Journeys to the Moon and Sun (handmade book in portfolio form)

Art Hazelwood

A portfolio-style loose-leaf book, Journeys to the Sun and Moon is broadly based on the imagined life of Cyrano de Bergerac. Includes 12 full color plates in color etching and aquatint with blockprinted decorative borders, accompanied by separate pages of typeset text also decorated by blockprinted borders. This portfolio is twenty-five pages total with colophon, and is enclosed in a clamshell box with blue cloth binding and an embossed image on the front.

From the colophon: "Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1955) was the true life inspiration for the romantic figure of Edmond de Rastand's nineteenth-century play and one of the more curious thinkers in early modern Europe. He was a satirist, swordsman, poet, and philosopher who indeed had a prodigious appendage. His book, excerpts of which are translated here under the title Journeys to the Moon and Sun, consists in equal parts of science fiction, philosophical specualtion, metaphysical drama, theological humor and freak show satire. The scales of the world are turned upside down and found to be wanting.

"This translation from the original French, based on the 1662 edition, was made by Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Compative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley."