URANIAN PRESS CATALOGUE No. ONE 1960

New York: Hand set & printed by Michael Martin & Conrad Skalba at Uranian Press, 1960. First Edition. Softcover. Very good. Tyler, Richard. 1959-1960. Bifolium, 12 inches. [4] pp., with 4 inserted leaves (2 broadsides, and 2 leaves, printed recto and verso, of contemporary xerographic reproductions of three articles from LIFE magazine and THE VILLAGE VOICE), as issued. Printed in black on brown paper, illustration on first page, logo on last. Wrinkled, especially at upper and lower edges, inserts worn and light chipped at outer edges. Very good.

The brief first and only known catalogue of the Uranian Press, printed two years after its founding by the visionary artist Richard Oviet Tyler in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side. Under the Uranian imprint, Tyler, his wife, Dorothea Baer, and friends and apprentices produced chapbooks, broadsides, and artist's books through the mid-1960s; later, they would produce photocopied flyers and zines as the Uranian Tract Society and Uranian Phalanstery.

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.

The 1960 catalogue shows five categories of goods for sale printed at the Uranian Press: artist's books, broadside portfolios, posters, a magazine, and greeting cards. The first, "Fine Art Editions," begins with Tyler's major illustrated work of "[o]riginal astrological interpretations," THE PLANETS (1958), listed in bound book form ($100, in an edition of 5) and portfolio form ($75, in an edition of 20). The catalogue's cover image is taken from a plate from the "Uranus" portion of this work. Second is the portfolio, THE LIFE OF DEATH OF CHICKENMAN, "[b]eing an account in Twenty-One Plates of the time & trauma of everyman." The third and final artist's book listed is THE ADVENTURES OF TOM GRAY, "[w]ritten, drawn, cut & printed by Ronald Short apprentice, age nine. A classic cowboy story in eighteen plates." The latter was the subject of a March 9, 1960 article in LIFE magazine, "Boy Printer and His Book," and mentioned in articles in THE VILLAGE VOICE in 1959 and 1960, all of which are repreduced in contemporary xerographs here.

In addition to the newspaper, two broadsides printed at the Uranian Press were issued with the catalogue. The first bears the caption title, "Elizabethan Ballads," and a 1959 Uranian Press imprint above a rubber stamp of the press's seal. It refers to the "Blackletter Broadside Ballad of the 16th & 17th cen." and the "Chapbook of the 18th cen." that inspired most of the works printed and sold by the Uranian Press and advertises several items being sold from the pushcart at the Judson Church Yard.

The second broadside, GREETINGS FROM ... URANIAN PRESS N.Y.C., features a halftone print of a photograph of the Uranian Press staff outside the Lower East Side tenement that housed its basement studio. The Tylers are shown with Kenneth Shepherd and Ralph Mucklefoot (i.e. Victor Lorenz Kaplan) and two young apprentices, Michael Martin and Conrad Skalba. Apprentice Ronald Short is listed in absentia, and a copy of ADVENTURES OF TOM GRAY is presented in his place.

The catalog and its supplementary materials create a small archive containing invaluable historical and bibliographical information on one of the most daring and original of New York's small presses. OCLC records two insitutional holdings: at the Harry Ransom Center and University College Dublin. Two copies exist at the Ransom Center in the Edward G. Fletcher collection, both of which contain identical inserts to those of the present copy.