Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) continued ...
John Cage’s contribution to S.M.S. No. 4 is one of the most characteristic printed works from his broad practice between music, language, and conceptual art. It was published in 1968 by The Letter Edged in Black Press in New York, within William N. Copley’s experimental portfolio-magazine S.M.S., whose fourth issue appeared in August 1968. Cage’s piece takes the form of a small artist’s booklet with a transparent cover, printed in color and conceived as a self-contained multiple within a larger ensemble. As so often with Cage, form is not merely the vehicle of the text but part of the thought itself: fragmentation, typographic spacing, and sequence turn reading into an experience. Within the context of S.M.S., the work stands beside contributions by Roy Lichtenstein, On Kawara, and Robert Watts, underscoring its place in the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the late 1960s. For collectors, it is at once a Cage item, an artist’s book, and a document of New York multiple culture. Small in format, it is large in intellectual reach.
Quantity
Cage, John
Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) continued 1968
1968 | New York | The Letter Edged in Black Press
Small Cage, large reach: a key work from S.M.S. No. 4 and the multiple culture of 1968.
John Cage’s contribution to S.M.S. No. 4 is one of the most characteristic printed works from his broad practice between music, language, and conceptual art. It was published in 1968 by The Letter Edged in Black Press in New York, within William N. Copley’s experimental portfolio-magazine S.M.S., whose fourth issue appeared in August 1968. Cage’s piece takes the form of a small artist’s booklet with a transparent cover, printed in color and conceived as a self-contained multiple within a larger ensemble. As so often with Cage, form is not merely the vehicle of the text but part of the thought itself: fragmentation, typographic spacing, and sequence turn reading into an experience. Within the context of S.M.S., the work stands beside contributions by Roy Lichtenstein, On Kawara, and Robert Watts, underscoring its place in the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the late 1960s. For collectors, it is at once a Cage item, an artist’s book, and a document of New York multiple culture. Small in format, it is large in intellectual reach.
€580
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-8 (Octavo) approx. 20 × 26 cm
Edition Particulars
Contribution from S.M.S. No. 4, issued as a self-contained booklet with transparent cover.
Inscription
No inscription
Product DETAIL
This publication continues Cage’s ongoing Diary sequence, a gathering of brief notes, observations, paradoxes, and aphoristic statements drawn from daily life, travel, politics, art, and thought. There is no linear narrative and no fixed cast of characters; at the centre stands a thinking voice registering the world in discontinuous, deliberately open fragments. The text moves from practical statements to philosophical remarks, from humor to social irritation, and from personal experience to broader cultural reflection. That succession without a classical plot is precisely the core of the work. The reader moves through a series of verbal events that can be light, sharp, and disorienting at once. In this form, the diary becomes not intimate confession but a field of attention and consciousness. The tone is experimental, dryly witty, and deliberately anti-rhetorical.
Eugène Ionesco
Antidotes
*Antidotes* brings together Eugène Ionesco’s polemical, autobiographical and literary reflections spanning more than fifteen years and provides an important key to the thought underlying his theatre. Most of the texts had first appeared in periodicals between 1961 and 1976 before being collected here in book form. Ionesco attacks ideological rigidity, political orthodoxies and collective conformity, while equally resisting attempts to reduce the human condition to purely social explanations. Art, culture, freedom and the metaphysical uncertainty of existence recur throughout the volume. His characteristic distrust of slogans and fossilised language assumes an explicitly polemical form in these essays. Gallimard’s collective first edition also includes an exceptionally restricted deluxe issue of only 25 copies on Arches Arjomari-Prioux wove paper, the sole large-paper issue. This copy is number 8 and is preserved in very good condition, making it a particularly desirable example of the edition.
Book
€250
Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges
Ariane
A remarkable copy of *Ariane*, published in the *Les Cahiers Nouveaux* series, inscribed with a poetic and enigmatic message by Ribemont-Dessaignes to Jacques Matarasso. This deluxe Japan paper edition was elegantly rebound in 1994 by Georges Leroux, in a restrained style that echoes the work’s Dadaist spirit.
Book
€1,100
Gracq, Julien
Au château d'Argol
Julien Gracq’s debut novel, issued by José Corti, sets a gothic castle on the Breton coast as the stage for a charged, almost dream-logic encounter between three figures. The prose is musical and image-rich, favouring symbolic landscapes and metaphysical weather. Born near Surrealism yet distinctly independent, the book establishes Gracq’s lucid enchantment from the start. For bibliophiles this is a key title: an early Corti publication, scarce in appealing condition, and the opening note of a major twentieth-century voice. Its limited print-run and initially slow reception add to the sense of discovery. This copy is on publisher’s stock.
Book
€610
Dominique Fourcade, Pierre Buraglio · Buraglio, Pierre
Au travail ma chérie
First volume in the Préférence series: a focused encounter between Dominique Fourcade and Pierre Buraglio. The Imprimerie nationale produced an exemplary typographic edition on Rives wove, limited to 100 copies signed by both. Buraglio “illuminates” the book with spare, hand-made interventions—strokes, contours, accents—that let the page breathe. The plain wrappers in a sturdy case stress the workshop feel. This copy bears a presentation to Jacques Dauchez, adding a vivid bibliophilic provenance. A scarce, exact book where typography, gesture, and poetry hold each other in balance.