Mushroom Book (signed limited edition)

New York: Hollanders Workshop, 1972. Portfolio (56 x 38 cm.), [30] leaves (10 double sheets folded once, 10 single sheets)+ [2] title & colophon leaves. Illustrated. FIRST EDITION. Limited to 75 copies from a total edition of 90. A unique collaboration between the great avant-garde composer John Cage, the textile artist and instructor at Pratt Institute Lois Long, and the distinguished botanist and president of the Mycological Society of America, Alexander H. Smith. This portfolio is perhaps the peak expression of John Cage's life-long engagement with mushrooms and mycology. Cage supported himself early in life as a composer by selling edible mushrooms to restaurants in New York City, including the famous Four Seasons. While teaching experimental composition at the New School for Social Research, he introduced (with Guy Nearing) a class on mushroom identification. The composer asserted no connection between music and fungi, but the connection appears in his writings, most notably, A Music Lover’s Field Companion (1957) which also incorporates hunting for field guides in used bookshops into the parallel worlds of foraging. The Mushroom Book consists of ten folia, each with lithographs of text written by Cage, superimposed upon itself in various-sized lithographic pencils, and a color lithograph by Long of one of fifteen mushroom species in the style of a botanical illustration. Inserted in the folia are single sheets of translucent paper, letterpress printed with transcriptions of Cage’s text, and Alexander Smith’s botanical descriptions. Cage’s texts are examples of his mesostics (a form similar to acrostics); and Smith’s descriptions are technical mycological descriptions. All components in fine condition and in a fine blue denim case as issued. All plates are signed by Cage as issued. Copies of Mushroom Book have become quite scarce on the market, with only a small handful coming to auction in the last twenty-five years. [OCLC locates fifteen copies; not in Volbracht, Myko Libri: die Bibliothek der Pilzbucher].