Description

This is the second edition, after the 1976 edition, and includes previously unpublished illustrations in full colour.

One of 101 copies with an original signed colour engraving by Dado, the only large paper edition. (The engraving attached to the large papers was never produced by Dado, and the large papers were sold without the etching).

"Each of the one hundred and seventy-six texts in this collection is an onzain, a poem of eleven lines, each line of which has eleven letters. Each line uses the same series of different letters, something like a scale, the permutations of which will produce the poem according to a principle similar to that of serial music: a letter cannot be repeated until the series has been exhausted. All the poems share the ten most common letters of the French alphabet: E, S, A, R, T, I, N, U, L, O. The eleventh letter is one of the sixteen remaining letters: B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, M, P, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z. There are eleven poems in B, eleven poems in C, etc. ... making a total of eleven complete alphabets, i.e. 16 x 11 = one hundred and seventy-six poems."