patricia Bergwerk: It is a limited run, out of print, full color, full size, 79 x 49.5 inches when open, flat, facsimile of the original 1913 collaboration between the poet Blaise Sandraus and the artist Sonia Delaunay, and open and still in his original shrink wrap. Folded closure measure 718 x 3 3⁄4. Produced from original copy in a permanent collection of the Bainic Rare Book Library at Yale University. Curator Timothy Young created this exceptionally handsome reproduction. Release date from Yale University was April 1st 2008, where click quickly snap up. The activists at Yale say there were only 200 produced. The item is housed in hand collated and folded like the original, housed in a folder base on the original painted volume cover, accompanied by a new English translation with notes.
Patricia kamoun: It is a limited run, out of print, full color, full size, 79 x 49.5 inches when open, flat, facsimile of the original 1913 collaboration between the poet Blaise Sandraus and the artist Sonia Delaunay, and open and still in his original shrink wrap. Folded closure measure 718 x 3 3⁄4. Produced from original copy in a permanent collection of the Bainic Rare Book Library at Yale University. Curator Timothy Young created this exceptionally handsome reproduction. Release date from Yale University was April 1st 2008, where click quickly snap up. The activists at Yale say there were only 200 produced. The item is housed in hand collated and folded like the original, housed in a folder base on the original painted volume cover, accompanied by a new English translation with notes.



Delaunay-Terk and her collaborator Blaise Cendrars, a modernist poet, called this “the first simultaneous book.” This reference to Simultanism, a new movement that the artist and her husband Robert Delaunay were pioneering in Paris, connected the work’s visual impact to the thrilling simultaneity of modern life—the fast-paced, consciousness-altering dynamism brought about by innovations in transportation and communication. Delaunay-Terk and Cendrars transformed the traditional book format from a handheld volume that is read sequentially from page to page into an object that unfolds accordion-style—a dazzlingly colorful, nearly seven-foot-long sheet on which text and illustration can be apprehended all at once. While Cendrars’s poem appears on the right, in various typefaces and colors, Delaunay-Terk’s geometries cascade down the left, and the blank spaces around the text have been stenciled with color as well.

Using flashbacks and flash-forwards that upend conventional notions of time and space, Cendrars’s poem narrates an epic, mostly imaginary journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that he takes with a young French prostitute, the “little Joan” of the title. Their train travels from Moscow to Siberia, China, the North Pole, and, finally, Paris, which is suggested by the motif of the Eiffel Tower—itself a famous symbol of modernity at the time—at bottom left. When the work is folded up, like a map, it tucks into a small parchment cover hand-painted by Delaunay-Terk.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)