New addition to Special Collections

We recently acquired the work “Opera Mortis: The Works of Death; The Simulacra & Natural History of Death’s Labors & Hours of Work” published in 2016 by Michael Kuch.   The book is inspired by Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort (1538) by Hans Holbein the Younger.  The accordion-bound book has 24 pages of relief etchings and can be displayed as a 12-point star.  It is an edition of 365.    Michael Kuch is a Hampshire alum who studied with Leonard Baskin during his time here and continued to work closely with Baskin after he left Hampshire, printing etchings in color for Baskin’s Gehenna Press.  In 1994, he started his own press, Double Elephant Press.     The Hampshire College Library Archives and Special Collections already owned a work by Kuch, Falling to Earth: Poems & Intaglios (2002).   He also generously donated a keepsake commemorating the 20th anniversary of his press, a gorgeous illuminated broadside of the book’s title, Illuminations (2014).  Email me  at rbeckwith@hampshire.edu if you’d like to see any of Michael Kuch’s books.