letters including this one to his brother, Eugene Brooks, back in New York.

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Pomes Penyeach
James Joyce, Pomes Penyeach, Damocle Edizioni, 2024 © James Joyce

Each book is bound in singer stitch, English-Italian facing text.





Pomes are poems but also apples, pommes, and there are twelve of them, plus one in tribute, tilly. Penyeach, a penny each: the collection was actually offered for sale for twelve francs in the first Paris edition that appeared for Shakespeare and Company in 1927, and later for a shilling-twelve pence-in the first London edition. But pen-also encompasses pain/peine/pena. Each of the poems in fact appears linked to a memory or projection of something lately painful or at least poignant.

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