Happy moments. Text & images

by Len Lye

A$150 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Limited edition

Edited with an afterword by Roger Horrocks. Auckland : The Holloway Press, 2002. Folio, lettered papered boards (lightly marked), cloth spine with paper title label, pp. 48, illustrations. Original prospectus enclosed. Happy Moments is the first complete publication of Len Lye’s remarkable autobiographical texts written in New York in the 1960s. The 21 texts (plus Lye’s introduction) are accompanied by eight previously unpublished drawings or ‘doodles’ as Lye called them. The book is edited and with an afterword by Roger Horrocks, author of the definitive Len Lye: a biography (Auckland University Press, 2001). Len Lye (1901-1980) was born in Christchurch and lived in New Zealand until the age of 21. Apart from brief return visits towards the end of his life in 1968 and 1977 Lye spent the rest of his life abroad. After short periods in Australia and Samoa he went to London in 1926, and lived there until 1944 when he moved to New York where he lived for the remainder of his life. He gained an international reputation as a film-maker, painter and kinetic sculptor. Lye was an enthusiastic writer throughout his life and was the author of a book No Trouble, a collection of his idiosyncratic letters published at the Seizen Press by his friends Robert Graves and Laura Riding in Majorca in 1930 utilising much the same letterpress technology as The Holloway Press. A selection of his writing, Figures in Motion, edited by Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks—including memoirs, manifestos and

• Binding: Hardcover

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