Thistle Seed in the Wind (Baskin)

This one hits all the marks: Leonard Baskin (engraving), Suzanne Moore (original calligraphy), and our old friends Dan Keleher (printing), and David P. Bourbeau (commissioner). (We know Suzanne, too, but we’ve not seen her in ages and doubt she remembers us.) Anyway, this was printed and lettered to mark the tenth anniversary of David’s Thistle Bindery, a place we spent tons of time in our youth. And now allow us to quote extensively from the R. Michelson Gallery description of this: “The thistle engraving was commissioned by David Bourbeau, artist, bookbinder, and owner of the Thistle Bindery. As David told the story, Baskin had hastily promised him a wood engraving as repayment for a favor even though he had stopped doing engravings years before. Regretting his promise and after may attempts to get out of it, under David’s insistence, Baskin inevitably relented and produced this wonderful thistle for David’s broadside to go with Robert Francis’s poem.” We could’ve written that ourselves because it was a story David told us a zillion times. He was a master bookbinder and a master talker.