A Tango with Ataturk

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk brought many things to Turkey as he pulled it out of the Ottoman Age and into the modern world: an alphabet, a secular government, freedom from capricious and oppressive religious rule, and a solid sense of patriotism in the land where Europe and Asia meet.

He also brought tango.

A Tango with Ataturk, based on a story about a 1926 reception that Ataturk hosted as his nascent country's new leader, imagines what happens from the perspective of a female tango dancer that night, and how everything can feel so right and wrong at the same time.

Edition of 10, 2008
7 x 4 1/4 x 1/4, 8 pps inside cloth-covered box
letterpress printed
ISBN: 0-9670264-2-3
$45, plus $3 for shipping

Passing through the Vandercook proof press four times, A Tango with Ataturk was printed using wood and metal type as well as pressure printing (the detail above shows the shoe shapes used in old-fashioned dance diagrams; these shapes do their own dance through the pages of A Tango with Ataturk). The book is "bound" in a box covered in bookcloth the color of the Turkish flag.

Here's a view of the colophon and wood type.

An excerpt from A Tango with Ataturk:

“Ataturk's arm sweeps toward the glinting dance floor as a smile angles up toward those dramatic brows, a pair of inverted v’s. There are only six of us here who tango — maybe the only people in all of new Turkey who can.

“We women face our partners, our hair and ankles naked, ready for the transcendental power of the dance. We will help destroy another taboo.”

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