"I work small, slowly and only for pleasure."

Nicholas Pounder's press Polar Bear produces fine art poetry editions in collaboration with poets and artists. Nicholas has extraordinary skills as a private publisher using dyes and pigments with unusual papers to make books, booklets and posters which are highly collectable.

This exhibition presents a nearly complete survey of Polar Bear publications, both new and rare.

For example: Garry Shead / C.P. Cavafy; Peter Kingston / Robert Adamson; Barry Pearce / Robert Gray; WH Auden; Number poems by ACR; George Alexander & Marie Gaulis; Robbie Coburn / GW Bot; Petr Herel / Francis Ponge / Ian Brinton; Marina Tsetaeva; Barry Pearce / Arthur Rimbaud; Nigel Roberts; Ken Bolton; Laurie Duggan; Pam Brown; Sasha Soldatow; Peter Lyssiotis / Lorca; Oum Kalthoum; Peter Porter; and more.

Before turning to publishing, Nicholas Pounder was well known as a literary book specialist, with a career spanning four decades of erudition. He began with his Exiles Bookshop in Darlinghurst (1979-83), became a favourite gathering place for poetry in the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_Bookshop   He then began the eponymous bookshop Nicholas Pounder Bookseller in Kings Cross from 1984 and then from 1995-2006 at Double Bay. These were a haven of first editions and hearty small-press publications, detailed in elegant prose in printed catalogues. Nicholas was an early adopter of the internet as a bookseller, and says he was "one of the first people on, and one of the first people off: I was using the net before it had pictures!". Some of his later lists made as emailed PDFs are archived on-line, easily found through a web search.

Floor sheet with all items and prices is available here