Colorado Springs
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In this issue, Maurice Manning seeks to satisfy “an awful, suffering thirst” in “Blind Tiger” and other poems. Sage Behr disputes the existence of a wound in “Colorado Springs.” And we revisit Wesley Brown’s timeless character Melvin Ellington, fresh on parole in “Tragic Magic.” Brown’s novel is being reissued in April 2021 by McSweeney’s “Of the Diaspora” series, which features “previously published works in Black literature.”
The images in this issue feature 18th century engravings published by Louis Renard and based on drawings from life by Samuel Fallours.
Originally published in 1719, with a second edition in 1754, Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes can lay claim to being the earliest known publication in colour on fish — in this case, celebrating those hailing from the waters of the East Indies. This wonderful book is the creation of Louis Renard — a publisher, bookseller, and spy for the British Crown (employed by Queen Anne, George I and George II). All in all, across the two volumes, the book contains 100 plates bearing 460 hand-coloured engravings — a total of 415 fishes, 41 crustaceans, two stick insects, a dugong and, in a final foldout, a solitary mermaid. The engravings were supposedly based on drawings from life by the artist Samuel Fallours (active 1703–20). There is no main text as such, only that found in and amongst the images, which tends to be anecdotal, mainly focusing on recipes as opposed to science. From Public Domain Review.
