First printing

£12 plus shipping

192 pages. Format approx. 7"/170mm wide x 10"/240mm tall. Acid-free white card covers and text paper; full colour title page; acid-free endpapers. Printed & bound in England. ISBN: 978-1-910691-09-0

Black & white reproductions of woodcuts by Bill Hamper

50 Numbered/signed/artwork copies

£180 plus shipping

192 pages. Handbound at the Tangerine workshop with cloth-covered acid-free boards, conservation glue and hemp cord; foil embossed front cover artwork; full colour title page; acid-free text paper and endpapers. ISBN: 978-1-910691-28-1

Black & white reproductions of woodcuts by Bill Hamper.

Specially commissioned 2-colour woodcut print only in this edition.

Quarter bound with Fabriano Tiziano maroon paper covered boards and Japanese silk grey/green spine; front cover artwork embossed in black; acid-free text paper. Two colour woodcut by Mr Childish is printed onto Somerset Satin paper and forms part of the 3-page ‘stepped’ Fabriano Tiziano front endpapers — the other page colours being 'grey/green with flecks' and black. Fabriano Tiziano 'grey/green with flecks' back endpapers.

Includes a gift reading copy of the first print paperback.

Signed by the author in blue pencil using his gallows symbol.

SOLD OUT

"Base and unpleasant... [The poems] demand and deserve attention."
— Never Imitate

"The book has the feel and heft of the old Black Sparrow Bukowski books. Billy doesn’t pull punches and doesn’t write for the genteel, nor should he. Anger runs through his writing, but insight does too and Billy has rightly become a treasured outsider voice."
— Morning Star

"This is book as well-dressed friend. And, in addition to the sense you have of the man, almost in his entirety, there is the edition, which is beautiful – beautiful paper between your fingers, beautiful design, like an ornament in paperback form. You want an introduction to the poetry of Billy Childish? It doesn’t get better than this.”
— Bookmunch

SOME OTHER COMMENTS ON MR CHILDISH'S POETRY:

"A seething, dyslexic, better looking Bukowski."
— Guardian

Billy Childish was born in Chatham, Kent in 1959. After leaving secondary school at sixteen, he worked at Chatham Dockyard as an apprentice stonemason. Initially denied an interview for the local art school, during six months of employment at the dockyard he produced hundreds of drawings that gained him entry to St Martin’s School of Art. Mr Childish’s defiance to authority and his insistence on integrity and personal style above the formalities of educational requirement led to his eventual expulsion from art school in 1981.

Mr Childish then embarked on an artistic, literary and musical odyssey exploring a broad range of worldly themes including war, history, social protest and religious philosophy, as well as his own experience of alcoholism and the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. With over forty years of continual creative activity, Mr Childish has gained a cult status worldwide; he has written and published five novels and over seventy volumes of confessional poetry, recorded over 125 albums, and has received international critical acclaim for his work as a painter.