Logbook by Tom Raworth, Illustrations by Frances Butler

Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1976. first edition. Wrappers, 15 unnumbered leaves. Slight fading. Colophon: "One hundred coloured copies have been printed on the Poltroon Vandercook & five hundred copies offset at the West Coast Print Centre, Berkeley." This copy is the offset printing. Kit Robinson (in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol 2 M-Z, Gale Research) describes the work:

The sea-voyage theme, as in the nineteenth-century adventure novels of Jules Verne or Robert Louis Stevenson, suggests its obverse, the cozy, bourgeois domesticity by which the individual is secured from imagination’s perilous seas (a boat is a room), but the violent swiveling and physical rupture of Raworth’s prose, with the explosion of the image bank depicted in Frances Butler’s illustrations, signals the obsolescence of western cultural icons, a space where, by a kind of Doppler effect, objects only get further away, a world in which “all books are dead & we live where the edges overlap.”.