Recent Acquisitions

Here’s three new additions to the Star Dot Star project: a great vintage Snoopy rendered in ASCII, a rare copy of Earl Conrad’s typewriter masterpiece Typoo, and Picture Poetry—which combines the formal aesthetics of concrete poetry with a gentle, almost Hallmark card approach to prose.

Back in the days of mainframe computers, experimental graphics departments at colleges, and the pre-internet, it was not uncommon to find lab walls adorned with at least one ASCII-rendered Snoopy. There was a ubiquitous (and now impossible to find) calendar, and other prints like the one above containing inspirational quotes or bits of humor. Because Snoopy / Peanuts collecting is a whole thing unto itself, these are pretty hard to come by in decent condition. Sometimes if you’re lucky, the print will still retain the start / end print commands, too.

Typoo is perhaps a nod to Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Herman Melville's first book. This is an amazing book; typewriter art front to back; super playful and experimental. We first learned about it via this super informative post on Goodreads by someone named Ichor, who writes

“Conspicuously missing from the history of typographical art is a prime candidate for the typographical narrative canon (does such a thing exist?), Earl Conrad’s Typoo. The novel chronicles the life of the eponymous main character Typoo—who is named so because of his Double O blood type.”

We don’t know a ton about this one; it’s a comb-bound black and white collection of poems in the concrete style; more lite and whimsical than the experimental and avant-garde works that proceed it. It’s both a set of works and an instructional manual, offering tips on writing, use of negative and shaped space, use of different paperstocks, etc.

Author Mary Halliburton writes “I always start with an image or subject, then write the poem. The poem can be free verse, metered/rhymed. Revising is a way of life for most poets. This is best done before trying your shape. Then take the main image from your poem and work it into the shape you want.”