Born out of the counter-cultural renaissance of 1960s New Orleans, Loujon Press operated as a small but mighty avant-garde fine-press publisher of a short-lived little magazine The Outsider, and four editioned books by Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller. Merging the pioneering spirit of the underground with a vision for creating expertly crafted, handmade publications, Gypsy Lou Webb and John Edgar Webb stand out as true visionaries and champions of American literature.
Although T.S. Eliot was never a full-fledged member of the Bloomsbury Group, he developed relationships with many of its members, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In fact, the Woolfs published many of Eliot’s most important works on the small press they operated out of their kitchen.
1922 was a pivotal year in the modernist literary movement, highlighted by the first edition publications of both James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem “The Waste Land.” In Eliot’s negotiations over publication rights to the poem, he utilized and tested an emerging network of modernist institutions.
The Jargon Society released its first publication numbered Jargon 1 in 1951, “Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun’s Child,” a folded pamphlet with poetry by Jonathan Williams and an etching by David Ruff. Founded that same year by Williams and Ruff, the Jargon Society would go on to publish 115 titles, mostly by up-and-coming writers and photographers.
May Sarton (1912 –1995) was an important and prolific American author of poetry, literature, and journals. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds several of Sarton’s first editions in the Rare Book and Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collections.
This post explores the life and work of poet, teacher, and publisher Naomi Cornelia Long Madgett (1923-2020), particularly her creative output and influence on publishing African American poetry.
George Schneeman was a poet and artist who collaborated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's in New York City. This blog post provides a short biography and some examples of his work found in his archive.
November 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of William Shakespeare's plays. The Library of Congress is fortunate to own two copies of the First Folio in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. One copy is a little unusual.
![Williams, Jonathan. Ruff, David, Metal-engraver. Garbage litters the iron face of the sun's child. Jargon 1. [Jonathan Williams], [San Francisco], 1951](https://blogs.loc.gov/bibliomania/files/2025/07/mm-jargon-001-01a.jpg)
