New hand made Sea Urchin edition:
Edgar Allan Poe – The Fifth Day
The Sea Urchin pamphlet The Fifth Day is a passage lifted from Edgar Allan Poe‘s tale Manuscript Found in a Bottle. The tale was first published in 1833 after it had won an award of $50 in a contest organised by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The version published by Sea Urchin is how it later appeared in Poe’s own Broadway Journal in 1845.Manuscript Found in a Bottle is a tale in which a drifting narrator describes how his ship sets sail from Batavia to the Sunda islands in the Malay Archipelago. A couple of days into the voyage the ship is struck by a hurricane and capsizes, leaving the narrator and an old Swedish sailor the sole survivors. The following days the ship and the two men are driven off course by strong winds, south towards the South Pole. The narrator’s journal describes the dawn of the fifth day of the fateful voyage as “the sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre…” and continues to paint the strange appearances of the sun during the rest of the day in words that evoke a strong sense of doom and foreboding. There isn’t going to be a sixth day…
The Fifth Day has been published in a hand made and numbered edition of 15 copies. An early 20th-century hand crafted idol of the Baltic sun god Saulé (collection of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius) has been printed on the flyleaf. Designed by Ben Schot, the text and choice of papers of The Fifth Day are a composition in sickly yellow, black and grey. Order now →