Rodney Graham. The System of Landor's Cottage; A Pendant To Poe's Last Story

Rare first numbered edition. Brussels/ Ontario, Yves Gevaert/ The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1987. Softcover, 24.2 x 16.5 cm, 308 pp. This is one of 250 numbered copies, numbered '86' on a tipped- in paper with a drawing by Jeff Wall. Covers and drawing spotted, else a fine copy, with cut pages.

Important work by the Canadian artist Rodney Graham (1949 -2022), known for his series of 'reading machines', sculptures involving excerpts from books by Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Ian Fleming et al, to which the artist added extra scenes or rearranged them to create endless narrative loops. Edgar Allan Poe’s 'Landor’s Cottage' (1948) tells a simple story of a narrator wandering through New England. He gets lost and stumbles upon a picturesque cottage with garden, where he meets a woman. Graham took Poe’s text and expanded both the story and the architectural features of Mr. Landor’s cottage. The book was displayed with a model of Poe’s cottage at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1987.