Stanislav Szukalski: Song of the Mute Singer

New York: Psychedelic Solution Gallery, 1989. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Red and black quarto in pictorial wraps; 32 unnumbered pages; stapled; black-and-white illustrations; 22 cm Near fine copy with tiny hairline crease to front, faint edgewear to wraps and sticker shadow on back cover, clean pages and vivid black and white printing. Magazine.

The original text by Szukalski, with contributions from Rick Griffin, Robert Williams, Suzanne Williams, and Lena Zwalve. Szukalski is the subject of the 2018 Netflix documentary "Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski", and was a prodigious, controversial and iconoclastic Polish sculptor, painter and artist who remained largely unrecognized in wider art circles until after his death in 1987.

"Within The Mute Singer, Szukalski speaks of the secret hypocrisy and selfishness within the pious social elite, who "smuggled through their prayers the extravagant hopes for themselves of attaining eternal life," with a brutal honesty and indignant scorn that is inimitably his own. [...] What we finally come away with, after reading the Mute Singer, is what is surely the most significant ideal in Szukalski's extensive world view, that this silently suffering indigent artist, a healer of souls, a wise and wordless sage-clown-alchemist of the firmament, is more heroic, more saintly than all the popes, kinds and generals of the land: that he is a martyred saint sent from heaven to pay painful vigil for our greatest sins and injustices perpetrated towards our fellow man." --Introduction by Carlo McCormick