Unpaginated (approximately 40 leaves) typographic art and concrete poetry book. Oblong octavo (6 1/4 x 9 3/4 inches). Original cream cloth boards with gilt-stamped title and author to front cover. Very small crease to lower corner of back cover, one page with a small paper fault which has made a crease, otherwise excellent. [Los Angeles?]: N.p., (1997). This volume appears to be from the second edition of 50 copies, no bibliographic information printed. A ring-bound first edition was published in 1973 by Philip Morris International.

Jules Engel (1909-2003) was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, painter, graphic artist, set designer, and animator. He was the founding director of the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, and from 1938 to 1941 worked as an animator at Walt Disney Studios, participating in the production of the classic films Fantasia and Bambi. For Fantasia, he was assigned to work on the choreography of two of the dance sequences in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and for Bambi he created the storyboard for the sequence where Bambi meets Faline.

After his time at Disney, Engel worked in the First Motion Picture Unit during World War II, alongside Ronald Reagan and Theodor Geisel, creating training videos, war bond advertisements, and eventually aerial maps and weapon instructions. After the war, he was one of a group of animators who joined the United Productions of America (UPA) Studios, where he worked as a background artist on cartoons such as Madeline and Mr. Magoo. He also spent time in Paris during the 1960s, where he directed a cartoon based on the work of Siné and befriended Man Ray and other artists.

Engel was also an abstract painter, producing a large body of paintings, lithographs, and other graphic works, with his work exhibited at institutions such as the Whitney, the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, and the Walker Art Center, among others.

This volume was originally published four years after Engel helped found the Experimental Animation Department at CalArts. Very scarce institutionally; as of July 2026, OCLC locates a handful of copies of the original 1973 edition, and five copies of this edition in North American libraries.

Book ID: 53729

Price: $1,250.00