Events

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, with illustrations by David Small, was produced by the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center in 2025 in two versions: a paperback edition with a perfect binding and a deluxe letterpress edition using handset Centaur type printed with a Vandercook Universal III Press on Flurry cotton paper. The page layout for each edition was done by Chafe Hensley of Weirder Wonderland. LLC, and the pages were digitally printed by Riverrun Press. The deluxe edition was bound with paper handmade at the KBAC in a custom clamshell box and each copy also contains an original watercolor of T.S. Eliot by David Small. There are 80 copies of the paperback edition and 20 copies of the deluxe edition.

About this special edition David Small writes:

It was during the pandemic. Work was scarce, the future uncertain and, finding myself in the vestibule of old age, I recalled Eliot’s famous lines: “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.” Rereading the poem after several decades I found it relevant to me in fresh ways. It’s wry humor, for one thing, was revelatory. (I hadn’t sensed it so acutely before, when I was young and unfamiliar as yet with the circumstances.) Dark humor is perhaps the best way to cope with the diminishment of midlife and what lies beyond. The poem is, in fact, so accurate an expression of the plights of certain men in middle age, it astounds me that Eliot was only 28 at its conception. Illustrating this, which I think is among his best and certainly most accessible poems, gave me great pleasure. 

There will be a presentation and reading of the book at the Zhang Legacy Collections Center (1650 Oakland Dr.) on Saturday, March 21, at 2:30 p.m. Ricky Wallsten, a WMU Drama student, will read the poem and David will be there to speak about the project and to greet visitors.