Revenant ReIssue #1: 391 (Issue 10, Dec. 1919)

#1 in the Revenant ReIssues Series, this small pamphlet translates an issue the Dada magazine 391 in its entirety.

Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann.

This pamphlet inaugurates a new series of ReIssues under the Revenant Editions imprint, the ReIssues series which will reprint – in translation when necessary – periodicals, pamphlets, handbills, etc. from the historical avant-gardes and other countercultural communities of the past, presented in their entirety and as close as possible to their original typography and design.

The Dada journal 391, edited by the globetrotting polymath Francis Picabia, was one of the most influential of the movement’s many mouthpieces, not only due to its aggressively outspoken propagandizing for the movement, but even more as a crucible of collaboration between its many local groups as the magazine migrated along with Picabia himself between Spain, the United States, Switzerland, and France. This issue, the second one to be published in Paris, lies right in the middle of the run of nineteen issues – a remarkably long lifespan for an underground periodical. (Its publication was spaced unevenly over nearly seven years, from 1917-1924.)

This single-fold pamphlet presents Issue 10 of 391 in its entirety, with most of its contents appearing in English for the first time, and with the design, typography, and presentation reproducing the original as closely as possible within the limits of a DIY micropress.

This issue includes a cover image by Jean Arp, three poems by Picabia, poems by Gabrielle Buffet, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara, a prose-poem manifesto by Albert Gleizes, an essay against nationalism and racism in French musical culture by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and a sarcastic little feature on the deaths of painters Auguste Renoir and Abel Truchet.