Stony Echoes. 10 Poems by Graham Searle, Illus Paul Peter Piech. Unnumbered Ltd Edtn pub: Taurus Press

Paul Peter Piech (Feb 1920 – May 1996), an American artist, printmaker, and publisher. Born in Brooklyn to Ukrainian parents, he spent a large part of his life in Wales, Piech is notable for his linocut and woodcut prints that advocate for social justice. His designs were influenced by Bayer’s Bauhaus aesthetic, as well as Klee, Picasso, William Blake and German Expressionism. During WWII, he was posted to Cardiff with United States Eighth Army Air Force. His duties included painting pinup art of blonde women in the front of aircraft. In 1959 he set up The Taurus Press. (1959 – ??) According to The Independent, “over the next decade, he accumulated a Gem proofing press and other commercially redundant letterpress printing equipment. In the early years, he used metal type to set his texts, but he became increasingly attached to his own rough and expressive linocut lettering.” This led him to the creation of linocut images alongside “wise words” or “crass boasts” of figures including John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Nixon.

Provenance: Part of a collection of 1,500+ Private / Hobby Printing Press items I will be listing, once the personal collection of Mike Elliston. Mike was a name in the Private Printing Press movement from the 1970s to early 2010s. He took over the organisation of ‘It’s a Small World’, a cooperative annual ‘magazine’ containing single leaves on printing subjects by different hobby printers from all over the world, between 1996 & 2011.