“the fhip did fail” is a retelling of an 18th century poem called “The happy ship carpenter, or the heroick Damsel.” The poem tells about a ship carpenter in Bristol who runs off to sea when his lover’s father refuses to let them marry. Little does he know, he is followed onto his ship by that very lover in disguise. My retelling references the couplet structure of the original but replaces its rhymes with free-verse ponderings on a search for (self-)love.Â
(TLDR: a transgender rewrite of a crossdressing sailor’s tale.)
The physical book has two page sizes, one nestled in the other and folded twice like secret notes passed between lovers. I handmade these smaller sheets from fabric scraps I’ve been collecting in my studio. Every sheet has a deckled edge (from my papermaking) or a false deckled edge (which I hand-tore individually) to reference the text, where our protagonist is searching (to no avail) for clear edges. The pale blue pages imitate rag paper from the relevant era, which was sometimes dyed blue to hide the color of lower quality rags.
Select pages, as well as the front cover, I lasercut with silhouettes of medical drawings based on ones in two 18th century books. In silhouette, they may be read as islands or seas.
While typesetting, I replaced many instances of the letter “s” with an italic “f” to imitate the experience of reading the original broadside, where you encounter a “long s” or “medial s” and might accidentally read “sail” as “fail.”
2025
artist's book (letterpress with handset type on handmade rag paper and on Neenah classic linen paper, lasercuts, handmade bookcloth, original text)
5.25” x 4.5” x .5” (closed)
edition of 18
I found the poem this work is inspired by in the Harris Collection of Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library. It can be viewed and read for free in their digital repository.​​​​​​​
Copies of this book may be purchased on my webstore.Â
If you would like to purchase a copy for a special collections library or other publicly accessible entity, please reach out to iris.write.artist<at>gmail.com to let me know.
If you are a publisher and would like to see this work reprinted in a larger quantity so it may be accessible to a wider audience, please reach out to iris.write.artist<@>gmail.com to inquire.