RETURN TO THUMBNAILS
Matin
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#(24) BLUE-PRINTS JM:

Edition of 200 of which 25 copies are signed. Three sets of signed progressives.

1972 Three colors 18" x 24"

Client: James Monday, Saint Hieronymus Press, 1703 Grove Street, Berkeley CA 94709. Telephone (510) 549-1405 All signed copies to The Poster, San Francisco (Print: Poster USA 73)

(Print: Poster USA 73)

My great grandmother was born during the Civil War, and entertained advanced notions of propriety. Absolute hell on table manners, swiftly enforced with a silver thimble that she wore on the middle finger of her left hand. A thwack on the forehead often attended an elbow on the table, the slurped soup, the thumb-assisted pea. This got your attention. You rose when an older person entered the room, and said "Yes, Sir," and "No, Ma'am" or she would know the reason why. For all this, she was a jolly old bird and lived well into her tenth decade, at last departing this vale of tears a few days shy of her 95th birthday. Though her thimbled hand has long moldered in the ground, I can't seem to get those habits out of my head. Good manners are the lubricant of society, preventing gritty reality from destroying vital machinery. With the aid of good manners, we can smile and bow even as we eagerly shoulder the burden of a fratricidal war. Men and women use good manners to shroud the daily hurts they slide to one another beneath the table. Good manners allow us to commit the most dreadful crimes in good conscience. The child is the father of the man.

"The child is father of the man," William Wordsworth (1770-1850), My Heart Leaps Up (1807)