Books in the Image to Word series

Published posthumously as Dreams, Styrský's dream journal spanning the interwar years comprises prose, sketches, collages, and paintings. The present volume includes the complete series based on Styrský's layout for its publication, his sole volume of poetry (also published posthumously), as well as a selection of his essays, lectures, manifestos, and other text fragments. This edition presents in English for the first time the broad range of Styrský's contribution to the interwar avant-garde and Surrealism.

In the vein of the well-known drug writings of De Quincey and Baudelaire from a century earlier and those of his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Jean Cocteau - and foreshadowing the later writings of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda on psychoactive drugs - Witkacy composed Narcotics in 1930 to discuss and document not only his own experimentation with different substances but the nature of addiction itself and the prevailing social attitude toward drugs, particularly those that were considered "acceptable." As life became increasingly mechanized, Witkacy felt that a sense of the metaphysical could only be achieved by artificial means, and like Henri Michaux, he produced an extensive oeuvre of singular visual art while under the influence of a variety of substances. Meandering, acerbic, and burlesque, rife with neologisms and expressions from German, French, English, and Russian, Witkacy dissects Polish society and the art world as well as himself via the hypocrisy surrounding drug use. Since it was first published in the 1930s, Narcotics has achieved a cult status in Poland where it is considered both a modernist classic and a paragon of Witkiewiczian madness. This edition, the first complete translation in English, includes a second appendix written later, passages from the novel Farewell to Autumn, and 34 color reproductions of a cross section of portraits to show how various substances impacted Witkacy's art.

Written in the 1950s and '60s, the "action poems" comprising a A User's Manual were published in their complete form in 1969 when they were paired with the 52 collages of Weekly 1967, the first of Kolař's celebrated series in which he commented visually on a major event for each week of the year. Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society's officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given directions. The collages on the facing pages to the poems are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, or decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of "evidential" report on the year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolař's enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. What art historian Arsen Pohribný wrote about Weekly 1968 equally applies to Weekly 1967: it "shocks with its abrupt stylistic twists" and is "a Babylonian, hybrid parable of multi-reality." The volume also includes the complete Czech text as an appendix.

Unable to publish in communist Czechoslovakia, Jiří Kolař saw Responses first appear in 1984 with the exile publishing house Index based in Cologne, Germany. The text discusses his influences and wide variety of collage techniques as well as art and literature in general. He pairs it with "Kafka's Prague," a series of color crumplages of Prague's buildings, streets, squares, and gardens accompanied by short extracts from Franz Kafka's work, which was also banned by the regime, as a sort of homage to the city whose artistic vitality was being snuffed out by communist repression. The result is a fascinating document akin to an artist's book that captures Kolař's creative flux at a particular moment in time. Crumplage is a technique developed by Kolař in which a sheet of paper or reproduction is crumpled at random and then flattened out and pasted onto a backing, creating a deformation of the original image or a new image.