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Gingerbread Books, Published 2006. Hardcover, 64 pp.; 14 cm square; First Edition (with full number line); illustrated throughout in color with fifty reproductions of the artist's Ned Kelly works printed on black grounds, with black-and-white reproductions of earlier Kelly images by other artists and ink and wash drawings; pictorial endpapers.
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Black cloth boards, silver stamped on front cover and spine. Mild bumping and shelf wear to corners and edges. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket, pale cream, Australian birds and animals worked around a title device in which the numeral 0 doubles as Kelly's slit visor helmet, has a 1/4 inch tear at the head of the front panel, a few small nicks and light creasing along edges, and mild shelf wear. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Fifty original works made in 2004 and 2005 by Melbourne artist, designer and publisher Maree Coote, each a reworking of the slit visor helmet Kelly wore at Glenrowan. Coote reduces him to a flat black silhouette and crowds the space around it with Australian flora and fauna (kangaroos, magpies, cockatoos, waratah and red gum) along with barbed wire, skulls, ships, and Kelly's own words lettered into the picture: "such is life," "ned is a virgin." Titles include Ned in Wonderland, Banksia Robber, The Dead Kellys, Ned and the Magpies, The Critics, and Greta Mob. A checklist of all fifty with titles and dates closes the volume. The plates are preceded by Coote's essay on the imaging of Kelly across 120 years, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of an 1880 press etching of Kelly in the dock, Norman Lindsay's 1946 watercolour, Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly of 1946, and Albert Tucker's Metamorphosis of Ned Kelly of 1956. Coote treats Nolan's series as the turning point, "the crystallisation of his image as an icon," and argues that the flatness of the figure is the whole point: "Hero or villain, naif or master criminal, joker or tragic . . . the simple silhouette of Ned Kelly allows all of these and more to be projected on it." Coote came to the subject while researching The Melbourne Book: A History of Now (Hardie Grant, 2003), her popular history of the city, and issued this under her own Gingerbread Books imprint, later Melbournestyle Books.