NOTES FROM THE DIASPORA, short stories with pen-and-ink drawings by Nancy Marmer, Atelier 21 (a limited edition), Hanover NH, 1962.

This book is set in Baskerville type and printed on Ivory Linweave Text paper. Each volume of this limited edition contains four original pen-and-ink drawings on handmade Royal Watercolour Society paper. The five stories included are “A Sign of Favor,” “The Courting of Mandelbaum,” “Fibelman in the Diaspora,” “The Mowers,” and “Death and the Old Man.” Four of these were subsequently published in Harper’s Bazaar, Lugano Review, The Annual, and Shenandoah.

Praise for NOTES FROM THE DIASPORA:

--In their irony, their verbal brilliance, their self-deprecation, above all in their ability to see life as simultaneously terrible and ludicrous, these stories are as Jewish as their heroes….[They] are wry, funny, ironic stories, as precise and meaningful in their absurdity as dreams. They are presented, what is more, in a format of unusual handsomeness. Binding, type, and paper have been well chosen, and each volume contains four black and white abstract drawings by Nancy Marmer, the author’s wife--drawings which, as works of art, equal the stories they complement.

Robert G. Hunter
Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (June 1962)