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beautifully illustrated by Hockney, with contributions from many of contemporary literature's most highly-regarded writers |
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"The world's Alphabets- Alpha to Omega- are drums and trumpets, clarion calls, State Funerals, Massed Choirs, Burial and Resurrection. For Paul Theroux 'D' evokes Death, and nothing but Death. His mind is transfixed by this one meaning... But Joyce Carol Oates, for whom 'B' signifies Birth, makes the pre-natal as terrifying and mysterious as the post-mortem. While Julian Barnes produces 'U' as meaning 'Unless', a kind of ghost threatening life beyond some threshold ever accompanying us, the most sinister word in the language, perhaps because it shadows us through all our lives, even more terrifying than Birth and Death..." |
| HOCKNEY, David; SPENDER, Stephen. Hockney's Alphabet.
Drawings by David Hockney & Written contributions edited by Stephen
Spender. London: Faber and Faber for the Aids Crisis Trust, (1991).
Folio, original yellow cloth, original slipcase. $500. First edition, signed by David Hockney and Stephen Spender (also issued in a rare limited edition signed by most of the contributors). Musings inspired by letters of the alphabet from 27 well-known writers including: Douglas Adams, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess, Margaret Drabble, T.S. Eliot, Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Erica Jong, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Ian McEwan, Arthur Miller, Iris Murdoch, Nigel Nicolson, John Julius Norwich, Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Pritchett, Craig Raine, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux, John Updike, and Gore Vidal. Each letter is accompanied by a full-page illustration by David Hockney. Published in 1991 to raise money for people living with AIDS. Fine condition.
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