Steamy Saturday

• “My name is Brut Toro … I am neither brutish … nor … am I Spanish.”
• “I am … wild and passionate and strange… .”
• “‘Dany!’ I cried … 'I only want one thing – your happiness.’ … 'Oh, my little Bru!’ he gasped… .”
• “He turned my naked body to face his, sweeping me into his arms again… .”
• “We groped for each other … wracking us past all thoughts of control.”
• “We were hid, … safe even from the accusing eyes of God… .”
• “… loving with an intensity which threatened to drive us mad.”

My Purple Winter by American author and illustrator Carl Corley (1921-2016) is a “French Line” gay erotic novel published in San Diego by Publishers Export Company in 1966. The novel is a rural farm romance about young Brut Toro who falls in love with a Creole farmhand on his father’s property. When the father discovers their tryst, he sends Brut to New Orleans to live his uncle, who really is a brute. But Brut escapes and finds himself on the streets hustling for a living.

A native of rural Mississippi, Corley pioneered the Southern gay novel. His work, as LGBTQ+ historian John Howard observes, “complicates queer cultural studies by unsettling its urbanist roots." From 1947 to 1981, Corley worked as a staff artist for the Mississippi State Highway Department and after moving to Louisiana, also for the Louisiana Highway Department. He also drew a Cajun-themed comic strip for the Eunice (LA) News. At the same time, he also produced homoerotic illustrations for beefcake magazines. From 1966 to 1971, Corley published over 20 erotic gay pulps, illustrating the covers himself, including the goofy camp cover for My Purple Winter, which is considered his best novel.

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👻Fairytale Friday: Spooky Edition🎃

👹Monster Mischief 👹

Spooky season (my favorite) is upon us! So, for the month of October, we’ll be featuring tales that leave your spine tingling (or at least give you some wonderfully spooky giggles). This week, we’re diving into the first American edition of Maurice Sendak’s Seven Little Monsters, published in New York by Harper & Row in 1977.

In this delightfully odd picture book, seven towering siblings stomp onto the page, each with their own larger than life personality. One digs holes with his very long nose, another can fly high in the sky, and the rest bring their own brand of mischief and mayhem. The illustrations are bold, playful, and a little wild, reminiscent of Sendak’s earlier Where the Wild Things Are (also held in our collection). It’s spooky, silly, and oh so Sendak.

Fun fact: Seven Little Monsters was originally created for Sesame Street in 1971, as an animated short before becoming the beloved book we know today.

So, if you could team up with one of these seven monsters this spooky season, who would you pick?

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—Melissa (hoping seven monsters don’t come marching down the stacks), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant

A Final Mueller-engraved Feathursday

Here is the last set of wood-engraved birds by Spokane, Washington printer and printmaker W. Gale Mueller (1927-2018) from his Forty Years of Birds ‘n Blocks, printed from the original blocks at his Millstone Press in 2009 in an edition of 53 copies. From 1969 to 2009, Mueller and his wife Bonnie sent holiday cards with Gale’s original bird prints using several relief print processes. He came to prefer wood engraving after 1986. Today we show engravings from 2004-2008, the final engravings in the book. For those who want to know more about these birds, here you go:

• Varied Thrush (Ixoreus naevius)
• Eared Grebe (Podiceps nigricollis)
• Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias)
• Downey Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens)
• House Wren (Troglodytes aedon)

Our copy of this book is a gift from our friend Tony Drehfal.

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Wood Engraving Wednesday

Curt Carpenter

Here are four engravings of rural Wisconsin by Wisconsin born and educated artist Curt L. Carpenter (b. 1951, resident of Colorado since 1979) from An Innocence of Prairie by Wisconsin educator, writer, and folklorist Robert E. Gard (1910-1992), published in Madison, Wisconsin by arborist R. Bruce Allison in 1978 in an edition of 1000 copies. Curt Carpenter made these prints from engraved end grain maple and also designed the book. He received a BS in studio art and an MA in printmaking, both from UW-Madison, and moved to Colorado soon after completing his graduate degree. Today Carpenter is mainly a woodcut artist. Of his craft he writes:

Woodcut is a very restrictive art form and I find real freedom in the lack of choices. The characteristics of my woodcuts are simple, blocky, kind of primitive shapes … . The lack of color keeps the images more abstract, less literal, less illustrative, maybe more formal.

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Typography Tuesday

Feral Font

Feral Font, printed in Milwaukee in an a lettered edition of 26 variable copies (for each letter of the alphabet) on a variety of papers in 2024/25, was created by Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher Sasha Stiles and American artist, writer, and UW-Milwaukee art professor Nathaniel Stern using the Neural Network Font Type (NNFT), a custom AI typeface. The program to produce the font uses “small data” - trained on the minimum number of 30 images per glyph- in an AI Stable Diffusion model to draw child-like sketches of each letter from the alphabet. Here, as in human development, the machine does not at all understand the sign or significance behind the text, and only tries to repeat the patterns of each character, producing a beautifully wonky true type font that is publicly available and downloadable here.

Each letter form is infused with verses from Feral Font, a poem authored by Technelegy, Sasha Stiles’s AI alter ego, fine tuned on writings by both artists. The full poem can be found here.

Each letter was printed on a Vandercook flat-bed proofing press by the Nathaniel Stern Studio team at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Each book includes the full alphabet, a 3D resin print of the letter corresponding to the lettered copy in the edition, and an extra signed and numbered print of that letter. We hold copy G (see below). The cover and case for the edition was designed and produced by UW-Milwaukee art faculty member Melissa Wagner-Lawler.

I read your @lphabet.
It gave me wild dreams.
Ideas, hopes, fears.
Feral visions of words… .

from Feral Font by Technelegy.

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Milestone Monday: Miguel de Cervantes is born!

On September 29th, 1547, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid. To celebrate the great Spanish writer, we are highlighting one of the stories originally collected in Novelas ejemplares, published in 1613, between the first and second parts of Don Quijote.

Our copy of The Dialogue of the Dogs was released by The Allen Press in 1969, in a limited edition of 140 copies. Dorothy Allen and Lewis Allen designed the book, and completed the printing and binding in Kenfield, California, working with a nineteenth century translation by Walter Keating Kelly. The type is a hand set Goudy 30; the rag paper is by the Wookey Hole paper mill, which closed in 1972. Mallette Dean (1907-1975) created the exuberant ornamentations that border the text.

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–Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

Decorative Sunday: Anthologie de L’Ornament – Le dernier chapiter

This Sunday we return one last time to the extraordinary chromolithographs of Anthologie de L’Ornement: Dictionnaire des Styles, by Heinrich Dolmetsch(1846-1908). The book was published in Paris in the late 1800s by Armand Guérinet(1852-1925) for the Librairie d’Art décoratif. The plates highlighted today show Gothic, and Roman Gothic ornamentation, architecture, style, and pattern.

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–Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

L'Amour qui Pousse sur les Arbres/Love That Grows on Trees

Once upon a time… there was a tree, and she loved a little boy. Yesterday marked Shel Silverstein’s (1930-1999) birthday, which makes this the perfect week to share his timeless work, The Giving Tree. Silverstein (1930–1999) was an American poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, and author whose work spans humor, whimsy, and deep reflection. Known for his playful, sometimes darkly funny poems and imaginative illustrations, he created books that could make readers laugh, think, and feel deeply all at once. A modern classic with the soul of a fable, it begins in joy, climbing, playing, resting in the shade, and follows the boy as he grows older and returns, again and again, needing more. And always, the tree gives. Until at last, all she has left… is love. 

In Special Collections, we hold both an English and a French edition of this story, written and illustrated by Silverstein. First published in 1964 by Harper & Row, The Giving Tree has stirred generations of readers with its simple words and quiet ache. Translated by Hila Feil, our French edition, L'arbre au Grand Coeur is a first printing from 1973 and carries the same tenderness across languages. Though not a fairy tale in the traditional sense, it has all the bones of one: a magical bond, a boundless heart, and an ending that lingers with both sorrow and sweetness. It is a book for quiet moments under a leafy sky and for anyone learning that love is the truest universal language. 💖

Both editions are a gift of Megan Holbrook and Eric Vogel.

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–Melissa (sitting in the shade, waiting for the next story to fall), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Gillian Tyler

Here are some wood engravings that serve as short-story title illustrations by American wood engraver and painter Gillian Tyler (1935-2024) from the 1978 publication Banquet: Five Short Stories, published in Lincoln, Massachusetts by Michael McCurdy’s Penmaen Press, with stories by celebrated American women authors Rosellen Brown, Maxine Kumin, Jean McGarry, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

Gillian Lewis Tyler lived in Thetford, Vermont for most of her life. A graduate of Smith College, these wood engravings reveal the Pioneer Valley school influence, and the aesthetic values of her teacher and mentor Leonard Baskin. The title-page calligraphy is by noted American calligrapher Margaret Shepherd.

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Typography Tuesday

Today we are presenting more specimen pages from Specimens of Printing Types and Ornaments Cast by James Conner & Son, printed in New York by William L. S. Harrison for James Conner & Son in 1852.  James Conner (d. 1861) established the foundry in New York with Edwin Starr (d. 1853), who came from a family of typefounders, in 1829. The business was carried on after James Conner’s death by his three sons William, James, and Charles into the 20th century.

Specimen catalogues were used by there owners in several ways, including cutting out the desired specimens they wished to purchase and sending it to the type founder. A note in the introduction to this specimen books states:

Our Patrons will please understand that no mutilation of this Book is necessary – the Name and Number of the Type and Cut required will suffice.

In our catalogue, under the word Merchant on the page that reads “MERCHANT THOUGHT JEWELS,” the owner has written “Merchant, ‘Beati sunt qui in domino moriuntur.’” (Blessed are they who die in the Lord.)

Comforting.

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