CALIFORNIA IN RELIEF: Thirty Wood Engravings by Richard Wagener. Author: Wagener, Richard Title: CALIFORNIA IN RELIEF: Thirty Wood Engravings by Richard Wagener Publication: San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2009 Edition: First Edition. This is copy 14 of 300 copies signed by Richard Wagener. Additionally inscribed and dated by Wagener to Gordon Van De Water, past president of the Zamorano Club, once on a prefatory blank leaf and again on the colophon. One of the leading American wood engravers, Richard Wagener has created a visual account of his wanderings throughout California in this lavish new work. In thirty original prints and short prose pieces describing them, he chronicles a journey that begins and ends in Los Angeles with stops in the San Jacinto Mountains, the Antelope Valley, Sonoma County, and the Sierra Nevada. Like John Muir and Gary Snyder, Wagener is a wanderer, explorer and observer of California, creating a poetry of place through both words and images, all born of actual experience. Not since Paul Landacre mastered the aesthetic and technical challenges of wood engraving in the early twentieth-century has any California artist achieved prominence in the medium. Wagener’s images of nature – his stately Sierra trees, stark peaks and rocky crags – and his urban architectural monuments – the Pantages Theater and the Griffith Observatory – combine to make this work a deeply personal record of distinctive California locations. Introduction by Victoria Dailey. Designed and printed by Peter Rutledge Koch. Original tan paper-covered boards over a dark green cloth spine, with a Wagener engraving on the front and a printed paper spine label. A fine copy in the illustrated glassine wrapper and the publisher’s slipcase. Established in 1981, Johnson Rare Books & Archives offers a wide array of materials from fine first editions to holographic letters, vernacular photography, archives, and other cultural resources. Our bricks and mortar location in downtown Covina, The Book Shop, is located about 20 miles east of Los Angeles. The shop is open six days a week and houses an inventory of some 30,000 titles, ranging from the general second-hand to the truly antiquarian. As proud members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), we uphold our association’s code of ethics. This listing was created by Bibliopolis.