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The inside of a Swan Vestas match box was modified to display an image of a sailboat on folded papercard. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This depicts a garden U-Boat conning tower sculpture (metaphor for silo?) and a cow separated from it by a moat. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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The image of this picture poem is a stylized, destroyer ship in side view silhouette. The smoke stacks and turrets are labeled with the letters A, B, C, and D. The letters pertain to Greek architectural columns for their temples, viz., Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. The poem signifies Finlay's love of the neo-classical period, the architecture in the late 18th and early 19th century prevalent in America and Europe that was characterized by wide-spread use of Greek orders and decorative motifs. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This card compares Greek temples to a stylized line drawing of a battleship with several components named for Greek columns. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This work is based upon a design by the Elizabethan architect, Inago Jones. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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The color of the card is green to suggest a grove but the poem lists nautical terms. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Card depicts Barque with list of sails innumerated with instructions, "White only." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Finlay (Archive entry) indicates that suprematist crosses of Malevich appear to him as abstracted early airplanes and suggests that an image from "Malevich's book" looks like an aerial dogfight. He adds a black cross to the picture with fire from its side to suggest that an enemy plane shot down by the red colored cross-airplane image of Malevich, "ace" of the avant garde. The suprematist elements are given a chalky surface as if colored with crayons. The trade edition of print was unsigned. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Image on the card is a map of a sea battle off the Italian coast during WWII that has the appearance of choreographed dance steps. 'Victor Sylvester's Ballroom Orchestra' was one of the leading dance band of the 1940s era. Victor Sylvester's early career was as a world champion exhibition dancer, who was also teaching ballroom dancing with his sister Gwen. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was a lack of good dance recordings that featured a constant tempo, something Sylvester needed for his dance studio. Most of the studios used a rather simple hand-wound phonograph to play recordings. With characteristic verve, Sylvester assembled a few musicians and made his own recording featuring songs with the pronounced beat so needed by dancers. Soon, other dance instructors were buying his records. Among his releases were "Ballroom Dancing with Victor Silvester & His Ballroom Orchestra", and "Dancing On My Heart". Interestingly, he also authored the book "Victor Sylvester's...

Scope and Contents The print depicts the word "Singer" in orange letters on a brown and orange background. In Finlay's homages, that distance is often marked by an ironic wit, what Bann called 'a minor key': a diminution of scale that is friendly and playful, but not without a certain edge to it. The Homage to Pop Art (1973), for instance, restates Cezanne's 'the cylinder, the sphere, the cone' in terms of an ice-cream cone; the Homage to Seurat (1972) transforms the artist's pointillism into a connect-the-numbered -dots painting kit. Other homages are less obviously playful, but no less complex. The Homage to Vuillard (1971) consists of the single word SINGER, printed in warm shades of yellow and brown that recall the intimacy of Vuillard's interiors. The literal meaning of the word (Vuillard as the 'singer,' or celebrator, of domestic life) is both reinforced and slyly commented on by the association of 'Singer' as the leading trade name of sewing machines (Stephen Scobie: Earthquakes&...

Scope and Contents This well illustrated book was written by Michael Harvey, the major lettering collaborator of Ian Hamilton Finlay. However, no examples of Finlay's work appear in this book.Wikipedia: Michael Harvey MBE (born 1931, died 18 October 2013) was an English lettering artist, teacher and writer specialising in lettering, type design and letter cutting. His work appears in many English cathedrals and on the National Gallery, London.Originally inspired by reading Eric Gill's Autobiography, he worked as Reynolds Stone's assistant between 1955 and 1961. He then became a freelance, producing some 1500 hand-lettered book jackets over the next twenty years for major publishers such as Heinemann, The Bodley Head and Cambridge University Press. As technology changed he developed his interest in type, producing designs for Adobe Systems and The Monotype Corporation and later, with Andy Benedek for his own foundry, Finefonts. His inscriptional work included a long collaboration with Ian Hamilton...

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This was classified in the Finlay bibliography as a proposal because the bowl of cherries was to be utilized as the centerpiece for a garden. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.