On retirement, publisher William Targ spent a decade creating limited editions of works by famous writers and artists such as Kate Millett, Chester Himes, Edward Gorey, Jorge Amado, and others. This exhibit showcases some of those books and looks at the man behind them, what he sought by making them, and his place in Greenwich Village culture of the 1970s. It also asks, do digital images successfully represent fine press books?
I created this online exhibit for a 2011 class at NYU. The class site that displayed my exhibit (along with several other outstanding student projects) was not preserved. After digging into the Internet Archive for a basic outline of the exhibit and re-formatting images I saved on my own, I recreated my exhibit because I still love this story and the images, best viewed on a laptop or pc.
As you visit this exhibit, please bear in mind Targ's note to readers on the copyright page of his 1984 book, Abacus Now:
"Letter-perfect books virtually do not exist; we suspect there are a dozen or so typographical errors in the following pages, for which our apologies. In view of the recently disclosed 5,000 errors in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, we feel humble. To our friends we can only say - To errr is human...."