The Burning of the Books
The Burning of the Books

A poem sequence by George Szirtes based on Elias Canetti's novel 'Auto da Fé'
illustrated by Ron King.
London: Circle Press, 2008. Edition of 30.
(Editioned copies sold, Artist Proof Copy available)

10.25 x 14"; 15 etchings (13 full page, one double spread, and one quarter page. Text letterpressed printed in Walbaum type from polymer plates. Housed in solander box.

Prospectus: "Back in 1971 Ron King at the press in Guildford tried to obtain permission from the publishers to illustrate Elias Canetti's great novel Auto da Fé. Permission was denied to him, as to all others who had requested it, as the author did not wish his work to be illustrated or made into a play or film. In 1981 the novel won Canetti the Nobel prize for literature but still the writer would not release his tight grip on the copyright. Canetti died in 1994 and ten years later King took it on himself to persuade George Szirtes winner of the Eliot prize for poetry 2004, to make a book with him on the theme of Auto da Fé. Within a short time poem after poem of a powerful sequence directly related to or inspired by his re-reading of the book, the poems living as it were, in the crevices of Canetti's text, arrived at the press from Szirtes."

George Szirtes, Introduction: "The sequence is titled 'The Burning of the Books' since that is what happens at the end of Auto da Fé. The scholar's library burns in anticipation of the Nazi book-burnings to come. The poems are fuel for King's visual symbiotic-organisms, joining them in a mutual homage-cum-conflagration."
(SOLD)