| Transmigration
Nan McDonald & Jan Brown
Printed 2007, released 2008
&Duck Selected 1
Transmigration
is the first volume in the Ampersand Duck fine press series, Selected.
Author:
Nan McDonald. Artist: Jan Brown.
Design and production: Caren Florance.
Handset letterpress in Bodoni and relief prints on 280gsm Arches BFK
grey paper, in a cased binding of ochre Buckram and relief-printed navy
Wibalin and a dustjacket of acid-free acetate. 40pp. 240 x 163mm. Edition
of 90.
Aus$250.00
ea
Postage and handling $10 in Australia. Please contact me for international
postage rates.
STATUS:
Now available
Orders
can be made by writing to me or emailing me (addresses
here). You can send me money or let me know what you want and I
can send you an invoice via Paypal,
which means you can pay by bank deposit or credit card over the internet.
Hooray!
Ampersand
Duck publications may soon be bought from certain retail outlets (I'll
let you know when this happens). However they will always be cheaper
if you buy them from the maker.
About
the contributors
Nan
McDonald
Born
in 1921, Nan McDonald also began her career writing poetry at Hornsby
Girls' High School where she contributed poems to the school magazine,
twice winning the Ethel Curlewis prize for verse. Proceeding to the
University of Sydney, she graduated with second-class honours in English.
In 1943 McDonald joined the editorial staff of Angus & Robertson
Ltd. There she worked with such people as Alec Bolton, Beatrice Davis
and Douglas Stewart. Recalled by Rosemary Dobson as ‘the best
book editor in Australia’, she made a considerable – though
largely unacknowledged – contribution to the publication of Australian
fiction and history for some thirty years.
McDonald's poetic output was small but highly regarded, with poems appearing
mostly in Sydney journals from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her first collection,
Pacific Sea (1947) won the first Grace Leven prize for poetry in 1947.
Her poems appear in most modern anthologies, but critical perspective
is still lacking.
McDonald spent much of her time in the Wollongong region, commuting
to Sydney to work. She died of cancer in January 1974 at Mt Ousley.
The
14 poems in Transmigration revolve around themes of birds,
sea, bushwalking and human interaction and interference with the environment.
Jan Brown AM
Jan
Brown is a sculptor who sees drawing as an integral part of her work.
She has a passionate interest in living forms, especially birds and
animals.
Jan taught life drawing at the Canberra School of Art for many years,
retiring as a Senior lecturer in 1987. Her initial training was as a
part-time student at East Sydney Technical College, and later as a full-time
student at Chelsea School of Art, under the direction of Henry Moore.
She was born in Sydney in 1922, and has travelled widely overseas, living
in London for ten years and returning to London and Europe on a regular
basis. Her home, since 1957, is Canberra, where she lives with her husband
and family.
She has been actively involved with the promotion of the visual arts
in Canberra and in 1992 was made an Order of Australia and also an Emeritus
Fellow of the Australia Council. In 2005 she was honoured in the ACT
International Women’s Day awards.
Jan's
drawings for Transmigration were not made for the book, but
selected by her and the printer from her extensive drawing archives.
Her drawings, many made in the same locations that Nan was writing about,
were scanned and cast as photopolymer plates, then printed as embossments,
slightly inked with transparent ink to darken the paper colour.
Jan
Brown and Nan McDonald were exact contemporaries, cared deeply about
the same issues, and frequented the same walking paths. They never knew
each other.
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