Richard Wagener.
San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2013

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

—John Muir

John Muir reminds us that a life lived without great rocky outcrops and ageless trees as a part of one’s native landscape would be a life deprived of one of the greatest resources of the sublime.… In the Sierra Nevada there live trees as old as Sumerian phonographic script and Egypt’s Bronze Age Middle Kingdom—there for you to lean against and smell … alive … sap oozing from the cores of the oldest living friends we have. Richard Wagener’s engravings capture an essential quality of that friendship—nearness and an austere clarity.

—from the Introduction by Peter Koch

The 31 blocks, including two panorama fold-out prints, in this special edition were hand-engraved on end-grain boxwood and relief-printed by Richard Wagener. The majority were produced between 2010 and 2013. The present work is a companion volume to California in Relief, published by the Book Club in 2009 to wide acclaim, and continues a legacy of ingenuity and beauty.

The Sierra Nevada Suite was designed and produced in an edition of three hundred and eight numbered copies by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken for The Book Club of California. Ten artist’s proofs designated A/P and ten printer’s proofs designated P/P are reserved. The typeface, Dante, designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, was originally hand-cut by Charles Malin and adapted for mechanical composition by Monotype in 1957. The text was cast at the letter foundry of Michael & Winifred Bixler and printed by Max Koch on Zerkall Büttenpapier. John DeMerritt Bookbinding bound and created slipcases for the book, which measures 7¾" x 12½". The Sierra Nevada Suite is Book Club of California publication 231.

Book;    7.75 x 12.5 inches    308 copies.       $2500.00