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Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier, Letter $20K-$30K

June 26, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


An extremely rare signed autograph letter by nineteenth century American folk hero, frontiersman, and politician, Davy Crockett (1786-1836), has come to market. Written from Washington D.C. ("Washington City") on December 24, 1834 to Messrs. E. L. Carey & A. Hart, Crockett’s Philadelphia publishers, it is being offered by auctioneer Profiles In History in its Rare Books and Manuscripts sale on July 10, 2013. It is estimated to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

Within, Crockett writes about his new book, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East, the sequel to his A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834).  The letter proves that he, though unschooled and unconcerned about it, took an active role in the composition of his own works.

Crockett writes in full:

Gentlemen your favor of the 20th Inst. came safe to hand and I saw Mr. Asgood and obtained his permission agreeable to your request and here enclose his letter to you [not present] which I hope will be agreeable to your wish. I have written and taken to Mr. [William] Clark 55 pages of my new Book. Mr. Clark sais it will do excelent for him to work upon and he sais he will make you a Book that will flll expectation. Excuse hast I am your obt servt David Crockett.

A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett was a best-seller. The sequel, published a year later in 1835, also enjoyed a wide success, with subsequent editions in 1837, 1840, 1845 and 1848. It records Crockett's “Extended Tour” for three weeks, April 25 - May 13 (or 14), 1834, parading himself before admiring throngs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Jersey City, Newport, Boston, Lowell, Providence and Camden to promote the Narrative… It was the blunder of his political career. Running for reelection to Congress, the tour, organized by the Whigs, attempted to parade Crockett before the masses, exploiting his popularity. His constituents in Tennessee's 12th district did not, apparently, appreciate Crockett courting the favor of Northeasterners and he narrowly lost the election.

Crockett, member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Upon his return to his home state he said, "I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas." No word where Tennesseans wound up but Crockett definitely went to Texas, where less than a year after the first edition of the Tour appeared, he was killed at the Battle of the Alamo, March 6, 1836.

Crockett prided himself on his lack of education - he once said that correct spelling was “contrary in nature” and grammar was “nothing at all." This letter confirms that, indeed, Crockett was a very bad speller an' his grammar weren't so good. It also confirms that Crockett, however awkwardly,  wrote his own books - with the aid of a “ghost-writer,” U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania William Clark (1774-1851), who, in this context, may be thought of rather as Crockett's editor.

As far as Crockett’s involvement in writing the Tour James Atkins Shackford wrote:

“David did not, of course, write the Tour, but merely helped to collect Whig notes and newspaper clippings recording ghost written speeches. Another man wrote the book from these ‘scissors and paste-pot’ gleanings. A few portions bear his touch, but most is so inferior, so a affectedly ‘backwoodsie,’ so full of sham vernacular and impossible harangue (though the views expressed are the anti-Jackson Whig ones of his letters and Congressional speeches) that the Tour richly deserved the oblivion that it promptly received” (David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 1956).

Crockett hoped to have the book completed by the first of January 1835 (or early in February), and rushed to get pages to Clark for correction and editing so that the publisher could begin setting the type. There was another reason for his desire to move the project along with all due speed: Crockett owed $300, and he hoped to be able to ask for an advance. The Tour came off the press in late March 1835. 

Davy Crockett by John Gadsby Chapman.

Crockett remains one of America's great folk heroes and autograph material by him is highly sought-after yet exceedingly scarce in the marketplace, hence the five-figure estimate for this note.

Coonskin hat not included with letter.
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Image courtesy of Profiles In History, with our thanks.
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Dr. Seuss, Political Cartoonist

June 27, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Seuss's Uncle Sam.

From 1941 through 1943, Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) created political cartoons for PM Daily, wartime propaganda for the left-leaning newspaper issued in New York by Field Productions, ultimately contributing 400 to PM's editorial and front page.


A complete run of PM featuring all of Geisel's wartime cartoons - all 146 issues - has just come into the marketplace. Each of the cartoons is highlighted by his pro-American, anti-isolationist views, and signed "Dr. Seuss," long before Geisel became the beloved Dr. Seuss, grand master of children's literature.


The Saturday Evening Post had published his first cartoon under the name Seuss in 1927. He subsequently became a successful advertising artist and writer, and, in 1937, had the first of his over sixty children's books published, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.


The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins followed in 1938, The King's Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in the next year, and Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940.


The crisis in Europe troubled him deeply. Mussolini irritated him and Seuss drew a cartoon lampooning Il Duce, submitted it to PM, which accepted it and then kept him busy warning of Fascism and isolationism, taking particular glee against American hero, isolationist, and Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. He attacked wartime prejudice against Jews and black Americans. He took shots at anyone who criticized President Roosevelt's handling of the war, including Congress and the press; criticism of aid to the Soviet Union; anti-Communist paranoia; rumor-mongers; and anything and anybody he considered to be giving aid to the Nazis and Japanese, sowing disunity, and undermining the war effort.


Dr. Seuss's experience as a wartime political cartoonist influenced his later books for kids. Horton Hears a Who (1954) is a parable about post-war relations amongst the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Japan. Yertle the Turtle (1958) warns of the dangers of those who wish to rule the world, Yertle standing in for Hitler. Seuss later admitted that when he first drew Yertle the turtle had an Adolf brush mustache.

The faces, figures, creatures, and backgrounds we associate with Geisel's children's books are on display in these cartoons, which share remarkable similarities to the unique worlds he created for children, Dr. Seuss before he became DR. SEUSS.
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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this collection, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Lost, UnpublishedDr. Seuss Manuscript Surfaces.

Lost Dr. Seuss Manuscript Sells For $34,004.

Rare, Unpublished Dr. Seuss Original Artwork Comes To Auction.
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Alexander Trocchi Goes On The Lam

July 1, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz
 "The most brilliant man I've ever met” (Allen Ginsberg).

A "unique and pivotal figure in the literary world of the 50's and 60's, an individual, that's it...they don't make 'em like that anymore" (William S. Burroughs).

"It is true, it has art, it is brave, I wouldn't be surprised if it is still talked about in twenty years" (Norman Mailer, on Cain's Book).

Mailer underestimated by at least thirty-three years.


In 1961, Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), the Glasgow-born novelist who, in Paris during the early through mid-1950s as the bridge between the Beats and Europe, had established himself at the center of a group of British and American ex-pat writers in Paris, and, in the late '50s moved to New York City, was in trouble, major big-time.

World literature's second most famous junkie author, William S. Burroughs taking the top spot, Trocchi had provided a sixteen year old girl with heroin. In response to an epidemic of heroin addiction that was non-existent, the United States Congress passed the Boggs Act in 1956,  draconian legislation that mandated the death penalty for providing heroin to a minor. The evidence against him overwhelming and, arrested and arraigned, Trocchi was released on bail. But while awaiting a trial that would have sent him to the electric chair if found guilty, Trocchi appeared in a televised debate about drug abuse. During the live proceedings he nonchalantly shot-up. He immediately became the face of evil. His bail was revoked and he was under threat of immediate re-arrest and incarceration. He had to get out of New York and the U.S., pronto. He had no money.


The income generated by his partner in addiction, his wife, Lyn, who prostituted herself to support their habits, was not sufficient to effect a getaway. He turned to a bookseller friend for financial help, writing him a letter.

That plea has just come into the marketplace, along with Trocchi's personal, hand-painted copy of Cain's Book (NY: Grove Press, 1960), his autobiographical novel and literary triumph, banned in Britain upon its publication there in 1963, recounting his days and nights as a writer in New York while working as a scow pilot on the docks, scoring junk and getting high. Trocchi was so far gone that he was unable to attend the book's release party.

After laying out his desperate situation, complicated by Lyn's arrest and the detention of their son, Marc, he makes the request on page two:

"This is probably the last time I'll ask you to do me a favor - for a long time anyway + in one way or another I'll get your good wishes back to you. Nothing is too little, nothing is too much. Please give it to Diane Di Prima or, if you like, she'll lead you to my hide out. Please keep all this secret until I am safely gone.

Yours, Alex T.


Front flyleaf note.

With the assistance of Norman Mailer, a major fan and supporter, Trocchi was spirited across the border into Canada, where he was met by Leonard Cohen, then a young, aspiring poet. A few days later, after surviving Trocchi's company - hanging-out with the mad Scot presented multiple opportunities for too much excitement, often at the same time - Cohen smuggled him aboard a steamer bound for Aberdeen, providing, to Trocchi's ecstatic relief, "enough Demerol to kill a herd of elephants."

Trocchi, who had been a leading literary light in Paris, publishing the acclaimed avant-garde journal, Merlin, and (along with his friends, including Terry Southern) writing erotica for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press (under the pseudonyms Carmencita de las Lunas and Francis Lengel), eventually settled in London and continued to write but published very little; his addiction was deep and taking its toll. He died of pneumonia in 1984. Almost immediately afterward, interest in his career became resurgent and intensified and he earned, the hard way, the post-mortem accolades accorded to a literary genius who channeled his gift through a 26-gauge needle squirting diacetylmorphine into his bloodstream in an existential rebellion to separate himself from a world he rejected and surrender in thrall to the muse of nothingness and, in the process, lose everything that remained meaningful to him.

This copy of Cain's Book - the most important copy imaginable - and this letter chronicle his most significant and lasting contribution to literature, his career height and the incident that, as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, instantly toppled him.

Here, Alexander Trocchi, A Life In Pieces, featuring William S. Burroughs and Leonard Cohen:


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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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Unrecorded Philip K. Dick Archive Surfaces

July 3, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Once again, Phil, you've come up with some memorable descriptive lines in this book -- two stick in my mind: something that smelled badly "as if the skins of dead dogs were drying somewhere, on a line," and "gray and fragile, like wounded mice." Wonderful.  (Larry Ashmead).

An archive of Philip K. Dick's 1970 novel, A Maze of Death - arguably his darkest and most violent work, an exploration of the death instinct and the human capacity for murder, and, as in much of Philip K. Dick's world, inquires into the conflict between reality, perception, and identity - has come to market. It includes the final, holograph-corrected typescript. The asking price is $28,500.

Manuscript material by Dick of any sort is scarce in the marketplace. Most of the author's papers are housed at California State University where they were donated by him in 1972. A smaller cache rests at the Browne Popular Cultural Library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (which includes a manuscript draft of Maze of Death). As a result, whenever any archival collections of the author appear for sale it's a major event. This archive seems to have been lost in an alternative reality until now.

First edition.

"His job, as always, bored him. So he had during the previous week gone to the ship's transmitter and attached conduits to the permanent electrodes extending from his pineal gland" (from A Maze of Death).

That's what I do when consumed by ennui.

In A Maze of Death, Ben Tallchief hates his inventory-control job so he prays, the conduits from his pineal gland transmitting his prayers to a relay network which sends his plea throughout the galaxy. He hoped it would reach one of the God-worlds. It, apparently, worked; he was transferred to Delmak-O, a harsh and strange off-world colony largely unexplored. There, he joins thirteen other colonists. Soon, six of the colonists either commit suicide or are murdered under mystifying circumstances.

Per usual with Philip K. Dick things are not what they seem. The survivors realize that they are each criminally insane, had murdered the others, and have been a part of a failed psychiatric experiment in rehabilitation. Oh, and that Delmak-O is actually Earth. Ultimately, their entire experience is discovered to be an exercise in virtual reality and hallucination; they are trapped within a program designed to help them endure their fate; their space ship is stranded in orbit around a dead star and they have no hope of rescue. Within the program a computer-generated religion and deity provides solace.

But Dick, who in this novel began to explore theological themes, doesn't let it go. The god of Delmak-O - the Intercessor - bleeds out of the virtual world and into the real to spirit away one survivor from the doomed ship, leaving the others to continue their hallucinatory existence until they die.

"A but of explanation on p. 13, clarifying the fact that nosers are strictly
one-way machines, would make p. 31 perfectly reasonable."

In addition to the corrected typescript, the archive includes letters from editors at Doubleday. Dick, evidently, ignored legendary editor Larry Ashmead's suggestions in a letter dated November 14, 1968 in which Ashmead declared the novel "one of your best to date." And so over a year later Doubleday editor Judith Glushanok wrote to the author on December 15, 1969 reiterating the suggestions.


To which Dick responded on December 28, 1969:

1. Explanation on p. 13. You seem to be under a misapprehension re the way fuel is used in interplanetary flight. Virtually all the fuel is used on takeoff; it is not like, say, a car which uses fuel continually. Thus, a space ship could, for example, handle a single-way flight of ten million miles but not a flight-and-return of five thousand miles each way. Do you see? But if you want to make changes on p. 13, please do so. But as far as I go, no changes are needed, so I will yield to you.

In the same letter, he declines to accept the suggestion that the sexually explicit material and graphic language on p. 131 be "toned down." Yet in the final, corrected typescript - part of this archive - he made changes to words and imagery.

Leaf from typescript, with holograph corrections.

Dick said that the idea for the novel came from an attempt "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

At this point in his career, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was transitioning from science-fiction themes to reconnaisance of religion and God.  He asserted that the idea for the novel came from an attempt "to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists."

The Introduction to the third volume of the Library of America's collection of Dick's writing describes this phase as one where "religious revelation, always an element of his fiction, became a dominant and irresistible theme," and that A Maze of Death "foreshadows Dick's final novels."

This post was written on Ecstasis-9, a barren pebble located in the third quadrant of meta-cyberspace by someone who looks, acts and talks exactly as I do but may be a figment of my fecund imagination, "Stephen J. Gertz" the product of long-term use of Substance-D by someone who shares my DNA but has been known  since  birth  as Agent  Murray, a  defrocked  rabbi  with personality issues working undercover  to  investigate "Stephen J. Gertz" for  the  Department  of  Homeland  Security, Section 8.
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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this archive, with our thanks. Click here for full details of archive content.
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The Autobiography Of God

July 5, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Chicago: Willett, Clark and Company, 1937.
"The vast sweep of history from the days of Abraham down to Hitler and the coronation of George VI of England in 1937 is portrayed as seen by Yahweh himself, the chief actor in the episodes that have shaped the modern world...a novel of great audacity" (Dust jacket blurb).

Ai, ai, ai, I, Yahweh! Great audacity, indeed.

Now, you can call me Yah or you can call me El; you can call me Elah or you can call me Eloah; you can call me HaShem or you can call me Adoshem; you can call me Jah or you can call me Jehovah but you doesn't have to call me Yahweh! In fact, I find it annoying. Adonai will do just fine. Like James Baldwin, nobody knows my name. In my case let's keep it that way.

Addressing me by my first name is simply rude. Maybe it's an American thing, breaking down class distinctions by leveling the playing field with informality. But if you were introduced to George Washington would you say, "Hey, George, nice t'meet'cha. Waz happ'nin?'" followed by a fist-bump? Of course not; you'd be awestruck. But you don't hesitate to dis me, treating me like we're old pals. Jumpin' Jehosephat! Did anybody - besides his wife, in private - dare to call Don Corleone "Vito?"  So, what am I, chopped liver?

It's Mr. Yahweh to you. Better yet, I Am That I Am (אהיה אשר אהיה), but if you insist upon being a boor call me Big Daddy. Or, since we're in the 21st century, Big Data: the invisible know-it-all in the cloud with a host of servers to do my bidding.

First of all, I did not "write" this book nor did I will it into existence. It's a case of identity theft. The first paragraph is a dead giveaway.

"I know not whose prayer gave rise to my being. Who, indeed, can remember the circumstances of his begetting? I recall only the mighty solitude of the world wherein first I found myself There was a great plain which lay round about the city of Ur in ancient Chaldea. Thither do my earliest memories return."

What? Thither doth my displeasure begin, and, please, begone the stilted language. I needed mankind to pray me into existence? Gimme a break. I was here before, I'm here now, I'll be here later, long after humanity bites the dust and returns to it. And, what, I have no memories before humanity came on the scene? Skip the ontology; I AM, that's all you need to know, and I remember more than Sammy "the Bull" Gravano testifying against John "the Dapper Don" Gotti.

Check this out, from chapter seven: "From that time forth, forasmuch as I had entered somewhat into the temporal province, Constantine entered more freely into the spiritual. And I took it it not amiss until that day when he said unto me, 'Yahweh, it is made increasingly plain that we must have thee defined.'

"'Defined, sayest thou?' I queried." The nerveth of this guy! I refuse to be pigeonholed. Everybody says I'm unknowable, beyond comprehension - and I am - but that hasn't stopped anyone from determining what they think I want. I'm a mystery without a solution, a Raymond Chandler novel with plot that makes no sense. My challenge to mankind is not to feel secure but to be able to live with insecurity without going insane.

What do I want? I'm not talking; gotta keep you flesh and blood folks on your toes.

I'm pleased to report that this book, a  turkey in the form of an autobiography, has not received a single review on Library Thing, Good Reads, or Amazon. It is, apparently, considered to be one of the ten plagues of Egypt and something to avoid, a toss-up between boils and pestilence. It is forgotten and for good reason. "Friends will find much to ponder on in this book, which is told in the first person by no less than Jehovah, Yahweh, God of the Hebrews. The idea is more startling than the book." So sayeth T. Morris Longstreet in 1939, reviewing the book (two years after its publication, yet!) for the Bulletin of Friends' Historical Association. It needs all the friends it can get, Quaker or otherwise.

Need I add that I have nothing to do with Yahweh.com, the online House of Me? Talk about chutzpah! My Domain is mine and mine alone but try telling that to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). I complained. I said, "I'm Yahweh." Guy says to me, "Right, and I'm Dagon, don't bust my chops." Philistines.

So, enough of this phoney-baloney autobiography of Me. Oy, Yahweh! It's a hoax.

So say I, Clifford Irving.
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GREY, Robert Munson. I, Yahweh. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Company, 1937. First edition. Octavo. [8], 352 pp. Cloth.. Dust jacket.
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Arthur Miller On Marilyn Monroe's Sense Of Humor, Etc.

July 8, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

By Richard Avedon, 1958.
 "I am quite conceivably prejudiced, but I think this collection is a wonder of Marilyn’s wittiness. As Lillian Russell, Marilyn sits [on] the solid gold bicycle just inexpertly enough to indicate that she is, after all, a lady… Her hands lace around the bike handles so much more femininely than they grasp the fan as Clara Bow. And here again is the difference between imitation and interpretation, between making an affect and rendering a spirit."
The above quotation was partially cut from Arthur Miller's feature article, My Wife Marilyn, which appeared in Life magazine, December 22, 1958, in its Christmas issue to accompany photographer Richard Avedon's spread, Marilyn Monroe: Fabled Enchantresses. Within, Avedon shot Monroe  as Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow. Miller’s essay describes Monroe’s “miraculous sense of sheer play” in channeling these celebrated sex symbols of the stage and screen and her role as their successor.

Miller's signed typescript draft of the article's final published version, with holograph corrections, revisions, and indicated cuts (almost a third of its final length), has come to market along with a signed typed letter by Miller to Life editor, Ralph Graves, dated October 31, 1958, that the playwright sent along with this final draft. They are being offered for $28,500.

 "Here is the article. The only stuff I have added is at the end, with the exception of one or two words in the body of the text. It reads like a precis of the original, I’m afraid, much of the feeling having been removed. But it will do, I guess. If you’ve got something better to use please do so. I’m sorry, again, that the wires got crossed and I conceived it for a much greater length. In any case, the photos are still miraculous."

The "feeling" remains within pages six through eleven of the eleven recto-only leaves of graph paper, which have been almost entirely struck through by Miller, who, once again, writes about Marilyn's sense of humor as evidenced in the photos. She possessed a keen sense of herself, completely self-aware and not only in on the joke but a collaborator in its creation. Though unschooled, this was a very smart woman; only the highly intelligent can play "dumb" with aplomb.

"As in life so in these pictures --- she salutes fantasy from the shore of the real until there comes a moment when she carries us, reality and all, into the dream with her, and we are grateful. Her wit here consists of her absolute commitment to two ordinarily irreconcilable opposites --- the real feminine and the man's fantasy of femininity. We know she knows the difference in these pictures, but is refusing to concede that there is any contradiction, and it is serious and funny at the same time."
The typescript, with its mounting revisions, examines in detail the nuances behind each pose and each portrait, exploring at length Monroe’s approach to portraying these prior stars and the cultural milieu from which they emerged.


Though a few lines and one longer passage from the original manuscript were salvaged for the published version, most were cut. These excisions, found here, include a comparison of Monroe’s face to “a lake under a changing sky” and Miller’s conviction that she is “the living proof that Boticelli was only painting the literal truth.” Where the published essay is a polished description of the electricity of Avedon’s set and Monroe’s ability to capture the “spirit of an age” and document “a kind of history of our mass fantasy, as far as seductresses are concerned,” this typescript reveals an unedited account of not only an inspired collaboration, but Miller’s beguilement over his wife’s many talents.


In Monroe's last interview before her death, appearing in Life on August 3, 1962, she discussed fame in general and hers in particular and pleaded to writer Richard Meryman, "Please don't make me a joke."

"The often bizarrely explained circumstances of her death and her image as a sex goddess/dumb blonde have at times prevented Monroe from being perceived as more than a caricature. She was, however, much more, and even in those 'dumb' roles she displayed an elegance worthy of respect. Her director in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, recognized this quality and called her 'an absolute genius as a comic actress.' Monroe never lost her desire for life or her sense of humor despite her tribulations, and she treated with humor and insight the depersonalization that came with her status and that often tormented her life and career" (American National Biography).

Once, in a throwaway quip employing a homonym to lampoon that dumb blonde sex-goddess image she, perhaps unconsciously, suggested a subtext that seriously addressed the inner conflict between what she represented to others and her true self:

"I thought symbols were something you clash."
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Typescript and letter images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering these items, with our thanks.

Marilyn Monroe photographs from Avedon's Fabled Enchantresses series can be viewed here.
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Of Related Interest:

Marilyn Monroe: Avid Reader, Writer & Book Collector.

Heartbreaking Marilyn Monroe Letter Estimated at $30,000 - $50,000. 

The Most Significant Marilyn Monroe Autograph Document Comes To Auction.
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J. D. Salinger Didn't Like Book Clubs And Almost Met Paulette Goddard

July 10, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


Two signed typed letters by J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) have come to market. Salinger autograph material is highly desirable and scarce, and, as with all author (or historical figure) letters, market value is tied to content, the richer and more revealing and insightful the more collectible - and expensive. The letters are being offered for $9,750 and $15,000 respectively, the moola in the rye.

On May 13, 1961, Salinger, writing from his home in Windsor, Vermont to his editor at Little, Brown, Ned Bradford, about the publication of his collection, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpentersand Seymour - an Introduction, expressed his feelings about book club deals.


Dorothy told me about the Readers' Subscription Book Club offer, the same day, I think, that she told me about the Book of the Month Club offer. I told her I preferred to have nothing to do with book clubs, any book clubs, but she may have thought I meant only the Book of the Month.

The Book Find Club offer is so horrible it's almost beautiful.

Anyway, thanks for passing the word along.

I think the book will do well enough without its getting mixed up in book club affairs. It may take a little longer, out on its own, but I think it's going to move along. I hope you feel so, too. 

Best regards.

Jerry

Salinger was right. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpentersand Seymour - an Introduction, ultimately published in 1963,  didn't need book club support. At this point, Salinger could do no wrong; the book became a best-seller.


As did its predecessor, Franny and Zooey, in 1961.

On March 10, 1961, two weeks before writing to Ned Bradford about book clubs,  Salinger wrote the editor a note regarding paperback rights. Writing also from his home on Rural Delivery 2, Windsor, VT,he was unhappy with what Signet had done with Catcher in the Rye. The cover illustration and blurb - "This unusual book may shock you...but you will never forget it!" - deeply offended him. He transferred paperback rights to Bantam. 

After thanking Bradford for making the new arrangement, he takes a sarcastic swipe at Signet.

I'm going to miss getting together again, though, with Victor Weybright and those other swell guys at Signet.

Salinger then goes into fan-boy mode, expressing his love for the work of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque.

I took an old copy of Three Comrades out to my sun shelter in the snow, just a week or so ago. I'd forgotten what a beautiful, touching book it is. I think his war books and post-war-rubble books are better than anyone's. His are the only ones that move me, anyway. I saw him once, with Paulette Goddard, at a restaurant, and nearly went over, but thought better of it. I don't think it's possible for one writer to pay another an acceptable compliment. Something always seems to go wrong.

Have a good trip. I hope to have the Preface ready soon. 

Yours, Jerry

That preface was for the first edition in book form of Franny and Zooey, published by Little, Brownfive months later in July, 1961.


Both letters have "Salinger" penciled at upper left and year circled, in red: Bradford file notes. Included with the book club letter is a copy of a typed bibliography compiled by Salinger of his short stories to date that he sent to accompany the note to Bradford.

Each letter is significant in its own way. That Salinger decided to avoid selling book club rights to Raise High the Roof Beam... was a major risk for a novelist at a time when book club sales were considered fundamental to a book's commercial success. And we rarely get an opportunity to peek into Salinger's view of authors he admired, and certainly to learn of his reticence to meet Remarque and express his pleasure; you can almost feel his tongue tie-up at the thought of approaching him - though the prospect of meeting beautiful brainiac Paulette Goddard (who married Remarque in 1958) may have been too much to bear.
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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering these letters, with our thanks.
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The Devil Made Le Poitevin Do It

July 12, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


Impish devils dance, make merry, carry off young maidens, engage in scatological activities, make mischief, toy with men and women. and generally have a hell of a time as infernal rascals frolicking with diabolical glee in Les Diables de Lithographies by Eugène Modeste Edmond Le Poitevin. 


Published in Paris, 1832, it is the most famous of all works, paint or print, by Le Poitevin (1806-1870), a French painter and lithographer. His "Devilries" established a genre in the wake of the Romantic school's Mephistopheles and Faust, from scenes to fright to scenes that, as here, delight and amuse, Satan a giant buff horned paysan overflowing with specimens for his torment-zoo.


The album, co-published in Paris by chez Aumont and in London by Charles Tilt, contains eighty illustrations on twelve black and white numbered lithographed plates, with two supplemental plates (Petits sujets des diableries manquent le plus souvent, nos. 19 and 26: Paris / London: chez Aubert / Charles Tilt, 1832) containing thirty-five illustrations; a total of fourteen plates with 115 illustrations.


In 1832 France was in turmoil. The idealism of republicans, which peaked during the July Revolution of 1830 when Charles X abdicated and Louis Philippe ascended to the new constitutional monarchy, had been shattered. Subsequent events led them to believe that the blood spilled in 1830 had been for naught. Food shortages and an outbreak of cholera that claimed over 18,000 lives in Paris alone added to the general discontent. Bonapartists bitterly lamented the loss of empire. Supporters of the former Bourbon dynasty were angry that Louis Philippe wasn't a Bourbon. The rich and the poor, who felt victimized by Louis Philippe, had their disillusionment expressed by Parisian republicans, including students, who took to the streets on June 5th and 6th in armed insurrection. The June Rebellion was crushed. 

Diabolical forces at work?


Upon its publication, Les Diables de Lithographies was hugely popular, a sensational success that became en vogue, so much so that demand for further "devilries" became enormous. Le Poitevin quickly  followed with Les diableries érotiques; Petits sujets des diableries; Bizarreries diaboliques; and Encore des Diableries. A. de Bayalos's Diablotins and Michel Delaporte's Récréations diabolico-fantasmagoriques continued in the genre that Le Poitevin established. Diables were all over the place, the zombie apocalypse of contemporary Parisian culture but a lot more fun for the protagonists, many of whom pass wind, water, or what's left of yesterday's lunch for sport.


It will come as no surprise that Les Diables de Lithographies is scarcely found complete, scarcer still in the publisher's original wrappers. The album was routinely broken up and the prints individually sold. OCLC records only one complete copy in institutional holdings worldwide. According to the ABPC Index, the last complete copy to come to auction was in 1923.

Plate 12.

As a painter, Le Poitevin specialized in marine art, as a lithographer he is best-known outside of France for his Devilries. He was a contributor to The Journal of Painters and Charles Philpon's La Caricature. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a pupil of Louis Hersent and Xavier Leprince.  Very popular in his time, he exhibited at the Salon from 1831 until his death in 1870.

Le Poitevin's mark.

"Tout autre est Eugène Le Poitevin, le peintre de marines, qui popularise un genre bien différent mais dont le retentissement ne fut pas moins grand. Procédant en droite ligne du Méphistophélès de Faust et des tendances au bizarre de l’école romantique, les diableries de cet artiste vinrent jeter une note pittoresque et amusante au milieu des estampes sans couleur du consciencieux lithographe. Pendant un temps ce ne furent plus que diables et diableries, diables souvent érotiques, diableries plus ou moins légères. Les Diables, Petits sujets de diables, Bizarreries diaboliques, Encore des Diableries; c’est sous ces titres que se répandaient partout les albums à couverture brune de Le Poitevin qu’imitèrent bientôt de Bayalos avec ses Diablotins et Michel Delaporte avec ses Récréations diabolico-fantasmagoriques. Diables blancs et diables noirs suivis de diables rouges et de diables verts. Le diable se glissait partout, commettant mille incongruités, relevait les robes des femmes, les déshabillait comme par enchantement, les mettait en cage, les tirait par les cheveux, ayant toujours à son service un nombre incalculable de petits diablotins courant à tort et à travers les feuilles. Il y eut une telle invasion des sujets de messire Satan que ce ne fut plus, comme dans la chanson, « Vive la lithographie, » mais « au diable, les polissonnes" (Grand-Carteret, Les Moeurs et la caricature en France, p. 174).
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LE POITEVIN, [Eugène Modeste Edmond]. Les Diables de Lithographies. Paris / London: Chez Aumont / Charles Tilt, n.d. [1832].

First edition, complete. Oblong folio (14 3/8 x 21 3/4 in; 363 x 600 mm). Eighty illustrations on twelve black and white lithographed plates, numbered, with two supplemental plates (Petits sujets des diableries manquent le plus souvent, nos. 19 and 26: Paris / London: Aubert / Tilt, 1832) with thirty-five illustrations; a total of fourteen. 
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Book Heisters & Gangbusters: The Notorious Rare Book Thieves of New York And Their Nemesis

July 15, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


There was Babyface Mahoney, who made the libraries of New England his playground; the Swede; Harry Gold, whose scouts were not Baden-Powell boys yet still tied the cops into knots; "Doctor" Harold Clarke, whose Ph.D was in larceny and logorrhea; the Southerner Dupree, who'd steal almost anything; the thief known only as Paul, a nimble lifter who could jump through a library window with the loot if need be; Ben Harris, the Dane who sold illegal erotica, was savvy, fearless, and knew the score. There was Jack Brocher, who hijacked Connecticut, tipped it over, and poured its rare books into New York; Oscar the fence Chudnowsky; the shadowy master thief known as Hilderwald, Hilderman, or Hilderbrand, a literary tourist on the wrong path who checked into the Library of Congress and checked out with rarities purloined as if they were hotel toiletries and towels; and more members of the crew, desperado biblioklepts all.

And then there was Charles Romm, who, with fire hydrant physique and the face and temperament of Al Capone, led this gang responsible for a five year tsunami of rare book thievery at Columbia University Library, Harvard Library, the New York Public Library, Boston Public Library, and almost every other public and private library in the Northeast, the many small town libraries easy pickin's. The books were scoured of obvious ID and then made their way to Book Row on New York City's Fourth Avenue, six long city blocks lined with the greatest concentration of secondhand book shops in the world. From Book Row the literary swag went up the food chain onto the shelves or into the back rooms of upscale rare and antiquarian booksellers in uptown Manhattan who weren't too picky about provenance, looked the other way, or were duped. The years 1926-1931 were open season for book hunters of dubious character stealing and/or dealing in hot rare books.

But G. William Bergquist, Special Investigator for the NYPL with a bloodhound nose and terrier disposition, was on their trail.

The beginning of the end for the outfit began with a copy of Poe's scarce Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). On Saturday, January, 10, 1931 Harry Gold sent the Southerner Dupree to the NYPL to steal the library's precious copy with the Swede and Paul as back-up in case Dupree, on his first caper, got the willies. That he did but managed to make a mad dash for the exit without slipping on the sweat flooding out of his pores and onto the floor; library staff were right behind him. But not right enough. An hour after the Southerner's close call  Al Aaraaf  was in Gold's hands.

As Travis McDade, author of The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman, and curator of rare books at the University of Illinois College of Law writes in his new book, Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, Bergquist's pursuit of Al Aaraaf  (he was as anxious to retrieve it as he was to nail the perp) led to the unraveling of the Romm Gang. Significantly, the case spurred libraries across the country to beef up security, which, at the time, was, to put it delicately, in its infancy.

And book theft had been, until this episode, casually treated by the police and lightly prosecuted. Book thieves were considered to be mentally ill, at the mercy of an uncontrollable passion, the "gentle madness" that Nicholas A. Basbanes has written so well about. Book thieves were finally considered to be criminals and, in New York, accommodations at Sing-Sing now awaited the convicted.

As McDade makes clear in this exhaustively researched book - 185 pages of text with twenty-three pages of notes - book theft was nothing new. Its roots stretch back to the mid-nineteenth century when the first public libraries in the U.S. were established, and library theft has always attracted colorful characters. No less so were the rare and antiquarian booksellers who were actively or passively complicit in the traffic in stolen books. Those with a nose for trade history may be startled to see many familiar names from the past and learn that some of those, amongst the most respected dealers in the U.S., were not averse to acquiring books warm to the touch. The rare book trade has always been a capital-intensive, feast or famine business with even the most successful dealers often on the brink of disaster. It's a great passion but a tough way to earn a living. The temptation to acquire books at suspiciously low prices once loomed large and the quest for legitimate bargains remains an ongoing imperative. Idealists who enter the trade are soon disillusioned; purity is for Ivory soap. This is hard commerce.

Thieves of Book Row, published by Oxford University Press, is a scholastic book that wants to be a popular true crime narrative and, to a large extent, it succeeds. There is rough going at first as McDade tries to wrestle the wealth of material into submission and draw us in. The sins of academic writing are difficult to exorcise but McDade, who teaches a class at University of Illinois on Rare Books, Crime & Punishment, soon loosens up, hits his stride, and the story takes off with a delightful dose of wit, a broad splash of color, and rich details and anecdotes.

Example: Adolf Stager, owner, with his son, of the Cadmus Bookshop, routinely and curiously wore his hat and coat at all times while in the shop. Why? He was on disability insurance and not allowed to work so he maintained a full-time facade that he was simply visiting his son at the store in case the authorities dropped by to check on him.

Bandits, rascals and rogues; good guys, scholars, and strugglers; individualists, misfits, and the melancholy: the rare book trade's personnel department never has to recruit, we just show up. The feral bandits have been tamed, if not domesticated, since trade associations emerged in the mid-20th century and established codes of ethics, which even non-association members tend to follow; it's just good business. The fact that book theft is now considered a serious crime with serious consequences has tempered the temptation for stealer and receiving dealer alike. The overwhelming number of rare and antiquarian booksellers are on the square and perhaps the worst that can be said about a dealer's behavior reiterates Chico Marx's reply in ADay At The Races when Groucho asks if he can trust Harpo.

"Sure, he's honest," Chico says, "but you gotta watch him a little."

I love the trade and our cast of characters. And I loved this book, a chronicle of Booktown's  Depression-era mean streets when literary culture met organized crime.
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McDADE, Travis.Thieves of Book Row. New York's Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It. New York: Oxford University Press, (June) 2013. First edition. Octavo. xi, [1], 216 pp. Black cloth, gilt-lettered spine. Dust jacket. $27.95.
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A Beatnik from the Middle Ages

July 16, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Alastair Johnston


Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter The Life & Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, edited by Nicole Simpson (n.p., occasional papers) 192 pp., paperback, with color illustrations $30

Though not as well known as his contemporaries Dieter Rot and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) is acknowledged to be one of the key figures in the concrete poetry movement of the 1960s. Starting (roughly speaking) from Apollinaire's Calligrammes, as well as Dadaist and Futurist experiments (Yes, I have heard of Ancient Greek acrostics), poets took an interest in the typographic form of their verse. Live performance also became an important component in twentieth-century poetry. For most people, poetry in the 1950s and 60s is synonymous with drug-taking Beatniks, but Houédard was a Benedictine monk who lived and worked in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire, England. And while he was active in the poetry and small press publishing scene in the 1960s, his work has now vanished: most of it unique or produced in small editions ended up in private collections.

A lot of his creative output was in the form of typed pages produced late at night in his cell on his trusty portable Olivetti (like Aram Saroyan, he failed to interest the Italian typewriter company in sponsorship -- or even acceptance of how their machine had become a vital part of artmaking). dsh typed letters manifestos and sometimes would disconnect the platen to make free-floating abstract images using the typewriter keys. In this his work is similar to that of H.N. Werkman, the Dutch artist of the 1930s and 40s, whose typed 'tiksels' he would have seen in Typographica. dsh made poem objects (though often using non-archival plastic), and he published in little magazines.

a particular way of looking (1971)
courtesy of Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry

But dsh was instrumental in bringing a wider appreciation of concrete poetry (which includes sound poems in performance) to Britain. He first wrote about it in Herbert Spencer's influential bi-annual journal Typographica 8. He reached out to the Noigandres group in Brazil, Eugen Gomringer and Henri Chopin in Europe, and other British practitioners like Finlay, Bob Cobbing, and Edwin Morgan. He started Openings Press with the artist John Furnival and they involved German typographer Hansjörg Mayer in their productions also.

A spiritual as well as literary activist, dsh got out of the abbey to become engaged with the Tibetan community who were foundering once the Chinese had kicked them out of their homeland. As a child dsh had read in the paper of the "God-king" of Tibet and was fascinated, particularly since the British press did not use the quotation marks. His War service in India (with Army Intelligence in Bangalore) made him aware of how the spiritual becomes the everyday in some cultures. He was interested in Zen and read the writings of D. T. Suzuki. In 1949 he joined the monastery and was ordained as a priest ten years after. Later in life he became involved with the Oxford-based ibn Arabi society. So his was in fact an ecumenical dialogue with poetry.

In addition he spent five years as literary editor of the Jerusalem Bible (1961-6).

His most famous poem is a revision of 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's famous "Frog" haiku, whose terse seventeen syllables read

     furu ike ya
     kawazu tobi ko mu
     mizu no oto

I am sure you know it by heart. But dsh stripped it even further to

            f  r o g
           p o n d
           p l  o p

Memorial print (litho, silkscreen & letterpress) by John Furnival, 1992

In later versions he enlarged the three Os, making them into an enso, or Zen circle, and further blurring the boundaries between poetry and painting. This reduction communicates his idea of "paintings and poems that are not 'about' life but that ARE live direct living acts."

dsh was very much an artist in the spirit of his age -- David Toop describes him (tonsured with horn-rims) as either "Sergeant Bilko in the unfolding of a scam or a beatnik from the Middle Ages, time-transported to the delirium of London's avant garde." Toop describes the sound poetry of the time (performed at "serious" venues like the Hayward Gallery or the ICA, so not merely coffee-shop ravings) as incorporating shamanic and secret speech, and he mentions the "range from Antonin Artaud to Slim Gaillard, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins to Professor Stanley Unwin."

dsh also collaborated with John Cage in the mid-60s, though how this came across in performance remains a paradox. They performed jointly in the "Chieko Shiomi Concert of Falling Events." Here are his notes for three of the seven movements in their collaborative work "c-dagesh" (the title is based on their names "cage" + "dsh"; dagesh is the Hebrew dot that accents letters to make them hard sounds at the beginning of words), a "7 note suite":
cevent
leave room for seven days: re-enter & sweep toward typewriter: type the following poem:
     c  -
            CC
         h -
            H
            H
           - observe dust resulting - some particles will have downward movements - those settling on the surface of the poems paper-environment constitute the total phonic event

seven-t
asked two tibetan policemonks to hold a teak door horizontal - on it deposited a single bead of quicksilver - for 17 hours they succeeded in keeping the bead on the wood - 17 hours later an ant i had popped into a fold of the habit of one of them caused him to scratch with his left hand - & the bead rolled off the edge

heaven-t
wrote words cacaca lemm - nenipi roto tut - cut paper into 20 pieces - dropped on lawn from tuliptree they formed word immaculatecontraception
dsh 141164 Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry
   
That dsh was greatly loved and respected by his contemporaries is clear here from their devotion in the essays and the careful reproduction of his typed letters and typewriter poems. There are type facsimiles of his major essays and a bibliography. One of the contributors, Charles Verey, is working on a full-scale biography of dsh.

The poems are a delight but the main course is the group of five essays included. dsh is curious and smart and takes the pulse of the moment (end of 1963) in "Beat and Afterbeat: a parallel condition of poetry and theology," written in familiar beat-prosody which readers of Ginsberg and Kerouac will recognize. His bibliography for this article includes four works of Anselm ("the Finn at the BBC") Hollo: Red Cats, Jazz Poems, Paul Klee, and & what else is new, a small poetry pamphlet; the Selected Poems of Corso (just published in England) alongside Edith Sitwell's latest collection; two magazines (Evergreen Review & Pa'lante) and a list of anthologies that defined the canon of 60s poetry: New American Poetry edited by Don Allen, Living Voices edited by Jon Silkin, New Departures edited by Michael Horovitz, Poetry Today edited by Elizabeth Jennings, and A. Alvarez's Penguin anthology, The New Poetry; he also includes Elias Wilentz' The Beat Scene. The first page is a total rush:
So what's happening? 1963 times running short & poetry the mad sad joy of the shadow church wefting nylon tantras inter man & man & world & Yahweh patching up the zimzum with a certified 2-way stretch of now & bursting thru our mental claptraps giftwraps & stale thought-think outlines with delirious mantic words has come a bit unstuck. And poetry here to begin with can include any even 1-line stuff from real poet shadow saints.

Then he introduces Anselm Hollo, before getting on to Vatican 2! A few pages later he tells us what's wrong:
After WW-2 we never felt naively déçu like after WW-1: partly because of the 20s partly because the 40s saw the real shrinkage (planetarisation) of the world begin partly because todays ultimate horror is the art-protest area built-in to new social fabrics (Germany England France America) that make both god & poet hygienic.

He rapses waxodical about the Beats: calling Burroughs a "writing liver." He feels for Corso, adores the hairy smelly Ginsy, but his biggest thrill is meeting another French-Catholic in Jean-Louis Kerouac. (dsh was born Pierre Houédard in Guernsey which is a British isle but geographically French.) What he detects is a heart/mind schism and he tries to explain this in art as well as theology:
…this new beat/monknik wind of popular fauve livedeparture biblical-liturgical theologies reacting against dessicated past systematisations - & this 2nd live wind of creative systematisation or cubist theology freezing for dead guests the mind-spirit impetus by conceptual bottling while hosts with satori participate in this & every insight - like reverse zen-archery & readers the hit becoming the hitters.

His task in this article is "the impossible serialisation of the surreal." He manages to separate British-English poetry from American-English, but only just, and sees the hope in pidgin "(esp Ee Tiang Hong of Malay Wale Soyinka of Nigeria & Zulfikar Ghose of Pakistan; french equivalents have had more influence on french eg alive negro poets Ed Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor - lyric firbank/lorca negritude)."

Hollo, he thinks, is too too kind to the Brits, but also "whats it like to be translated by ah? A jokey fauve sensation like going through a loss-of-outline tank - he's creative exciting as zen when loose on noncrib russian translation he ties his love into lovely knots with two loose ends. His J poets are the ones to watch…"

dsh ends this blockbuster essay/crash course in modern poetry with a flourish:
The mad gay bliss of benedictine gravitas - so other than puritanical seriosità. Some people (?Mary McCarthy) get so wild at this sort of thing: theyd rather go to what they think their image of hell ought to be just to PROVE that gods like the image theyve given up of him reflecting themselves. They cld SHAKE that god - where the new wave just breezes around unzipping him & showing the mysterys all much deeper more mysterious. The new wave & the new wind are in the same direction: life prayer poetry jazz are participation in creativeness in god - they just dont exist outside performance.
i possibly am again (1967, PVC laminate) Courtesy Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of concrete & Visual Poetry

The second essay "Between Poetry & Painting" is a Master's Thesis in telegrammatic form. dsh explores the Dadaist notion that "word and image are one," or as he puts it, Logos & Ikon on equal terms. There are no illustrations (but you can find many of them in Massin's Lettre et Image [Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970]), however a very wide range of sources is cited in his chronology including another clever typo: "1923 Werkman begins his 600 druksels: e. e. cunnings writes tulips and chimneys." Musicians, painters and architects make it to his shortlist as well as asian/arabic/hebrew sources. We also get a key glimpse inside his mind/lair when he contrasts his kinetic concrete poetry with writing about it:
kinkon/spatial is cool: hot-media (like this note about things) leave nothing unsaid: depend on fictitious feudal-author caged spirit in superior private-mind bossing the tenants of his literary space: cool is nouvelle-vague selfregulating anarchic system - communicator-receptor on equal terms sharing telstar communication ball…
wind grove mind alone
Courtesy John Rylands Library

His famous essay "Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay" expands on the last in more detail, explaining his terms such as constructivist, constrictive, nonsemantic & coexistential. "Introductionancestry Andchronology" is more of the same, this time with an emphasis on sound poetry (Finlay is a visual artist or environmental word-sculptor). These essays presents one aspect of Houédard's work; his commentaries on Meister Eckhart will have to wait for another anthology, but for those of us interested in visual arts and the poetic conjunction between language & typography this is a hefty box of chocs.
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Harlan Ellison Gets A Haircut

July 17, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Hollywood haircut noir.

Harlan Ellison did a book signing in Hollywood last weekend. He got a haircut first.

I don't know how many haircuts Ellison gets each year but the media was alerted for this one. He's seventy-nine years old but not on death's door; this wasn't Harlan Ellison's Last Haircut. But it was a Harlan Ellison haircut, nonetheless. Stop the presses.

Considering that he got it at Sweeney Todd's Barber Shop on Hollywood Boulevard we're fortunate that it wasn't something more. Trader Joe's is not offering 100% All-Harlan Meat Pies this week.

Sweeney Todd's offers party services and will, upon request, screen vintage stag films for guests, a classic movie projector running the sin through its sprockets. This occurs at night, after hours. No stag films during Ellison's haircut: it was daytime and the clips were strictly of the scissors kind. Harlan merely needed a little taken off the top and around the ears with neckline cleaned up. But he wound up getting styled.

Prelude to a pompadour.
Photo credit: Miriam Linna.

I arrived late, Sweeney Todd's was packed inside, a crowd of Ellisoniacs piled outside, and the two bodyguards the publisher hired for the occasion (appropriately dressed  as '50s juvenile delinquents  because Ellison is the king of JD-lit. amongst other literary crowns he wears) blocked my entrance. Through the window I saw Harlan sitting in the barber's chair. He'd been regaling those inside with 100% pure Ellison, which is to say he was outrageous, funny, profane, provocative, acerbic, funnier still, insightful, and totally entertaining. I didn't hear any of it but it's a given that when Harlan Ellison opens his mouth to an audience pearls of all grades and colors fall out of it.

Haircut over, he made it to the front door, looked directly at me through its window, got walleyed, enthusiastically pointed, then spread his arms and mouthed "Oh, my God!" Somewhat puzzled by his effusive display I pantomimed my own greeting in return. A moment later he walked out the door with his wife, Susan, and bodyguards in tow. "Great to see you!" he said as if I was his long-lost best friend. "Great to see you, too," I said, as if he was my long-lost best friend I never knew I had and lost. I was touched. Surrounded by the adoring he introduced me to Susan: "Tell her who you are!" I did while he was distracted by the press, which pressed close, the potential for sterling sound bites too overwhelming to let pass.

He was wearing a black t-shirt under an open button-down. The t-shirt read, "What if the Hokey-Pokey was really what it's all about?," existentialist despair with mordant pop-culture wit ala Ellison. So, we put our right foot in, we put our right foot out and pokey'ed down the street to La Luz de Jesus, the book, art, and pop-culture gallery where Harlan was giving a talk with Q&A followed by a signing for Pulling A Train and Getting in the Wind. These twin collections of Ellison JD short stories were recently published by Kicks Books and reprint those in Ellison's Sex Gang by Paul Merchant (Nightstand Books, NB 1503, 1959) with others from the late '50s - early '60s. Kicks is the wild paperback imprint out of Brooklyn and home to "Hip Pocket Books," the reflection of the all-consuming pulp-culture sensibility of their publisher, Miriam Linna. She's the reigning Queen of Cool whose irrepressibly enthusiastic, tongue-in-torrid-cheek happy-go-hard-boiled fanzine ad copy reads like a rush down a dark alley on a moonlit night in Pulpville in service to moving the merch with an irresistible pitch.

"All hail the first hip pocket volume of Ellison short stories culled
from the rarest of his titles, SEX GANG, which was issued under
the name of Paul Merchant in 1959. The wild set of psychosexual
gangland tales is finally available again, fifty years later, spanning
two volumes which collect all of the stories in the 1959 book plus
an unhealthy dose of lost fiction from the persistent pen of the
grand master of all things tainted, terrible, torrid and terrific."

The gallery was packed; there was no room to wriggle. A sardine would have been thankful to be in a can. Harlan moved through the crowd toward the front; I faded into the audience.

After an amusing introduction by comedian Patton Oswalt (whose recent Star Wars-themed filibuster on Parks and Recreation has gone YouTube viral due to its inspired high-insanity quotient) Harlan took the podium and for the next half-hour he took it for a ride.

Harlan mugs for Patton Oswalt's camera.

Don't get Harlan Ellison started on the stalkers, creeps, and miscreants that have plagued him over the years. Death threats have come his way like confetti at a convention. He doesn't shoot from the hip so much as bazooka from the shoulder and this bugs some people, particularly those with loose hinges. Ellison doesn't take kindly to loons in his yard at night with shotguns. It offends his street-sense of courtesy and he has no compunctions about dealing directly with such hazards. On one occasion he disarmed the intruder and nailed him to a tree. This may seem extreme but in Ellison's telling the episode was a dark Looney Tune™ and the only thing missing was an anvil falling on the bum's head; he got off easy with the nails, and Harlan, naturally, nailed the story's laugh lines.

I wouldn't interrupt Harlan Ellison in mid-sentence if I were you. He takes no prisoners. You'll be impaled but the audience will scream with delight. You may, however, float an inch off the ground with a beatific smile afterward, as did one guilty party I saw. To be cursed by Harlan Ellison is to be blessed; you have been anointed with his words. It's like getting ranked-out by Don Rickles: it's a badge of honor and only the humorless complain.

"Hot on the heels of PULLING A TRAIN comes its savage sister
GETTING IN THE WIND, whipping up more gritty street life odes
circa 1959! Perfect the pair with both volumes - together, they
pack the fervor of a genre too wild, too true, too traumatizing
for tepid tempers - this is the neckmeat for a new breed of reader,
a glittering illiterati channeling raw emotion and constant
visceral stimulation. Without this pair, friend, you are lost."

Harlan Ellison has been called contentious, abrasive, and argumentative. He knows he can be that way sometimes. Considering the many putzes he's had to contend with over the years you'd be contentious, abrasive, and argumentative, too. Robert Bloch once said that while other writers take infinite pains, "Harlan gives them."

He has a healthy ego. Some think it's too healthy. But a novelist without an ego solidly in the pink ain't much of a writer. So, when a young guy asked him what he thought of Philip K. Dick during the Q&A I froze. Uh, oh, I thought, this is a Harlan Ellison book event; Harlan Ellison is performing (because Harlan Ellison appearances are performance art); Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest science-fiction writers the world has ever produced; hell, it's Harlan-Time! and this chowderhead is asking about another author, one in the same genre? I thought the question steel to Ellison's flint and expected sparks to fly.

Harlan grew quiet. It was a two-part question, he carefully replied. What do I think of Philip K. Dick as a writer and what do I think of Philip K. Dick as a man?

Ellison adores 80% of Philip K. Dick's work, it's beyond compare. The other 20% he doesn't care for, Dick's theologically-themed novels. Ellison isn't into spirituality, he prefers gritty, he says. As for Philip K. Dick, the man, Harlan began then stopped himself, afraid that he might say something that would get him into trouble. He earlier expressed a strong aversion to computers, the Internet, social media and hand-held digital devices that can take a snippet and turn it into a tempest in ten minutes. After measured consideration he simply said that when Dick was in the mood he could be the most charming person in the world. When he wasn't in the mood, well..., and he let it go at that.


There was one area in which Ellison admitted satisfaction in besting Philip K. Dick. Dick was only married five times. Susan is Harlan's sixth wife, their marriage in its twenty-eighth year. "I finally got it right!" he said. This after he admitted to being a swordsman in youth, advancing with his sabre five, six times a day, starlets too enchanted to parry his lunges nor want to. You'd think that level of activity would affect his writing schedule but this is a man who used to make in-store appearances as writer-in-residence as window display, sitting at a desk with typewriter and banging out work in progress to draw passersby, mutli-tasking as silent, preoccupied barker.

As long as he was talking about sci-fi colleagues he expressed his grief over Richard Matheson's recent death. Matheson was a giant in Ellison's book and the world lost a master.

At this point the line for signing snaked out the door of La Luz de Jesus, the natives were getting restless, and it was time for Harlan to move into the adjoining space, sit at a desk and begin that part of the party, and this was, indeed, a party.

"EXCLUSIVE TO HARLAN ELLISON'S PULLING A TRAIN In step with all books
in the Kicks paperback line, a 'sidekick' perfume has been formulated,
street-tested, bottled and packaged. SEX GANG is the heady scent
that tells the world OFF! Exclusive, limited, and totally dangerous. With
miniature switchblade comb. Arrives bottled in authentic Italian half ounce
Baralan bottle, boxed in signature Kicks Books Co. gift box."

I had to leave before the signing began. I wedged through the crush, went up to him to say goodbye, and our farewell was as warm as our hello. I still didn't understand why but I enjoyed it. He seemed to enjoy it, too. We both enjoyed it and I saw no point in spoiling the enjoyment by questioning him in public, putting him in an awkward position, and blowing the good vibes. I noticed a few people checking me out, like who's this guy who seems to be such a good buddy of the Great Man?

I'd met Harlan Ellison exactly once, a while ago for a total of maybe thirty, forty minutes or so. What did I do right to earn a generous spot in his memory? Maybe he had me confused with someone else. When he earlier told me to tell Susan about myself it could have been a dodge to discover who I was but at that moment he was besieged and may have simply delegated the introduction for convenience.

Isaac Asimov once noted that "Harlan uses his gifts for colorful and variegated invective on those who irritate him - intrusive fans, obdurate editors, callous publishers, offensive strangers."

Harlan Ellison doesn't suffer fools gladly. In fact he doesn't suffer at all; he makes them suffer. I have the sense that he's annoyed by 99.9999% of the population. While he respects his fans and, up to a point, appreciates their attention, he has no use for flatterers. Perhaps, then, Harlan didn't think me a fool, was not annoyed, nor considered me a fawning supplicant, intrusive, irritating, or offensive  -  though I've been all those things with others, at times. I've been awestruck by a celebrity only once in my life and that was when I had lunch with Yoko Ono a few years back during a book fair in New York and interviewed her for Booktryst. I  felt like a blubbering idiot throughout the experience. Don't tell him but I'm in awe of Harlan Ellison. I just keep it under wraps and behave like a normal person, no matter how alien I actually am.

"EXCLUSIVE TO HARLAN ELLISON'S GETTING IN THE WIND, Like all
Kicks Books fragrances, SIN TIME is created from the world's
finest floral distillates. A scent can evoke the memory of a
stained satin bedsheet or the moonlit hair of a gang deb
teetering down the wet, cobblestone streets of Red Hook.
Extracted from lavender, this ancient scent is symbolic of
magic and mistrust, aiding one in seeing ghosts of gangland past.
A pair of exquisite miniature glass dice are inside each
Baralan bottle."

I wanted to reach out to him later to reinforce the friendship that was welcome news to me. Susan was kind to give me his secret contact info, which I'd lost, a mail drop located in [redacted] within L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. He doesn't do email and few get his phone number. It may have been more interesting but I feel lucky he didn't ask me to place a gladiolus under a garbage can at the corner of [redacted] and [redacted], wait two hours, return, and pick up a coded sandwich bag in the trash can containing his home address written in cuneiform Sumerian.

Cheech Beldone, delinquent, with toothpick.
Photo credit: Patton Oswalt.

I am pleased to report that Harlan and his haircut - "The Cheech Beldone," created by Sween Lahman of Sweeney Todd's and so-dubbed in homage to Harlan's street name when he joined a youth gang in 1954 to research the phenomenon - survived the afternoon, or at least as much as I experienced of it. At seventy-nine years, Harlan Ellison still has a full, lush head of hair. Long may it wave. I want this guy around forever. Make that a permanent wave.
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All images other than header courtesy of Miriam Linna, with our thanks.
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A case of Kicks perfumes was boosted from the Kicks Books trunk. Anyone with knowledge its whereabouts is encouraged to contact the publisher before Cheech Beldone hunts down the dirty dog and dissects it.
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Maxfield Parrish Didn't Like Book Collecting

July 19, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

"I have steered clear of book collecting always, seeing the ravaging results on some of my friends, and I wouldn't know a first edition from subsequent ones..."

So wrote the great book, etc., illustrator, Maxfield Parrish, in his distinctive script on both sides of a 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 card, to collector and printer Edward L. Stone (1864-1938) on December 15, 1930, from Windsor, Vermont (later home to J.D. Salinger). Stone was instrumental in the Library of Congress acquiring the copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum from the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria. Parrish, responding to a letter from Stone, commented on the bible, and then book collecting in general. Parrish collected manuscripts but avoided books:

I have a friend & neighbor who is having a room built for his great collection. He takes out a book as though it were a new baby, his eyes glisten and voices are hushed as in a museum. Were it the MSS I would understand, but it is just one of many printed at the time, albeit a fine job and hard to get and expensive to own. I wouldn't want to get that way. I almost got four with George Washington's signature in them, but luckily was willed a fine Saray Highboy instead, though it ought to be in a museum instead of up here in the New Hampshire hills.

We have no idea what four books signed by George Washington Parrish refers to but I suspect that readers may be salivating, as I am, at the thought of possessing them. I have no idea what the market is for a Saray highboy but the signed Washington books must surely exceed it in value.

Stone, an avid book collector, replied to Parrish, an avid hobby machinist, on January 16, 1931, mentioning the Gutenberg Bible exhibit at the LOC,  printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers (1870-1957), and printer Billy Budge,  an "old-timer," according to the Typographical Journal in 1902, working in Chicago. He also defends the collection of books:

On permanent exhibition in a magnificent mahogany case in the Library of Congress, I imagine it will be of continued interest to a ledge percentage of the people who visit the Library‚ as I feel sure you would enjoy not only this particular copy of the Bible, but the seventeen hundred Fifteenth Century books, which will remain on exhibition for some months.

I have forgotten whether I sent you one of the little booklets which Billy Budge printed for me - "All Hope Abandon - Ye Who Enter Here." If not, I will be glad to send you a copy. Maybe this might ease your pain about not being a book collector. But in my sixty six years I have found nothing to take its place - nothing comparable, but, of course, there are many things I have not tried and know nothing about, but I know of people who have interests of all sorts and collectors who are crazy about everything from stamps to colonial antique furniture, paintings, etchings, and everything imaginable. I think it's a fine thing for anyone to get thoroughly interested in a given thing and know all about it that they can possibly find out. You know someone has said: 'There is more o know about an electron than the mind of any one man can contain.' So whether it be in four-leaf clovers or whatnot, there is great enjoyment, just as there must be in your hobby of machines, mechanics or in models of ships, as was Bruce Rogers.

It is easy for me to understand the thrill that you would get from collecting manuscripts, but such a hobby would be a little too much for me, although I have a few manuscript Books of Hours, the works of some of the old writers and scribes, and they all give me a great thrill. Only the other day I found in a little volume of Ovid the signature of 'Robert Browning, Venice 1878." And although I am not collecting autographs or inscriptions, they certainly do add to the pleasure and particularly if they are accompanied by a sentiment or have some special association. Just as there is a bit of pleasure in having a book printed in Leyden, 1616, by William Brewster before he sailed on the Mayflower, although the subject is not intriguing - Cartwright's 'Commentaries of Solomon.' One of my manuscript books dates back to 1330, quite old for me to own…
 
Last June I was in John Byland's library where they have twelve hundred manuscript books, and to look at a showcase full of them ne could easily imagine viewing a jewelry case with the wonderful illuminated goldwork, wonderful floral designs and other decorations…
 
I have only one George Washingon signature, one of Patrick Henry and William Blake. I suspect I have many others that I have not mentally catalogued."

Edward Lee Stone, author of a Book-Lover's Bouquet (1931) and The Great Gutenberg Bible (1930) was born in Liberty, Virginia (now known as Bedford, VA). After working for John P. Bell's printing company, Stone was promoted and eventually took over the business. He became a wealthy and prominent citizen of Roanoake, VA through his business, the Stone Printing and Manufacturing Company. His wealth went a long way in helping the LOC buying the Gutenberg from Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul.

The Parrish letter and Stone's three-page typed response are being offered by PBA Galleries in their Historic Autographs and Manuscripts With Archival Material sale, July 25, 2013.It is estimated to sell for $700-$1000.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Ancient Empress Heats Up Rare Book Bound By A Master

July 22, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Front wrapper.

Vulgar, insatiably lustful, shrewish, calculating, mean-spirited, born in a brothel and, above all, beautiful, she was the daughter of a bear trainer father and actress-dancer mother from Byzantium (Constantinople). Or, in the sanitized version, she was gorgeous and pious, the daughter of a Miaphysite Christian priest.

Title page.

The Byzantine Roman Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian I, was one of the most influential women of her time. Justinian sought her counsel on politics, and she is credited with influencing social reforms, including the expansion of divorce rights of and property ownership by women, other rights for women, and the rights of children. Born in 497 CE, she reigned from 527 CE until her death at age fifty-one in 548 CE.

She got the royal treatment from French historian Charles Diehl (1859-1944) in a magnificently designed biography, Theodora Imperatrice de Byzance, with Italian Art Nouveau illustrator Manuel Orazi providing the lithographed decorations and images. It was published in Paris by L'Edition D'Art H. Piazza et Cie in 1904 in a limited edition of 300 numbered copies.

Chapter headpiece.

I recently had a copy pass through my hands, bound by René Kieffer of Paris and fit for an empress in a stunning Art Nouveau binding as showy as the sixty full color and gilt lithographed illustrations and decorative borders that frame the text.

Theodora's debut.

Diehl concentrates on the hot ancient empress born in a brothel aspects of Theodora's life as told by the historian Procopius, a scribe for the Byzantine Roman general Belisarius and Theodora's contemporary, in his Historia Arcana (Secret History) which went unpublished for over a thousand years until discovered in the Vatican Library. Within, Procopius claimed that both Justinian and Theodora were "fiends in human form" whose heads, according to witnesses, left their bodies to roam their palace. Had Procopius published the work his severed head would have roamed the palace like a  bowling ball.


Prior to the Historia Arcana Procopius wrote two other accounts of Theodora, twenty years younger than Justinian and his mistress before becoming his wife, both published while Justinian was alive and capable of retribution if he didn't like what he read. Each portrayed her as a courageous and influential (The Wars of Justinian), pious Christian (The Buildings of Justinian). Squeaky clean, that queen. But Procopius became disillusioned and turned bitter against the imperial couple.

You tell me which account is the more likely to appeal to a broad, popular audience:


"Theodora, the second sister, dressed in a little tunic with sleeves, like a slave girl, waited on Comito and used to follow her about carrying on her shoulders the bench on which her favored sister was wont to sit at public gatherings. Now Theodora was still too young to know the normal relation of man with maid, but consented to the unnatural violence of villainous slaves who, following their masters to the theater, employed their leisure in this infamous manner. And for some time in a brothel she suffered such misuse.

"But as soon as she arrived at the age of youth, and was now ready for the world, her mother put her on the stage. Forthwith, she became a courtesan, and such as the ancient Greeks used to call a common one, at that: for she was not a flute or harp player, nor was she even trained to dance, but only gave her youth to anyone she met, in utter abandonment. Her general favors included, of course, the actors in the theater; and in their productions she took part in the low comedy scenes. For she was very funny and a good mimic, and immediately became popular in this art. There was no shame in the girl, and no one ever saw her dismayed: no role was too scandalous for her to, accept without a blush.

Champion with Theodora as prize.

"She was the kind of comedienne who delights the audience by letting herself be cuffed and slapped on the cheeks, and makes them guffaw by raising her skirts to reveal to the spectators those feminine secrets here and there which custom veils from the eyes of the opposite sex. With pretended laziness she mocked her lovers, and coquettishly adopting ever new ways of embracing, was able to keep in a constant turmoil the hearts of the sophisticated. And she did not wait to be asked by anyone she met, but on the contrary, with inviting jests and a comic flaunting of her skirts herself tempted all men who passed by, especially those who were adolescent.

 "On the field of pleasure she was never defeated" (Procopius, Historia Arcana, Chapter 9, trans. by Richard Atwater).

Theodora Imperatrice de Byzance, no shock,went into five editions in its first year of publication but this, the true first, has become scarce. It was reprinted in 1937, and translated into English and published by F. Ungar in New York, 1972.

Binding by René Kieffer.
 

This copy was bound c. 1904 by René Kieffer in full mauve crushed morocco that picks-up the hue from the title page decoration. Multiple fillets and deep purple onlays as borders enclose an Art Nouveau design incorporating gilt-outlined, green onlaid flowers, gilt stems, and gilt-outlined, black onlaid branchwork, with gilt-bordered black onlaid dots. The design is reiterated in the spine compartments. 


Broad mauve morocco turn-ins with gilt rules and cornerpieces grace the inner covers with deep blue-purple patterned silk endpapers. Marbled endleaves follow the silk endpapers. All edges are gilt and the original wrappers are preserved.  Kieffer's ticket is found on the verso of the front endleaf. The whole is housed in the binder's morocco-edged slipcase

Inner front cover turn-in, with Kieffer's stamp.

According to Duncan & De Bartha's Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding, René Kieffer (1875-1964) worked for ten years at the famed Chambolle-Duru bindery in Paris, specializing in gilding, before establishing his own workshop in 1903. He debuted at the 1903 Salon des Artistes Françcais, and, evolving toward to more modern approach, became a disciple of the great Marius-Michel. At the time of this binding's creation he had begun to incorporate a transitional mix of flowers, vines, and colorful onlays in rather formal compositions, their Art Nouveau motifs retained within symmetrical borders that revealed his classical roots. By the end of World War I he had emerged as one of Paris's leading binders, his work sought after by collectors, his fine workmanship matched by a wide range of of progressive designs.

Endpaper.

The patterned silk endpapers are extraordinary, amongst the most attractive and unusual I've seen; wonderful things happen when light strikes them at various angles.

Kieffer's stamp.
Kieffer's ticket.

Kieffer's design was not particularly original for the period yet the binding's beauty and masterful craftsmanship earned him the right to advertise his work as Art Bindings and the honorific, Binder to the Empress Theodora, sexpot sovereign of the Eastern Roman Empire.
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[KIEFFER, René, binder]. DIEHL, Charles.Theodora Imperatrice de Byzance. Par Chalres Diehl, Charge de Cours a la Faculté des Lettres de L'University de Paris. Illustrations de Manuel Orazi. Paris: L'Edition D'Art H. Piazza et Cie., n.d. [1904].

First edition, limited to 240 copies (of 300) on vélin à la cuve, this being no. 242. Quarto (8 7/8 x 6 1/4 in; 226 x 159 mm). 261, [1] pp. Decorative text borders. Sixty full color and gold lithographed text illustrations, twelve hors texte.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Dieter Rot Sets In

July 23, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Alastair Johnston


wait, later this will be nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, edited by Sarah Suzuki et al, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2013, 96 pp., 108 illustrations, paperback.

    Funny how things come in threes. Last year I wrote on Booktrystabout Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish artist (concrete poet and landscape gardener). Finlay's son Eck got a laugh out of my review, calling my take, "IHF: the Dolce & Gabbana Years"! I noted that he had dismissed Dom Sylvester Houédard (ironically the first person to champion Finlay in print in Britain, in an excellent piece in Typographica 8) as "anti-culture" and "nonsense." Then I received a copy of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter by DSH and reviewed it last week. Both of these pieces mentioned the publisher Hansjörg Mayer and both also mentioned the Icelandic concrete poet and book artist, Dieter Rot. So by some curious coincidence, Saturn cheap-day Return, or whatever you want to call it, I am back looking at the 1960s and the movements that promised so much then.

    It has been 50 years and those of us who remember the 60s are old codgers thinking nostalgically about the explosion of art, fashion and music that signaled our coming of age, and how much grimmer things got, from "Free Love" succumbing to AIDS, acid trips becoming the nightmare of drug wars with crackheads and cough-syrup slurpers pervading all corners of society, to the great liberating joy of rock-n-roll, punk & new wave, succumbing to disco then becoming the tired pablum of Justin Bieber  & Britney Spears. What went wrong? we cry. Stop babbling, gramps, say the youth, and drink your Ensure.

    Dieter Rot (or Roth as he is called here) was born in Germany in 1930. Though he operated at the same time as Op Art, Actionism and Fluxus, he went his own way and, like another German, Kurt Schwitters, he created his own one-man art movement. And he did it out of Germany, moving from Switzerland to Iceland in 1955. His biggest influence was Marcel Duchamp and he worked closely with British pop artist Richard Hamilton as well as the printer and typographer Hansjörg Mayer. There is one constant in Rot's output and that is editioned works, whether books or prints, but otherwise he changed means of expression constantly.


     The title of this monograph suggests the transience of all things, and points to the fact the Rot used cardboard, Sellotape, newsprint and other non-archival material to make his art. (Schwitters too liked bits of acidic newsprint and so many of his artworks are now uniformly brown whereas they once had sparkling red and yellow passages.) Rot's art or anti-art was ahead of its time, though obviously Duchamp and Cage are big influences. He took sheets of overprinted waste paper from a printshop floor and bound them into books. Of course there is an unconscious element in there and the random juxtaposition of fragmentary found images would be a constant in his work for the next two decades. He made masks out of black paper by cutting holes in a sheet at random then overlaying it on a printed page. He also die-cut holes in randomly assembled pieces of print matter.


   Rot's Daily Mirror Book of 1961 is a good example of his conceptual art: he cut random 2 centimetre squares out of the British tabloid Daily Mirror then perfectbound them -- the result is a "book" with pages, text, fragments of ads and imagery that is an archaeological slide of a moment. It also signals a new form: the Artist's Book. (Later he recycled this book, taking some of the pages and blowing them up to be much larger, for Quadratblatt, 1965.)


    Another artwork, less obviously a book, but no less an "artistsbook" is his Litteraturwurst, which he created in different incarnations throughout the 1960s. He took a book or newspaper and ground it up, added gelatin, lard and spices, and stuffed it into a sausage skin. You could slice your own text from it, like congealed alphabet soup (though not so vegetarian). He offered it to George Maciunas as a Fluxus publication but it was rejected. (Thus becoming another of many artworks misunderstood, even by their intended audience.) His point was, we consume literature like sausage and it too ends up as shit. He made litteraturwurst out of Marx, James Joyce, Goethe, Hegel, Günter Grass and many other authors he felt needed this treatment.

    Roth loved playing jokes on the artworld. Not like those clowns Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst who are merely naughty boys in art class saying "But Sir it is art, my mammy says so…," but in a more subversive way. He made a bunny rabbit shaped like a chocolate rabbit you might consume at easter. (Remember the Swiss love chocolate probably more than they love sausage.) It's called "Karnickelköttelkarnickel (Bunny-dropping-bunny)" -- which is amusing in itself. It was manufactured, out of rabbit droppings, in an edition of 250. Not only does chocolate resemble shit, but a lot of art is really shit, he seems to be saying. He called his collected poems The Collected Shit, forestalling any criticism, and retained all the errors in his German that his students at R.I.S.D. (who were tasked with assembling the work) introduced. He stepped in an artwork of his contemporary Joseph Beuys (a bucket of lard), but the more celebrated artist graciously allowed his action as a "collaboration." 


    A self-portrait has a Duchampian title, "P. O. TH. A. A. VFB." (written in Dymo tape on the pedestal), it stands for "Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste." His lumpy ugly sub-Giacometti self-portrait bust is made of chocolate and birdseed. His intention was that the work would be left in a garden to be consumed by the birds and vanish as the artist himself does. Of course it ended up in a museum being worried over by conservationists. From the gloom of Beckett to the exuberance of Paolozzi you can see a mirror of the times in his work.

    Rot's increasing use of food was problematic, not just for posterity, but even during its existence. Cupcakes in the shape of a motorcyclist were given out at a gallery opening … and eaten. An installation of pieces of cheese which were supposed to slide down a wall towards open suitcases became rancid and maggoty in a few days and eventually the gallerist's husband drove the art to the desert and abandoned it.

    Roth didn't like the Fluxus artists ("A good thing they are modest, he said, because they have no talent"); he doesn't seem to have liked anybody very much ("James Joyce is kitsch"), apart from his collaborators Hansjörg Mayer and Richard Hamilton, but he created some very amusing and provocative artworks, some in multiple editions, and many of which stretch our concept of what a book is or can be.
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Pablo Escobar: Drug Lord & Book Publisher?

July 24, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


Quick - you've just been incarcerated in La Cathedral, a maximum-security prison in Columbia built to your exacting specs so your accommodations are deluxe. You were the world's most notorious cocaine trafficker, head of the Medellin Cartel, but now you're all dressed-up with no place to go. You don't want anyone to forget your infamy. What's a coke kingpin to do?


Publish a book.

Frontispiece.

In 1992 Pablo Escobar did just that. Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991 is his self-published valentine to himself, a vanity publication containing 352 political cartoons, photographs, and drawings (four in color) that originally appeared in Columbian newspapers.


Printed on June 2, 1992, it was limited to a small number of copies, the exact number unknown. It's full calf binding was graced by Escobar's facsimile signature and fingerprint on the front cover. After Escobar's escape from the lap of penal luxury a month later, in late July, 1992, his family, for reasons unclear, burned the print run. It appears that only a handful have survived, perhaps ten copies at most. It has become quite scarce.
 

But in a reminder that price is tied to market demand and not necessarily an item's rarity, the offering price on this book has ranged from the ludicrously absurd to the possibly reasonable. Two sellers on eBay - a site that has legitimate and knowledgeable rare booksellers yet is tainted by so many amateurs who have little idea of what they're doing and no feel for the market - offered copies at $60,000 (November, 2012) and $107,000 (February, 2013). PBA Galleries offered a copy in June, 2012 that was estimated to sell for $10,000 - $15,000.


The market spoke and it said (with Jamaican accent), "Have you lost your mind, Mon?" No surprise: they did not sell.

The eBay sellers had no excuse. PBA Galleries' initial auction page remains online with results posted (the lot in question, #94, excluded from the list, indicating no sale). The eBay offers were pure fantasy based upon a crackpipe dream. With no prior auction sales to compare to, PBA's estimate was, if too high, at least serious and down to earth, professionally evaluated, and within the realm of possibility based upon its staff handling thousands of rare books each year and knowledge of categories and their collectors.


Sanity prevailed when James Cummins Bookseller offered a copy two weeks ago for $5,000 and it immediately sold. The market found the price. The eBay copies possessed either Escobar's signature or the original publisher's box (as did the PBA copy), which, the dealers claimed, merited their grandiose, coked-up to the gills prices. (Why $107,000? Why not $100,000 or $110,000?).

A  low ($5,000, Cummins) and high (<$10,000, PBA) value has now been established. We can safely presume that the bidding at PBA began at around $9,000 and there were no takers. The reserve was likely around the same and it was not met. The copies offered on eBay are now worth approximately $5,000 - $8,750, if, of course, there's someone else in the world who cares enough to fork over that sum. That estimate will rise, of course, if demand exceeds supply. It will decline, naturally, if collectors collectively shrug their shoulders.


What the eBay dealers didn't understand because they did not know the market, was that the one person in the world who was a keen collector of drug-related literature, a completist who wanted everything in his area of collection, and, significantly, possessed fabulous wealth, had died in 2011. But Julio Santo Domingo was no fool and would have laughed at the eBay prices; he knew the marketplace. Hell, he was the marketplace for drug-lit., dominating it for the last fifteen years of his life. Escobar's book is interesting but not that interesting, at best a bizarre curiosity, and most, if not all, active collectors of drug literature do not have the scratch necessary to buy at exorbitant prices no matter how scarce the volume. You can't price books in a vacuum; offers have to reflect market realities. There is no such thing as intrinsic monetary value to any collectable, only what collectors are willing to pay and they rule the market. If viewers of Antiques Roadshow have learned anything it is that the rarest anything in the world is well-nigh worthless if nobody cares about it.

Pablo Escobar, whose fortune was once estimated in billions of dollars, would have been thrilled to learn that his book was offered at $107,000. Then, after coming down from the coke high, he would have been depressed when a copy actually sold for only a measly five grand. The market spoke and it said, tu libro es agradable, pero no es para tanto, mi amigo. Lo siento.
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GAVIRIA, Pablo Escobar.Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991. [Medellin, Columbia: Pablo Escobar,  1992]. First (only) edition, unknown limitation. Large quarto ( (9x7¾ in); 230 x 200 mm). [2] - 377, [1] recto-only pp. with 13 leaves of prologue and text, 8 leaves of photographs and portraits, 352 leaves of political and caricature, four in full color. Original padded calf with facsimile signature and fingerprint in gilt. Housed in the publisher's box.
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Search

William S. Burroughs Exposes Scientology To Allen Ginsberg

July 26, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

Title page.

Serendipity struck Scientology when, simultaneous to actress Leah Remini's recent and very public defection from the controversial organization, a copy of William S. Burroughs exposé, Ali's Smile / Naked Scientology, came to market. It wasn't just any ol' copy. It was a Presentation Copy, Allen Ginsberg's, inscribed by Burroughs on the front wrapper, "For Allen / Love / William S. Burroughs," and signed "Allen Ginsberg aug 30, 1979 City Lights" on the half-title.

The book collects the author's various newspaper and magazine essays on Scientology and the Scientology-themed short story, Ali's Smile. Burroughs joined the organization during the Sixties, took courses, and became a "clear." But soon afterward he became disenchanted with the group's authoritarian and secretive nature and left the organization in 1970. Officially expelled, he was declared by Scientology to be in a "Condition of Treason."

Burroughs was initially attracted to Scientology because of its promise to liberate the mind by clearing it of traumatic memories that impeded personal growth, and, by extension, social progress and freedom from social control. His frequent collaborator, the artist Brion Gysin, introduced him to it and Burrough's "cut-up" technique in his early books reflected the influence of Hubbard's Dianetics and the fracturing of consciousness to attain a higher reality.

But as his biographer Ted Morgan noted, Burroughs "… had hoped to find a method of personal emancipation and had found instead another control system."

Burroughs wrote:

"In view of the fact that my articles and statements on Scientology may have influenced young people to associate themselves with the so called Church of Scientology, I feel an obligation to make my present views on the subject quite clear..."

"...Some of the techniques are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation. The E Meter is a useful device … (many variations of this instrument are possible). On the other hand I am in flat disagreement with the organizational policy. No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. Suppose Newton had founded a Church of Newtonian Physics and refused to show his formula to anyone who doubted the tenets of Newtonian Physics? All organizations create organizational necessities. It is precisely organizational necessities that have prevented Scientology from obtaining the serious consideration merited by the importance of Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries. Scientologists are not prepared to accept intelligent and sometimes critical evaluation. They demand unquestioning acceptance.

"Mr. Hubbard’s overtly fascist utterances (China is the real threat to world peace, Scientology is protecting the home, the church, the family, decent morals … positively no wife swapping. It’s a dirty Communist trick … national boundaries, the concepts of RIGHT and WRONG against evil free thinking psychiatrist) can hardly recommend him to the militant students. Certainly it is time for the Scientologists to come out in plain English on one side or the other, if they expect the trust and support of young people. Which side are you on Hubbard, which side are you on?" (Burroughs On Scientology, Los Angeles Free Press,  March 6, 1970, reprinted in Ali's Smile / Naked Scientology).

That Burroughs presented this copy of Ali's Smile / Naked Scientology to Allen Ginsberg is of no little significance. Burroughs had been proselytizing to his friend about Scientology as early as 1959. In a letter to Ginsberg dated October 27 of that year he wrote: "The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology. You will recall I wrote urging you to contact local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It works. I have used the method - partially responsible for recent changes."

Ginsberg was also concerned with personal liberation and freedom from social totalitarianism. With this copy of Ali's Smile / Naked Scientology Burroughs presented Ginsberg with his conclusions about the group and his deep concerns, which can be neatly summarized in a line from The Who's We Won't Get Fooled Again, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Dogma, orthodoxy, and authoritarian control were antithetical to everything Burroughs and Ginsberg stood for.
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BURROUGHS, William S.Ali's Smile Naked Scientology. Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1978. First collected edition of previously published work, first printing in wrappers, a Presentation Copy inscribed to Allen Ginsberg. Octavo. 106, [4] pp., text in German and English, translations by Carl Weissner. Pictorial wrappers.
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Original Schindler's List Offered At $3,000,000

July 29, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

"Don't miss your chance to own a piece of history that has inspired many on the difference one person can make in the face of great danger. This exceedingly rare original Schindler’s List is the only one ever on the market. It emanates from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant and right hand man (played by Ben Kingsley in the Academy Award-winning film). There are 3 others known which are in institutional hands. It is 14 pages in length and lists 801 male names, dated April 18, 1945. It is guaranteed authentic… Itzhak Stern typed up the 14 page list on onion skin paper. Up for auction is not a copy of that list, but the actual one. It was sold by Itzhak Stern's nephew to the current owner. It is dated in pencil on the first page, April 18, 1945."

An original of Oscar Schindler's list of factory workers to be saved from Nazi gas chambers was offered through an online auction that ended Sunday July 28th at 9PM EDT. On eBay. For  $3,000,000. That's three million george w's. It did not sell.


I, as most professional antiquarian booksellers, am customarily dubious about rare books and documents sold through eBay. Prices often appear to be calculated within a Martian atmosphere with little connection to market realities by sellers who are often amateurs, at best, and authentication can be a challenge. So, when I learned of this offer I simply shook my head: another wacko episode on eBay, the auction network at the bottom of the ratings.

However, when I casually mentioned this offer to a highly respected trade colleague here in Los Angeles he told me that he knew the seller. Not only that but the seller, Gazin Auctions/Auction Cause, was his next door neighbor.


Prior to the auction's end, I contacted Eric Gazin to find out if this is real or if I can share the opium pipe he's been sucking on.

SJG: How did you arrive at the offering price? Can you tell me something about the owner? How did the owner find you? I ask the last because I find it curious that it is being offered on eBay and not through Sotheby's, Christie's, or any other major auction house.

EG: The owner [in Israel] wishes to remain anonymous. This came to me through Gary Zimet, owner of Moments in Time, a document dealer. He is the one who arrived at this price. Contrary to conventional wisdom, eBay is a great location to offer these kinds of rare pieces. Our clients and buyers love the fact there is no 10% buyer's premium too, means more funds to spend on the auction item.

We sold the Rush Limbaugh - Harry Reid letter there for $2.1 million, the highest price ever achieved for a modern document. We have an active base of high net worth individuals who often make purchases from us.

SJG: At that price any serious collector will want to personally view it before committing to buy. What arrangements do you have for previewing the List?

EG: Yes, the winner will be able to see the List in person in Israel while his/her funds are in an escrow account and can bring along their expert.

SJG: If you have no bidders what's your next step?

EG: We have a few interested parties that may or may not bid, and if it ends without them bidding, we will be continuing the purchase discussions with them.

SJG: What sort of business do you have? What do you trade in?

EG: My company is a high profile auction management agency. We help mainly celebrities, charities, corporate brands, TV shows, and individuals with unique auction offerings which need design, promotion, bidder screening, logistic services, research, and consulting. Personally, I love historical items, rare books, and other paper pieces. We are always happy to assist a collector looking for a non traditional auction house alternative.

                                                              •  •  •

So, there you have it. Schindler's Original List, yours for only $3,000,000, private sale pending upon negotiation. When you can sell a letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Limbaugh's boss, Mark P. Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications, excoriating Limbaugh for intemperate comments (read it here), and co-signed by forty-one Democratic senators for $2.1 million, all of a sudden $3 mil for an original of Schindler's List doesn't seem an insane price, nor eBay an inane place for rare books and historical paper from a respectable, high-end dealer..
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Images courtesy of Gazin Auctions, with our thanks.
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How WET Can You Get?

July 30, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Alastair Johnston 

Leonard Koren, Making WET: the magazine of Gourmet Bathing, Point Reyes, Ca: Imperfect Publishing, 2012


 WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (1976–81), was a pioneering example of a California “lifestyle” magazine that was as much about the design and packaging as about the content. There were ads that looked like editorial content and vice versa. Ostensibly about bathing, it ran from 1976 until 1981, when the editor, Leonard Koren, left Venice, California, moved to San Francisco and then to Japan.

  The influence of Japanese culture increased steadily in the US, particularly the West Coast states, after the Second World War. Zen Buddhism was an important element, but so were the graphic arts. And there is the Japanese tea ceremony. “The Japanese tea room – despite its very appealing form and philosophy – was too culturally specific for the vague purposes I had in mind,” said Koren, who was a former architecture student looking for a direction.

   Koren wanted to create some kind of visual expression that was not in the mainstream. He had been thinking about bathrooms as important but overlooked places that were private and cleansing: they had illumination, heat and water. They involved nakedness and contemplation. He had used images of bathers in a series of artworks, and came up with the idea of a magazine about bathing. His magazine was to be about enthusiasms, and since California is about extremes, he though he would create a parody of enthusiasts.

   His inspiration was threefold, first there was Vogue which he saw as dogmatic, full of bombastic bluster and grand pronouncements about fashion, such as “BROWN is the new BLACK!” Then there was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which was a compendium of beautifully presented drivel by self-important minor celebrities; and thirdly, there was Gourmet, a foodie magazine which featured pretentious articles about meals. Koren liked the idea of a tongue-in-cheek combination of all three, a “Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” that was and was not about bathing: mud baths and soaps can only hold your attention for so long, but pretty much anything could work in the context. He started working on WET and delivered the magazine to friends in Venice Beach and Santa Monica, networking to sell ads or find contributors.

WET June/July 1977, photo by Raul Vega; design by Tom Ingalls & April Greiman

   In April 1977 he met the designer Tom Ingalls who had design world connections to photographers and graphic artists, that would improve the look of the magazine from a funky typewritten fanzine into something with more polish. At the time Ingalls was going through a break-up with his girlfriend April Greiman, and Koren hoped they could get along long enough to get the April/June issue of the magazine done. Greiman was on the verge of becoming one of the key figures in the LA design world. Her background was in textiles and she had gone to Basel, Switzerland, to study at the Art School there, but the faculty had plugged her into a series of courses in typography that were to transform her interests. She took the Swiss style she had been schooled in, and elements of Russian Constructivism she had picked up in Europe, and deconstructed them, leading to a postmodern style in American design in the 1980s (popularized, for example, on record album covers from Los Angeles-based labels).

  Cultural historian Frances Butler referred to it as “The LA Slash-and-Spritz style” because of the pieces of film, rubylith and artificial blotches added to the clean layouts that were appearing with the introduction of computerized design. No longer were jobs typeset in metal, repro-ed and pasted up, now there were photo-compositors, and most of the pre-press work was done on the light table. This led to a certain sterility in graphics that Greiman saw at once, and countered with stray bits of Zip-a-tone screen, registration marks and other tools which were normally invisible – a “baring the device” technique that had become popular in literature and film long before. In 1981, Butler wrote, “Sometimes the connection between visual incidents is not made explicit and the reader must try to trap these incidents into a syntax. Much contemporary graphic design has essentially a reader-sequencing structure. This is true of many Japanese posters, especially the early work of Tadanori Yokoo, and now the poster work of the Los Angeles slash-and-spritz school.”

WET September/October 1979, the "Religion" issue: Ricky Martin photographed by Guy Webster; designed by April Greiman & Jayme Odgers

  WET quickly evolved from a funky typewritten news-letter to a slick glossy publication and this attracted attention and advertisers. And while the content is more or less immaterial to advertisers, the nudity aspect didn’t hurt. As Koren said, “There is an appetite for nakedness – not the stagey, self-conscious nakedness of skin magazines, but the nakedness that lets the body pass by itself through the awakening and regenerating extremes of hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry, that the natural environment is so kind to provide.”

  The magazine took off (events at bath houses created a buzz in the press, followed by television interviews in hot tubs, and Mademoiselle editors coming to mud bath parties) and attracted a lot of talented Angeleno artists: designers John Van Hamersveld, Taki Ono and Rip Georges, cartoonists Matt Groening, Futzie Nutzle and Gary Panter, photographers Herb Ritts, Raul Vega and Jayme Odgers. Some at the start of their careers, lent their talents cheaply and helped push the boundaries of art and design that WET would become known for.

  Koren said, “Scattered throughout California there are certain latter-day saints – a dangerous number of whom seem to be artists, photographers, or writers – who get the joke of gourmet bathing without having it explained. Which is fortunate because the concept is so evanescent and mercurial that to attempt explanation is to risk over-kill.” He did explain that it is not a system, a therapy or a philosophy, it is “at most a point of view having some--thing to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small.”

WET September/October 1980, design by John Van Hamersveld
  
   The magazine continually reinvented itself. For one thing the designers used it as a calling card to move on to other better-paying or higher profile gigs, but through new approaches to graphics and editorial content, it evolved. John Van Hamersveld, who had already achieved design fame with covers for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972: a collage of Robert Frank photos with scrawled hand-lettering and visible tape and cut marks), Hotter than Hell by Kiss (1974: showing the influence of Tadanori Yokoo), and Eat to the Beat by Blondie (1979: hand-lettering, angled type and a grid), continued with an illustration career; Jayme Odgers’ trade-mark image of a hand holding a Polaroid was featured on Fleetwood Mac and other best-selling album covers; Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” cartoon made its first appearance in WET in 1978: it grew to a weekly syndication of 250 papers and launched Groening’s TV show “The Simpsons.”

   Koren found the thematic approach (e.g., “Religion”) was a good solution to pulling an issue together. He persuaded poet Lewis MacAdams to move south from Bolinas and assume the role of editor, which he fulfilled excellently, bringing in another range of literary connections, including William Burroughs’ essay “Is language a virus?” An article on necrophilia created a furor – and sold copies. Koren was well-networked. He dropped in on Noel Young in Santa Barbara and got a copy of Henry Miller’s essay “On Turning Eighty,” which ran in the magazine, as did an article on Henry Miller’s bathroom (Sept/Oct 1981). Fashion and music joined the regular contents. Kristine McKenna brought interviews with musicians that had uncensored language and ideas, making them unfit for more mainstream media. WET caught the Zeitgeist and was light and ephemeral, not predictable or ponderous. The ads blended into the editorial content and vice versa, creating a unified style, which is always desirable in a magazine.

WET September/October 1981, design by "King Terry" Teruhiko Yumura
 
    Koren refers to wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and seeing profundity in nature, as one of his guiding principles. D. T. Suzuki described wabi-sabi as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” In graphics there is a style known as hata-uma or good/bad art (literally “clumsy-tasty,” referring to the occasional appeal of the badly drawn), which extends wabi-sabi to illustration. Koren hired Tokyo-based Teruhiko Yumura as art director in 1981. Yumura (known in WET as King Terry) brought this fresh style to LA design and it influenced Gary Panter and others. Again confusing editorial and advertising matter, there is a full-page ad for Terry’s Hit Parade, a “full-color action art book from Japan’s number one illustrator,” available exclusively as a “terrible WET book.”

   The successful marketing of the Californian lifestyle, particularly in the context of water, was a trend that continued with Beach Culture (late 80s) and Ray Gun (Santa Monica, 1992–2000) magazines, designed by David Carson, that were also essentially pointless, but graphically far less interesting.
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"Wives Is What I Hanker For": Mormons Take Center Stage

July 31, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz


We shift from rare prose literature to rare literature of the theater today, inspired by an item offered in Swann Galleries upcoming Vintage  Posters sale, August 7, 2013.

During the 1880-1881 theatrical touring season the Goesche-Hopper Company presented 100 Wives, an anti-Mormon tabloid-theater comedy-melodrama with a dash of anti-Chinese racism that appears to have sold out every performance in every town and city it played in.

The playbill set forth the proceedings:

EMBLEMATIC TABLEAU - Inner Temple of the Mormons. The Danites Receiving a New Covenant. The Solemn Oaths of the Blood atonement. The Chant of the Priests. Immediately following this picture, which illustrates the mission of the Destroying Angels, the curtain rises upon the Play.

ACT I - Salt Lake City. Arrival of the English Colony at New Jerusalem. Elder Bezum's Wicked Designs. The McGinley Family. Elsie Bradford Hears Terrible News. A Timely Rescue.

ACT II - Nick's Ranch at McGinely's Gulch. The Chinese Question. A Boys Celebrate. A Lost Child. The Danites in Pursuit. Bezum Baffled. The Dead Restored To Life.

ACT III - TABLEAU I - McGinley's Home. Reconciliation and New Terrors. Mrs. McGinley's Plan. "Wives is what I hanker for." TABLEAU 2 - Up among the Mines. Little Bessie Prays for her Papa. The Death Fall from the Cliff.

ACT IV - Exterior of the Mormon Tabernacle. The Marriage. Elder Bezum presses Hard. The Mormon Church is Supreme. Surprise. The Govermnet has Something to Say at Last. "Home Sweet Home."

First on the bill, the play's lead character possesses my new favorite name, one right out of S.J. Perelman. Elder Bezum, third on the bill, is the zealous Mormon who declaims, "Wives is what I hanker for." A better headline for a personal ad  would be difficult to compose, "SWMM Seeks Wives! Wives, Wives!" lacking its quaint colloquial fervor.

The Cast:

Confucius McGinley, a Doubtful Convert.
Edward Branford, a Gentile.
Elder Bezum, A Pillar of the Church.
Hung Li, a Celestial.
Mrs. Sophronia McGinley, an Ambitious Woman.
Elsie Bradford, a Deceived Woman.
Mrs. Andrews, a Deluded Woman.
Little Bessie


"If this play could run for a hundred nights instead of closing this week, it would still not exhaust popular interest, for every one who has once seen it must want to go again. It has taken the town by surprise, and that, too, in the midst of election excitement; such a fresh and dramatic story, based on a matter that all are familiar with, yet that for the first time seems to come home to the audience with all its tragic capabilities.

"The popular idea of the 'American play,' with its slang and localisms of manners and dress, is very far indeed from all that is presentd in 'The Hundred Wives.' Nor need any one fear to be introduced into the American harem at Salt Lake, or be treated to any moralizing sermons or situations, in themselves demoralizing and disgusting. On the contrary the plot of this Mormon story is worked out with a hand at once delicate and skilful.

"The believer and the Danite, Mormon Apostle and Destroying Angel, are given just that touch of fanatic devotion and of quaint phraseology as brings out the livery this creed has adopted to serve the devil in, and the opening tableau of the Danite vow in the Mormon Tabernacle is the real keynote to the story. The skill, too, with which the Chinaman is made to foil a Mormon plot is very noticeable, especially as he is a typical Chinaman, of the California pattern, not above the tricks of his tribe - yet turning his secretive qualities to good and loyal effect as the plot thickens.


"Here are the two nearest problems that the American people have to deal with - the Chinese and the Mormon - most ingeniously worked out, and although the audience is in a broad ripple of laughter from beginning to end, there is an undercurrent of appeal constantly that this is a live story, and here is a matter that must be presently be settled in one or another way.

"The entirely novel humor and style of acting of Mr. De Wolf Hopper and Miss Ada Gilman have already been noticed. Both are such natural and such new personations, and both have such unusual physical advantages for the comic situation, that the matrimonial argument is irresistible whenever the diminutive wife takes her tall, strapping miner in hand. Mrs. Sophronia, with her unwavering attachment to the Mormon creed, and her undisguised horror of it when the reality os played off upon her by her own earnestness and her husband's joke, is altogether delightful.

"…In fine, the play is an argument, such as people can understand, against the hideous Mormon creed, which is suffered to exist by virtue of popular indifference to its every-day features. There will certainly be a change in public sentiment wherever the 'Hundred Wives' is played, for it is the one wife that comes out triumphant.

"Forcible as the plot is, it is none the less a clean plot, and all the more dramatic for being a true bill" (The Scrap Book, Volume 2, Sept. 1906- Feb. 1907, pp. 723-724, reprinting a review from the Philadelphia Ledger, 1880).

"This talking drama will occupy the boards at the opera house on Monday night next. The New Orleans Democrat pays the entertainment the following flattering tribute: The new American play, "One Hundred Wives," which has created an immense sensation wherever presented, was produced here last night and made a decided hit. The theater was filled from top to bottom, and the unanimous verdict of the immense audience was, that the drama is the best thing in its line which has ever been brought before a New Orleans audience. Though it is somewhat on the order of "The Danites," it is far superior to that play both in plot and detail. The company presenting it is an excellent one" (Decatur Review, January 28, 1882).

Producer-Actor De Wolf Hopper (1858-1935), who portrayed Confucius McGinley and was, presumably, the play's writer-director, was ninety-four marriages shy of "100 Wives." Married only six times, his fifth pass at the altar espoused him to actress Elda Furry, who later became the famed Old Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper.

The world awaits a play with clean plot and true bill whose lead character is named Lao Tse McGonagle, Mencius O'Malley, or Zhaozhou Schwartz.
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Images of 100 Wives and De Wolf Hopper courtesy of Swann Galleries; image of 100 Wives flyer courtesy of Ebay, with our thanks.
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Aubrey Beardsley's Reading Woman

August 1, 2013, 2:30 am
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by Stephen J. Gertz

AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898)
Chaix, Paris, 1897.
Cropped plate from Les Affiches Etrangères.
The original poster was published in 1894.
 
In 1894, Aubrey Beardsley created a poster to advertise T. Fisher Unwin's Children's Books.

"Printed in black and purple...in its most common form  it was used to advertise Topsys and Turvys by P.S. Newell, four works by Palmer Cox, the first 19 volumes in Unwin's Children's Library, The Land of Puck by Mary Mapes Dodge, and the magazine St. Nicholas. 


"According to Gallatin the poster was also produced in reduced size [as here, 1897].

"Copeland and Day also used Beardsley's drawing (printed in black and yellow) on a poster promoting The Yellow Book... They did so without Unwin's authorization, a step which led to an acrimonious correspondence between the two publishers and threats of legal action after the design was reproduced in an article about posters published in the March 1896 issue of The Overland Monthly, an American periodical" (Lasner).

Lasner 75. Gallitan 791.
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Image courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.
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