The white cover and spine are embossed in Pessin's typical style of repeated abstract markings or hieroglyphics that are utilized as a personal alphabet. Similar markings are contained on the three folded pages embossed on white, brown and beige papers. The remaining pages contain reproduced, handwritten French text by Pessin that offers an explanation of his personal alphabet. A poetic text by Jean-Pierre Spilmont and a critical text by Michel Butor are included in this catalogue. A description of Pessin's work which was included in the exhibition, "Civilisations Imaginaires" follows. The distinctive trademark of Marc Pessin's prints is a sophisticated system of waffle printing producing pages where the signs appear in relief. Using the same technique, a series of books were made with drawings from self taught outsider artists like Pierre Pascaud, Alain Pauzie, lan Pyper, Patrick Guallino and Jean Paul Baudouin. Born in 1933 in Paris, in a family of fairground artists, Marc Pessin is an internationally known engraver and art book publisher (editions Le Verbe et l'Empreinte). Since 1965 he is also the father of the "pessinoise" civilization displayed in the Treasure room of his Art Center in Saint Laurent Pont, near Grenoble: hundreds of seals, tablets, cylinders, coins, jewels or amulets, manuscripts and parchments, covered with the fictitious writing in which he undertook to translate his "Weltanschauung." "Language is an imaginary extension of the genome" writes this obsessively involved lover of calligraphy, who also has a passion for the traditional or modern techniques of engraving and printing. A collector of contemporary prints, and a poet himself (he has worked with such writers as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Michel Butor, Jean Claude Renard and Alain Bosquet), Pessin assumes a position close to Contemporary Art but also to Outsider or Raw Art (Art Brut) which fascinates him. Of his own universe he gives this puzzling explanation: The land of the "Pessinois" is a taboo subject, a little bit as if a zoologist was interested in Mickey Mouse's skeleton. His next exhibition at the Tete d'Or in Lyon will display the continuation of his pseudo-scientific research: an imaginary botany and a fictitious paleontology. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.