BIOGRAPHY OF A FLOWER [cover title]. VERSES "THE GOSPEL OF TRUTH" : A VALENTINIAN MEDITATION 2nd CEN. GNOSTIC : WOODCUTS : DOROTHEA BAER : 20th CEN. MYSTIC by Valentinus; Dorothy Baer [Tyler] (ill.) - 1963

New York: Uranian Press, 1963. First Edition. Softcover. Fine. Baer, Dorothy [Tyler]. [20] pp., including 8 in-text woodcut illustrations. Original pictorial wrappers, printed in red on black paper, tied with red string. Text printed in black and red. Fine.

Verses from the "Gospel of Truth" manuscript discovered in the Nag Hammadi library and attributed to the 2nd-century Gnostic Valentinus, here illustrated in eight woodcuts by Dorothea Baer (1926-2012), artist and co-founder of the Uranian Press. The verses and illustrations - the latter largely through the imagery of the life cycle of a flower - both touch on themes of coming into being, material reality, divine revelation, and spiritual knowledge. Dorothea Baer (1926-2012) cofounded the Uranian Press in 1958 with her husband, Richard Oviet Tyler (1926-1983) shortly after the two moved to New York City from Chicago, where both had attended the School of the Art Institute. By 1960, they had installed four printing presses in the basement of a Lower East Side tenement. Under the Uranian imprint, the Tyler and their friends produced chapbooks, broadsides, and artist's books through the mid-1960s. Later, they would produce photcopied flyers and zines as the Uranian Tract Society and Uranian Phalanstery. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Tyler was a fixture in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s, selling the Press's wares from a pushcart in the yard of Judson Memorial Church, a nod to both contemporary Jewish peddlers of the Lower East Side and the chapmen of Elizabethan England. He played an important, if still underappreciated, role in the nascent expanded arts movements of the New York avant garde scene with both the Press and its performance arm, the Uranian Alchemical Players. The Uranian circle expanded into a quasi-religious collective incorporating Jungian and Gnostic ideas of creativity and consciousness, LSD, Western astrology, alchemy, Tibetan Buddhism, and the political thought of Charles Fourier, becoming known officially in 1974 as the Uranian Phalanstery. After the death of Richard in 1983, Baer maintained the Phalanstery until her own death in 2012; it survives today under the care of her protégé, Mehdi Matin.