Turkenkalender 1942. 14 leaves with letterpress and stencil illustrations on various paper stocks. Small folio, 325 x 250 mm, cord bound in publisher’s stencil illustrated wrappers preserved in a new cloth folding box. [Groningen]: De Blauwe Schuit, 1941.
One of 120 copies printed for friends of De Blauwe Schuit. The most elaborate of H.N. Werkman’s clandestine printings consisting of 28 pages of striking avant-garde design in the form of calendar for the year 1942. The concept and title are derived from Johannes Guttenberg’s Der Türkenkalender printed in December of 1454. That ‘calendar’ was Catholic propaganda warning of the advance of the Turks and calling upon European leaders to resist. Werkman’s (1882-1945) calendar includes patriotic and subversive Dutch verse from sixteenth and seventeenth century directed toward Spanish aggression, clearly a call to resist the occupying German forces at the time.
Given the dire circumstances of its publication, Werkman’s Turkenkalender 1942 is nothing short of a remarkable feat of printing. It was entirely hand pressed and illustrated by Werkman with each copy slightly varying on account of its handmade nature. The page design is of the highest quality with Werkman utilizing every element of the printing materials to the fullest from the different colour paper stocks to the ink used for the stencils. Werkman would tragically be executed on April 10, 1945, just three days before the liberation of Gronigen.
A fine copy with OCLC locating 6 copies in the US, the Wolfsonian, Getty, Stanford, Berkley, Northwestern and Newberry.
See: ‘Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman and the Werkmaniana in the British Library’ by Anna E.C. Simoni, The British Library Journal , SPRING 1976, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 70-88. Hendrik Werkman en de Blauwe Schuit Ate Zuidhoff, Utrecht Swerz 1995.
