Southern Harvest

Clare Leighton

2015

Bradel binding with black goatskin spine, boards covered in paper with rust effect and rollered black lino printing ink, insets of printed Mingeishi tissue with black ink scratched and splattered with pen and nib then laminated to Griffen Mill Early Wove cream paper, black goatskin onlays, title tooled with red gold. Endpapers are printed Mingeishi tissue laminated to Griffen Mill Early Wove cream with pen and ink manuscript. Doublures are double printed black Murano paper. Hand sewn silk endbands. All edges black.

This book documents the Deep South and my attention was drawn to the chapter on cotton picking. The contrasts between the white plantation owner and the black slave cotton pickers, the black stems of the cotton plants and the white boules of the cotton flowers are reflected in the black and white of the print on the page and the woodcut illustrations throughout. These contrasts are echoed in the black edges of the white pages, the black and white of the endbands and the black and white of the cotton plants. The manuscript No More My Lord is the lyrics to a traditional African American spiritual sung in the fields. A CD in the accompanying binders’ notes is a recording of this song made by Alan Lomax at Parchman Penitentiary in 1948. The doublures depict the bare branches of the picked cotton but also reflect the whipping scars on the back of Gordon, a slave. The portraits in the cotton boules are of child cotton pickers.