About This Site

What Is This?

This site offers a collection of Mina Loy's works formatted properly to preserve line structure and spacing (which were important elements in her avant-garde writing). At the moment, the site is focused on the collection of works that Janet Lyon identifies in Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern as central to Loy's critique of Italian Futurism.

In addition to those listed above, Lyon also lists Loy's two plays, The Sacred Prostitute and The Pamperers, as being important to this critique. These are both available online (though The Pamperers is only available through JSTOR which requires a now free registration).

I may post other works to this collection in the future, but for now I am focusing on this core list of important texts.

Why Are You Doing This?

There is not a good set of these poems online, especially one that included the proper (and crucial) punctuation and formatting that provides the poetic shape to Loy's writing. I wanted to rectify this lack for myself while working on a book chapter on Loy and early rumblings of transhumanism during modernism, but, more importantly, wanted to share these editions with other fans of poetry or scholars of modernity.

How Was This Made?

The poems were typeset using Markdown with some additional HTML to facilitate spacing (especially in Songs to Joannes). The font is Arapey and served as a web font from Google Fonts. Typesetting was assisted by Typebase. Ligature support from Ligature.js.

A Note About Formatting

As much as possible, the shape of the text was considered in formatting in HTML. However, as the "Editorial Guidelines and Considerations" in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1997) makes clear, there is no clear sense of what Mina Loy intended these texts to look like, as there are generally no surviving manuscripts or even corrected typescripts. If you are interested in this editorial problem, please consult the appendix in that volume: it accurately captures the difficulty of this task.

As a rule, I follow the typesetting in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1997), sometimes perhaps to a fault. Based on their printing of "Feminist Manifesto," especially, it is difficult to discern any intended formatting decisions Loy might have made (which is unfortunate given how large a role typography plays in that essay). As such, I followed the print volume's decision to the letter, even leaving in line breaks that probably resulted from page size. I find this produces the most visually pleasing e-Text of this essay (and I ran through several iterations of the text before reaching this decision). Formatting "Feminist Manifesto" for online reading, otherwise, would, I feel, force me to make too many personal decisions about the text and I'm not comfortable with that.

If you feel these decisions are incorrect, please contact me (see below).

Contributing

You can view the source code for this project on GitHub.

How Can I Contact You?

I am @oncomouse on twitter and my email address is . I would love to hear from you if you have any feedback on this project.