Mark Curran collects Brazilian cordelian broadsides the way he once collected baseball cards. The only difference is that his boyhood baseball collection could have paid his daughter’s way through Harvard. His cordel collection has more historic than commercial value.

Cordel is related to the folk art of the woodcut because cordelian booklets of verse use woodcuts as decorative illustrations on their covers. The woodcuts, much like the poetry they were created to depict, are vanishing.

Brazilian woodcuts in cordel came into vogue during the late 1950s when poets and publishers began commissioning local artists to create specific artwork for key cordels. Those woodcuts were rough, carved from a single block of wood, and fairly unsophisticated. But they did illustrate the content of specific poems, and that was their appeal.

Until that time, cordel poems usually were illustrated with whatever was on hand. Initially, decorative type fonts graced cordel covers. By the 1920s, poets were using images much like travel postcards. Later, poets would use the photos of Hollywood stars taken from newspaper ads. For example, a local love story might be illustrated with a Gone With the Wind photo of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. Gene Autry, John Wayne, and Betty Grable were popular as well.

Eventually, however, a few poor poets gained the means to buy a printing press. They commissioned story-specific artwork for front covers and began using the back covers for editorials. Those pages displayed everything from philosophical statements to political parodies to marketing data. Over time, the woodcuts themselves became popular.

“During the 1960s, art aficionados and historians from throughout the world discovered and began collecting woodcuts for their own value,” Curran says. “Those collectors often did not know Portuguese. As a result, they weren’t hunting for the cordel stories, but rather for the art itself.”

Although Curran’s first and primary interest was the poetry, he came to appreciate the woodcuts as well. Each reflects history in its own way. He began his collection more than 30 years ago. Today, Curran owns one of the world’s quality collections. The woodcuts grace the covers of many of his six books.—Lindsey Michaels

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