A Rosary of Teardrops: The Life of Henry Darger

by Alastair Johnston 

HENRY DARGER: THROWAWAY BOY The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist by Jim Elledge (Overlook Duckworth, 2013, 396 pp., illus., $29.95)

Long after his death in 1973 Henry Darger emerged, first as another curious figure in Outsider Art in America, then gradually, as the extent of his work became known, as a remarkable self-taught artist whose obsessions resulted in awkward, childish, brilliantly colored surreal paintings and the longest work of fiction ever written, In the Realms of the Unreal.

John M. MacGregor, a psychologist interested in the mental state of Outsider Artists, wrote the first study of his work (which appeared as Dans les Royaumes de l’Irréel: le Monde de Henry Darger, from Art Brut in Lausanne, 1995, before appearing in English), stating emphatically that Darger had "the mind of a serial killer" and was possibly a "murderer and pedophile." During his decline into senility, Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, hired a neighbor to clear out the packrat’s Chicago apartment and only then discovered it contained art and writing: the distillation of his years of longing and scavenging in quest of something unobtainable. The landlords’ (who benefited to the tune of millions from Darger’s art) only acquaintance with the recluse had been occasional remarks about the weather when they ran into him. They had no idea this soul was someone who had been brought to tears by snowfall as a child.

In fact his whole miserable life was one of complete obscurity. Based on the startling artworks (some 300 paintings found in his apartment), a disturbing portrait emerged among critics of Darger as a sexually frustrated lunatic with a vague grasp of children’s anatomy and an insatiable blood-lust. Now we have a full scale biography, meticulously researched and imaginatively reconstructed by Jim Elledge to put Darger's art in a whole new light. Fortunately Elledge is a writer with a grasp of history, particularly the little-known history of gays in the late nineteenth century, and his discourse is free of terms like "discourse" -- not to mention "reification" or "structuralism."

In “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Charles Baudelaire posited that “genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will.” Many artists use memory and reflection, remembrances of things past, as the inspiration for their work. But the innocence and curiosity of childhood are lost as we grow up. Like Balthus, Darger got stuck in adolescence, and the key to Darger is his childhood. So Elledge takes us back to the sordid corner of West Madison Street, Chicago, where Henry Darger Junior was created. His parents were German immigrants scrabbling to raise themselves up to a better life in the new world. Darger’s father was a tailor but, unlike his hard-working brothers who rose out of poverty, Darger’s father was a drunkard, and after the death of his wife in childbirth he became more dissolute and lived with the boy in a run-down shack. Young Henry was raised on the streets. He lied, stole and fought and showed a taste for pyromania.

Various Catholic do-gooders attempted to give him some education but he resisted, slashing one teacher with a knife, and ended up running with gangs of boys who would entice and then roll homosexuals. In school he acted out so much (speaking in voices) the other kids nicknamed him “Crazy.” Older boys and men would protect young Henry, who was small for his age, in return for sexual favors. It was the only route he knew to money and food. We know he was sexually promiscuous because among other things he was locked up at age 12 for excessive and sometimes public masturbation.

Fifty years from now Americans will marvel at the ludicrousness and expense we incurred to imprison people for possessing marijuana. Pot smoking is not a social evil, incarceration is. A century ago the insane asylums were full of people who had syphilis or were habitual masturbators. Spilling your vital seed, your “precious bodily fluids,” as fans of Dr Strangelove know, is a fatal weakness. But recognized authorities like Dr Kellogg (father of the flakes) expounded about the effeminacy that resulted from excessive wanking. In those days a man or boy who jerked off was considered to be temporarily transformed into a girl while his body regenerated his manly essence. Homosexuals were only of one type: men who dressed as women, wore makeup and had floral names, like Daisy or Violet. Machos who liked punking other men or boys were considered normal heteros with a taste for variety. Society thought the evils of masturbation and homosexuality were so great that the only sure cure was castration.

At Jennie Richee, n.d. (detail)

In Elledge's view, the little girls with penises, familiar from Darger’s massive paintings, are not hermaphrodites or freaks — or the product of his ignorance of female anatomy — they are emasculated boys.

Henry failed at schoolwork. If he received any money from his aunt he would be punished as a thief. If he told on the others they would extract sadistic revenge. He did have an interest in history, particularly the American Civil War which had ended three decades earlier. When a teacher mentioned that so many thousand men had died at some battle, Henry said that he had read three different figures in three different books therefore could not agree with the teacher’s estimate. Punished for being a wise guy, he soon shut up. Tales of life in the dark corridors of the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy reminded me of Papillon on Devil’s Island, without the tattoos and shrunken heads, but still pretty vicious. But the “vice, degeneracy and abnormal behavior” exhibited by Henry meant the Catholics couldn’t control him and asked his father to remove him.

At this point the father, turning down an incredibly generous offer from one of the matrons to adopt the lad, handed him over to the State Insane Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, 150 miles away on the prairie where he could forget about him. He was enrolled, unartfully, as Henry Dodger (later amended to Dagett). Henry thought the food was good and plenty, and he wolfed down heapings of breakfast oatmeal. Interestingly the asylum fodder was considered wormy oatmeal, wormy prunes and rotten meat, which suggests that the food in the Catholic home had been worse!

Untitled, pencil & watercolor, n.d., (detail)

The children were beaten with boards, raped and punished in many sadistic ways. One of the guards’ tricks was strangulation with a towel, which didn’t leave marks, until the child’s tongue lolled and they passed out. Deaths from castrations gone wrong led to an inquiry and the newspapers reported the sordid details: a 1907 investigative committee was shocked at the seeming callousness of the hospital staff. The committee reported that there were many problems that needed attention, in particular, although it was called The Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, there were many children of normal intelligence there as well as many adults (transferred from overcrowded prisons) who were left unsupervised after 10 p.m. in the dormitories with the children.

The girls fared as badly as the boys, one was gnawed by rats and lost a finger as well as much of her skin, another died after being put in a scalding hot bath. Her piercing screams were ignored. After Darger’s father’s death he wrote “I was very dangerous if not left alone.” As he entered his teens Henry could no longer face the future in this institution which now consigned him to full days of farm labor. He tried to escape, was captured and roped and led back tied to a horse like a beast. His second attempt was also a failure, but by the time he was 16 he managed to hop a freight and ride back to Chicago. But once there he had no idea what to do but surrender to police who sent him back to the city nuthouse where he had been locked up as a 6 year old. After a month he was returned to the Asylum but fled again, this time going South where he worked for a farmer for a few days and then set off to walk the 160 miles back to Chicago. After a five year absence, he showed up on his aunt’s doorstep and told her he had been cured of his insanity and discharged.

At Norma Catherine. Are captured again by Glandelinian Cavalry

His relatives didn’t know what to do with him, but all he wanted from them was to know what had happened to the baby sister who had been given up for adoption. This was the central puzzle of his life. He couldn’t believe her lot had been as bad as his. His godmother didn’t exactly welcome him with open arms, but called on an old acquaintance, a nun who worked at St Joseph’s Hospital, and managed to get Henry hired as a janitor. However, the nurses and nuns all knew he had been in the asylum and gave him a wide berth and any time they thought he needed a reality check they threatened to send him back. He worked long hours in return for a room and board. 

But then in 1911 his life changed. Darger met an older man, "Whillie" Schloeder, and the two had a friendship that lasted until Schloeder’s death in 1959. They were photographed together thrice and all indications are that they were a couple. With some stability now in his life Henry began writing and illustrating his novel in the style of a children's book, In the Realms of the Unreal. Endless and unreadable, it occupied him for the rest of his life.

Michael Bonesteel published excerpts in his book on Darger and now Elledge has gone further to identify sources and point out the parallels to Darger’s own life in the story of the seven Vivian girls and the war between good and evil. The Vivian girls are fairies in both senses of the word: girls in spirit trapped in boys' bodies, as well as beings from an unearthly realm. There are numerous clues to Henry as Marie, one of the characters, and also the fact that he notes that the real author is Annie Aronburg, another alter-ego. He copied out important personal documents into his notebooks but always changed his own name to Annie Aronburg. Later he used pseudonyms, including Dargarius, claiming he was born in Brazil, and as proof would sing a children's marching song in Portuguese.

It was the abduction, rape and strangulation of a 5-year-old child named Elsie Paroubek that set Henry off. As a janitor he would find all the day's papers discarded in the hospital waiting rooms and could follow the drama which unfolded for a month before the child's corpse was found in a canal. There had been a monumental hunt for the girl, including pursuit of an Italian organ grinder and the belief that she had been kidnapped by gypsies and forced to beg. Another little girl, Lillian Wulff, who had escaped from gypsies showed remarkable strength of character and advised the police. But in the end the murderer was never apprehended.

Henry empathized with the tiny victim because it was the kind of abuse he had put up with all through his childhood. Although Henry had escaped with his life, he "understood her fear, her wanting to be back with her family, and what it meant to be raped and strangled. She became an emblem to him of his own abuse." He was moved to begin writing In the Realms of the Unreal. The illustrations were based on popular sources, Saturday Evening Post, the Sunday funnies etc, but were subsumed by Darger into his own fantasy and took on the sinister qualities of torture and disembowelment found in Japanese guro manga today.

A second novel, Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House, is even more autobiographical, as Elledge points out, interweaving stories from Darger's life with fiction based on his library as well as his established cast of characters (Penrod -- a readymade boy hero from Booth Tarkington -- and the Vivian girls), but this time set in Chicago, rather than a fantasyland. The hero, Webber George, is badly behaved and mad at God for not making him a girl. (The surname George is common among the Romany or gypsy families but Elledge doesn't pursue this.) Many of Webber's escapades are drawn directly from Darger's autobiography and he himself enters the narrative to say, "the writer knows quite a number of boys who would give anything to have been born a girl."

Creative activity quelled his pent-up rage and inner torment, since "God had made his life a rosary of miseries and tragedy." A third work, promisingly titled The History of My Life, written in his seventies, derails into an apocalyptic revenge tale of a tornado (appropriated from Oz, though Darger had witnessed the devastation of a tornado personally) named Sweetie Pie that wreaks havoc on the Midwest, destroying all those places where Darger had suffered.

We now have several coffee-table books reproducing the remarkable art of Henry Darger and this biography fills in the sad details behind the work: his life of pain and despair, religious anguish and daily misery. (As an aside, all of the works of Darger are marked © Kiyoko Lerner, but this would never stand up in court. Apart from the fact he has living relatives, most of the work is not registered with the copyright office and she could not prove legal entitlement [See U.S. Copyright Law, Involuntary Transfer of Ownership, Section §201 (e)].)

What remains? We know he had a cupboard full of books including all of L. Frank Baum, some Dickens, books about the Great Fire of Chicago, and a mass of ephemera, pictures clipped from magazines to be traced and collaged into his art, which he pasted into old phone books. He also had a collection of 78 rpm records that he played into the night while he worked: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Darger would be astounded at this interest in his life. (Even the little victim "Elsie Paroubek" brings up 65,000 Google search results.)

Acres of manuscript remain for the doctoral thesis machine to pick over before we wring all the sentimentality out of one of the saddest lives ever saved from the rubbish dump and held up for our contemplation.
__________
__________

Poet & Literary Hoaxster John Glassco On Pornography, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

Scraping the crumbling roadbed of this strife
With rotting fenceposts and old mortgages
(No way of living, but a mode of life),
How sift from death and waste three grains of duty,
O thoughts that start from scratch and end in a dream
Of graveyards minding their own business?

But the heart accepts it all, this honest air
Lapped in green valleys where accidents will happen!

                     — John Glassco, "The Rural Mail"

What distinguishes good porn from bad? Is there an aesthetic of pornography? Are porn novels an essentially romantic genre of literature? What are the true rewards of authorship? Is Margaret Atwood a sexual fetishist? And did Leonard Cohen really want to give up singing and join the Israeli army?

Last year, A Gentleman of Pleasure, literary historian Brian Busby's biography of the enigmatic Canadian poet, memoirist, acclaimed translator of French-Canadian poetry, novelist, pornographer, and literary hoaxster, John Glassco, the self-proclaimed "great practitioner of deceit," was published. Now, Mr. Busby presents The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of Glassco's letters.

Glassco's correspondents included novelist Kay Boyle; poet and novelist, Robert McAlmon; Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias; novelist, poet, and critic Malcolm Cowley; novelist Margaret Atwood; Henry James' biographer, Leon Edel; and many other literary notables, including novelist, literary and cultural critic, and professor, Geoffrey Wagner, who, under the pseudonym, P.N. Dedeaux, wrote a handful of erotic novels in the 1960s and early '70s that remain amongst the best written of the era.

DEDEAUX, P.N. [Geoffrey Wagner]. The Tutor.
Wilmington, Delaware: Taurus Publications, 1970.
Distributed by All America Distributors Corp.
True first edition, reprinted by Venus Library (Grove Press), 1971.

DEDEAUX, P.N. [Geoffrey Wagner]. Tender Buns.
North Hollywood: Essex House #0126, 1969.
First edition.

Glassco, whose Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) is considered to be the best view of expatriate Paris in the 1920s, had a gift for stylistic imitation. He seamlessly completed Aubrey Beardsley's unfinished erotic novel, Under the Hill (aka Venus and Tannhauser) for Olympia Press in Paris (1959). He wrote the erotic poem, Squire Hardman, which he mischievously ascribed to George Colman the Younger, a once popular British dramatist and writer of the late eighteenth- early nineteenth centuries).

First edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970.

He was the author of what is arguably the best-selling, most popular erotic novel in English of all time, The English Governess by Miles Underwood (Paris: Ophelia Press [Olympia Press], 1960) aka Harriet Marwood, Governess, The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, An English Governess; The Governess; Under the Birch, and who knows how many other reprint titles, a novel so often pirated that it may hold a record in that department, too. Glassco also wrote Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer, which he, with a gallant wink, dedicated, "To John Glassco."

He wrote the Introduction to The Temple of Pederasty by Ihara Saikaku, translated by Hideki Okada (Brandon House/Hanover House, 1970). He wrote more than the Introduction.  The book, purportedly based on one by the very real 17th century Japanese poet and novelist, Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), the volume is an grand exercise in literary deception. The translator, 'the late Dr. Hideki Okada,' is actually Glassco himself. Glassco's translation (in his word, "interpolation") is, for the most part, derived from Ken Sato's unintentionally hysterical and inept translation of Saikaku's Quaint Stories of the Samurais, a collection of homoerotic tales published by Robert McAlmon, Paris, 1928.

In Glassco's letters to Wagner he shares his thoughts on literary pornography.

"Ours are only more sophisticated, in better taste, more literate and civilized. In my 'Art of Pornography' I have hazarded a tentative definition of the genre, in so far as it can be considered a branch of literary art, as 'that kind of aphrodisiac writing which, no matter to what sexual disposition of vagary it is addressed, can command the interest of a judicious reader of dissimilar psychosexual disposition.' This rules out all kinds of trash but leans heavily on imponderables. I was simply trying to formulate some definition, to isolate what we know is good pornography (Cleland, Nerciat, Voisenon, Beardsley, Swinburne) from the mass of rubbish like Rosa Fielding, The Lustful Turk, etc. and such dead horses as poor Steven Marcus flogs so pointlessly [in The Other Victorians]. I was subjecting pornography to an aesthetic test: perhaps thereby imposing on it a dead critical hand. - the essential mystery of sadomasochism itself remains dark, and I for one shall never unravel it. All I know is that like all forms of psychosexuality it is auto-erotic, subjective, and the partner sought (and sometimes found, and isn't this a blessing) in real life is only a projection of one's own self. One does find one's alter-ego, as I know; and so does she, and then everything in the garden is lovely, even for years.  The real Luv arrives, and dulls the sharp end of sex, and both go wandering off on their endless quest for variety, separately alas, still seeking some new double version of the self..."

"Dear old Bizarre! It was an oasis back in the dreary fifties. Yes, I remember the wonderful photo of of Mlle Polaris, the Queen of the Wasp-waists, in her extraordinary corset, which John Willie unearthed and reprinted….He was a Pioneer. Though his pony-girl fantasy, in monthly episodes, did get rather tedious: the writing was so amateur…

"Thanks for your suggestion that I send the Governess to the Penthouse Book Society. Alas, I sold all British rights outright, in dear Harriet to one Aaron M. Shapiro of New York for $1,000 down and 50% of everything he can get over this. And notre cher Maurice G. owns the rights to the obscene version. He still owes me $500 (due last July) but what hope. So I am now only an onlooker of the progress of this absurd book. It gives me unexampled delight to see it on drugstore counters and being bought by liplicking trembly-handed gents on Montreal. These are the true rewards of authorship" (Sept 3, 1968).

North Hollywood: Hanover House (Brandon House), 1970.

On April 12, 1970, copies of Glassco's Temple of Pederasty sent to him by the publisher in California were intercepted at the Canadian border, examined in Ottawa, and determined to be "immoral or indecent." On April 24th, Glassco wrote Wagner:

"I just might make an issue of this. I am consulting our great F.R. Scott (Lady Chatterley's Lawyer) about this next week. After all, these 18 free copies are mine by right, aren't they? I'm mad as hell about this virtual confiscation of my proputty."

On June 16, 1971, Glassco wrote Wagner:

"Thank you so much for Gynecocracy [1893] and The Boudoir [1880s magazine]: they are both banned in this moral province [Quebec]. These Victorian things have always had a great appeal to me, largely as period pieces. In spite of or perhaps because of their awkwardness, bad grammar and super-abundance of cliché (descriptively, the girls simply don't exist!), they are still readable and often stimulating. What I find their greatest fault is their lack of verisimilitude, the demands they make on the reader for an utter suspension of common sense, and a certain monotony. But what is most interesting is that their very situations, action and preoccupations are still being reproduced in places like the correspondence column of Justice Weekly: in porno, there is almost nothing new under the sun! - Well, these old books were of course for the most part carelessly and hastily written: Gynecocracy begins rather well but falls down badly about half-way through, with absurdity piled on absurdity as the  author either became tired or lost all sense of proportion. I think you and I have done much better in the genre; the next generation will be reading us, rather than them, I'm sure…Even at that, however, I think we tend to bypass reality rather too much: it's such a temptation to let one's fancy lightly fly! And to pile things on. At least it is so in my case:I've forgotten Horace's ne nimium advice much too often.

"But this raises the whole question of an aesthetic of pornography, the matter of raising it to the plane of art, as Cleland and Nerciat somehow did. Perhaps we should try and forget the Victorians: they are, subtly, too much with us, too sweetly oppresive by reason of their décor, richness and nostalgia. But what milieu, what locus, can take their place? Our art is essentially romantic, and seeks a never-never climate; yet it must, I think, take more account of reality than it has in the past. This means, to begin with, it must have a strong story-line, a good skeleton as it were; it should also be psychologically viable; and should even have a certain moral truth such as it had in the 18th century. Perhaps this involves giving our work a wry, tragic, or unhappy ending. Quite a programme, indeed!"

For all his genius as an editor-publisher, Maurice Girodias was a poor businessman with a casual attitude about contracts and author payments. Everyone who wrote for Maurice Girodias had complaints and Glassco was no exception.

On September 26, 1966 Glassco sent Girodias a postal spear with firm point.

"It has…come to my notice that you have published a book called Under the Birch, using the text of The English Governess, and are apparently selling it in various countries. This is a breach on copyright, since under our agreement of 30 March 1960, you had only the right to reprint The English Governess on payment to me of NF 3000 for each reprint. The new title means a new publication, not a reprint…

"In view of the difficulties I have experienced in the past in ensuring performance of our agreement of 30 March 1960 I am sure you will understand my insistence on payment of the $1000 in Canadian funds within three months of the date of this letter…"

On May 11, 1967, Glassco wrote Girodias again, his spear inspired by Nabokov's Lolita.

"Dear Maurice (if I may):

"I have just been reading your 'Sad Ungraceful Tale of Lolita' in the reprinted Olympia Reader, and was struck by the undoubted fact that Lolita would not, as you point out, heve been published at all; but for you: at which point I realized that this also holds true for Under the Hill, and that my last letter to you was written in an unduly heated state of mind…

"…There is a chance I may be sent to Paris on a government cultural mission in a week or so…I hope then to have the pleasure of calling on you, and talking on all subjects except that of money.

"Yours with kindest regards, John G."

Later in that year, Glassco wrote again to Girodias in response to a request (and Girodias' plan to reprint The English Governess in the U.S. under his Olympia Press- NY imprint). The request remains intriguing:

"Some new Sade translations might be within my powers this winter. My versions would be quite unlike [Austryn] Wainhouse's as to constitute original translation…Sade has a good clear rhetorical style, a little turgid, but full of a life and vivacity which do redeem the dryness and tedium of his philosophical ideas…All the English versions of Sade I've ever seen are quite unworthy of this inspired madman who surpasses St. Francis of Assisi in the scope of his ideas. Sade is the moral Columbus of our epoch."

Margaret Atwood interested in fetishism? Leonard Cohen in the Israeli army?

"June 16, 1971

"Dear Peggy

Thank you so much for The Undergrowth of Literature [by Gillian Freeman, 1967, a survey of sexual fantasy in literature]. I was specially struck by the chapter on rubber fetishism, which I can see is rampant over there [in England]. As a latex fan since the age of 4 (my true Venus has always worn a frogman's suit), I enjoyed it enormously. Also, I had just finished a short novel [Fetish Girl] whose characters wallow delicate in this fetish, and it was encouraging to read about its popularity in the U.K…

"…Leonard Cohen tells me he is finished with Literature and chansonnerie and suggests we both join the Israeli army…"

NY: Venus Library, 1972. First edition.

In 1971 Glasco submitted the first chapter of Fetish Girl to Fraser Sutherland, publisher of Northern Journey, a Canadian literary journal, for publication.

"You may find FG disappointing. But don't forget that this is formula commercial pop-porno, beginning mildly because the action must always be a constant crescendo and all subsequent chapters depend closely on each other, and they can't be isolated. - By the way, FG is the first rubber-fetish novel ever written. [N.B. It was not. That honor lies with Rubber Goddess by Lana Preston (Paul Hugo Little, 1967).

"If you take this chapter - and please feel free to reject it in spite of your kind sight-uneen acceptance! - it must appear under the name of its true author Miss Sylvia Bayer, as the entire book will; nor should any reference be made to its publication this fall by Grove Press [under its Venus Library imprint], since this may invalidate her contract.

"I will send you a recent glossy of myself, and one of Miss Bayer, too…"

"To The Editors Of Northern Journey, July 15, 1971.

Dear Sirs: -

My good friend John Glassco has just told me you have accepted the first chapter of my latest novel Fetish Girl and I am delighted.

I understand you would like to use a photograph and to print some kind of introductory-biographical note.

I enclose the photograph. As for the note here also is a suggested first person text giving all relevant information and you can 3rd-person alter, cut, telescope or rearrange as you see fit. Only I must see the final text of whatever note you mean to use, I'm sorry to put you to this extra trouble, but I have to do it.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. Sylvia Fenwick-Owen, 1224 Bishop St.,
Montreal 107
P.Q.

P.S. May I beg you to keep my home address quite confidential. Thank you."

Whose photograph did Glassco submit as that of "Sylvia Bayer?" His first wife, Elma. Fraser Sutherland had no idea. Glassco's friends did and were startled.

It remains a mystery just who John Glassco really was. For all the light Mr. Busby has diligently shone on the man, and no matter how revealing his letters, John Glassco remains, however open, charming and generous of spirit - his heart, indeed, accepted it all - something of a puzzle, he seemed to prefer it that way, and he's all the more fascinating because of it. He enjoyed pseudonymity and creating a tall-tale context for his erotica. His pleasure was writer as actor portraying his characters. He was one of Canada's gifts to literature, a gentleman litterateur in a smoking jacket with a talent for literary sex.

__________

Full disclosure: Mr. Busby is a friend, and in the book generously acknowledges the meager assistance I provided by answering a few questions.

__________

__________

Dieter Rot Sets In

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 Booktryst about 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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The Autobiography Of God

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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Photographers On Reading

By Alastair Johnston

Who doesn't love a good book? And in our image-saturated society, who doesn't love a good photo of someone else reading? The Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) published a book of sixty-three candid black and white photos of people reading, called appropriately enough ON READING (New York, Grossman, 1971). 

It celebrated the universal joy of reading in a poetic elegy of private moments made public. Kertész gained recognition as a photographer and was able to travel the world and always when the opportunity arose made snapshots of readers for his project. 

Since it began in 1915 with a group of three boys reading in his native Hungary, it's clear Kertész came to think of it as a century-long project! Kertész died in 1985, but his work endures. A gift of 120 of his reading photos was the basis for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago in 2006. More recently, in 2009, his work was celebrated at the Photographers' Gallery in London, and in 2011 the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted an exhibit of his "Reading" pictures.

To me it's odd that as recently as 1971 -- which is in some people's living memory, though still B.C. (Before Computers) -- the world was black and white. But more specifically the world of fine art photography was black and white, and for some collectors and curators remains so.

Photojournalism has changed a lot in the last generation, just as reading has. Now artists like Alex Webb and Steve McCurry regularly dazzle us with news photos that are works of art in their own right. Webb works in the margins: he likes the places where borders exist and throw up societal conflict. He responds to chaos in spots where most of us are disconcerted and the last thing we want to do is pull out a camera and start getting in people's faces, like at a funeral in Haiti. He has a painter's eye, gets the tropical colors, scorched shadows & dramatic cropping effortlessly into the frame and manages to tell a story at the same time. And one of the most visually striking parts of Webb's work is its richly saturated color. He says,

As I understand it, one of the tenets of Goethe’s theory of color is that color emerges from the tension between light and dark, a notion that seems to resonate with my use of color, with its intense highlights and deep shadows. Also, my photographs are often a little enigmatic — there’s sometimes a sense of mystery, of ambiguity.

He makes it sound simple! But then he is capable, in his books, of taking Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander to another level, through his use of color.

National Gee has long fostered talented photographers. There's a whole new bunch to watch, including Michael Wolf (who started out at GEO in Germany, but now works in Hong Kong) and David Liittschwager, who takes Avedon-like portraits of endangered creatures. The most celebrated, and with good reason, is the spectacularly gifted Steve McCurry. He is an unassuming bloke, a face in the crowd, which is a good asset for a street photographer: Someone you might see loitering on a bridge and not think, "A perv, call the cops!" He's just hanging out, waiting for that moment when the flower seller rows his boat underneath. He's there every day -- as long as it takes -- and, after ten days, the light is right, a slight haze, even the water wants to look good, everything comes together and he gets the shot. One photograph. A very Zen exercise. But how many times have you missed the shot, because your mind wasn't there in the moment, or your reflexes weren't quick enough? But people reading are in their own time and space, and that is all the time in the world for them -- suspended over the abyss of an author's black words in a limitless white expanse, the white of the page blending into the sparkling scrim behind their eyes -- as well as for the observant to capture their portrait. 

McCurry has updated Kertész, and he does it with such aplomb: it's on his blog which he regularly fills with masterpieces as if he were just dealing cards but somehow hitting full house after flush after Aces and Kings. And as he travels the world, adding images to his own "People Reading" category, it's gratifying to see that books and newspapers are still crucial to people's lives.

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The Most Notorious Publisher In American History

by Stephen J. Gertz

He stood at the crossroads of Modernism and censorship, twentieth century literature, copyright law, and cultural history. He introduced America to James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, Alfred Jarry's The Garden of Priapus, etc. He also published Loose Shoulder Straps by "Alain Dubois" aka poet, litterateur, and author of The Rhyming Dictionary, Clement Wood; Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity by Alcide Bonneau (1928); Sacred Prostitution and Marriage By Capture (1932); Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931, written by Antony Gudaitis, aka Tony Gud);  and the famed homoerotic novel, A Scarlet Pansy (1932 deluxe issue, by "Robert Scully," almost surely poet Robert McAlmon, with a 1933 trade edition). He edited and published Two Worlds, a hardbound literary quarterly whose contributing editors were Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. He was a master of mail-order book sales. The list of imprints he established is as long as a leg. He was Jean Valjean to New York Society For the Supression of Vice leader John S. Sumner's Javert. He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. He gave his name to a  key Supreme Court 1st Amendment decision. Samuel Roth's personal and professional activities - they were one and the same - ultimately allowed Americans to read whatever they wanted to; his sacrifice at the Court in 1957 made it safe for U.S. citizens to buy legal American copies of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959 without Mrs. Grundy at their door with SWAT team and incinerator.

Roth, at right, in his Poetry Book Shop, Greenwich Village 1920.

"Samuel Roth…was a man of considerable culture. Some of the material he sold was trash; some of it was unquestionably literature" (Charles Rembar). He believed that "reading is itself is a great good, any kind of reading is better than no reading and some people will read only rather low material, which I am willing to supply" (Samuel Roth, as paraphrased by his attorney, Charles Rembar, in his The End of Obscenity).

Sam Roth (1893-1974), if he is remembered at all, is infamous for his literary piracies. After he serially published twelve excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses without authorization in Two Worlds, Sylvia Beach, who had published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris, at Joyce's behest organized an international protest in 1927 against Roth with 167 internationally respected intellectuals and artists signing the document, including Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Einstein. He was immediately vilified. This incident has deeply scarred Roth's legacy. Jay A. Gertzman, with evidence not available to earlier scholars, makes a strong case for reappraising Samuel Roth's guilt, both legal and ethical, in a new and definitive biography.

Issue 1, No. 1, December, 1925.

Gertzman, who in his Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 (1999), exposed the edgy world of the clandestine, East Coast-U.S. publication of sexually-themed literature, has now, after at least fifteen years of research, published this long-awaited biography of Roth, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, the first deeply researched, full-length investigation of the man and his milieu.

Samuel Roth.

Grade C-Z moviemakers were once consigned to Gower Gulch, a low-rent, run-down section of Hollywood near the major studios but a light year distant from their  superior quality; it was also known as Poverty Row. Brazen upstarts, outsiders, and finaglers with ambition but little money and desperate to distribute their product through a system dominated by the big studios vied for the eyeballs of movie-goers. New York publishers short on cash but long on brash found themselves in similar circumstances. Being proudly Jewish and thus not well-connected to or well-perceived by book publishing's elitist, gentile power-centers didn't help. Having a constitutional attraction to literature, modern and classical, fiction  and non-fiction that defied contemporary moral standards was certainly a disadvantage. A strong anti-authoritarian streak and determination to publish and accept the consequences (but not without a fight) in concert with a fundamental aversion to censorship in a free society only made matters worse. Being a blatant huckster came with the territory; publishing was a Darwinian business. Easily victimized, you did what you had to do to survive. Roth, a downtown publisher with uptown aspirations, was all of these things, and a writer, too, a brilliant Columbia graduate with artistic pretensions and a voice for self-pity. Born in Galacia, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, where chutzpah was sliced thick and Roth's portion super-sized.

Roth's mug shot, 1930, upon beginning his two-month prison
sentence for selling copies of Joyce's Ulysses in Philadelphia.

An outsider to begin with, the Ulysses controversy made him an outcast, a  pariah for his sin as "desecrater of literary expression." Gertzman carefully mounts a strong case that Roth was not the philistine he has been made out to be. 

• Roth did not "pirate" Ulysses. Because of a clause in contemporary U.S. copyright law written to protect the domestic printing trade, books that were not printed on an American-based press were not granted copyright protection. Ulysses was, within the U.S., in the public domain. Blame Congress.

• There is evidence that Joyce and Roth's mutual friend, Ezra Pound, acting as Joyce's literary agent, gave Roth the go-ahead, and that arrangements for payment had been made.

• Joyce's outrage was disingenuous. While sincerely trying to protect his image as avant-garde genius he was also a shrewd businessman not without keen commercial instincts. The furor of his friends and supporters was exaggerated. Edited excerpts of Ulysses had been previously published and no one complained about it. A managed protest could only increase awareness and build demand for the book's ultimate legal publication in full in the United States (Random House, 1934). Genius aesthete versus greedy capitalist barbarian always makes a good story.

• Joyce's concern that sales of the Beach edition of the book would be hurt by Roth's excerpts to a broad audience (Roth wanted his publications bought by the average man on the street; his overriding goal was to popularize literature of all kinds and get it to the hinterlands) was groundless and something of a canard. With its limited press run and price the Beach edition was never meant or expected to attract a broad readership beyond wealthy collectors.

Gertzman goes on in depth and what we take away is that there is plenty of blame to spread amongst the actors in this bit of literary theater. Roth was not a boogey-man. He was, to a large degree, the perfect scapegoat.

Sketch, undoubtedly by Mahlon Blaine, for an advertisement.

Are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a memoir concerning his incestuous relationship with his sister, Elisabeth? In 1951 Roth published My Sister and I (NY: Boar's Head) based upon a manuscript in Nietzsche's hand that fell into Roth's possession in 1924. Its first edition went through fourteen printings. He initially advertised its publication in 1924 but ran out of money (Roth never got rich publishing anything, much less Ulysses, and was always in a financial bind of some sort). After a raid on Roth's offices by John S. Sumner in 1929 the manuscript was thought lost. It resurfaced during a 1940s inventory. Real or apocryphal Nietzsche? Gertzman presents the critical arguments, strong on both sides. The jury remains out.

Roth was a big cat who, when wounded, roared and attacked, a Lion of Judah. He was a "steadfast Jew and Zionist...who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today" (Michael Bronski).

NY: Golden Hind Press, 1934.

• • •

Thrill of the Trade Department:  around ten years ago I had Roth's personal copy of another publisher's piracy of A Scarlet Pansy (NY: Nesor [Rosen, backwards], 1937) pass through my hands. Within, Roth made penciled revisions, cuts, and expurgations for his planned reissue (NY: Royal, 1940). The book also possessed subsequent annotations by sexual folklorist and bibliographer Gershon Legman, who worked for Roth during the 1930s, recording what Roth was up to with this book, from Legman's library, acquired directly from his widow, Judith. I felt as if I was sitting next to Roth as he worked on the book. Thanks, GL.

• • •

Roth lost his 1957 appeal to the Supreme Court to vacate his 1956 conviction for obscenity; he went to jail. But he won the war. The Court's Constitutional test in Roth v. United States - that for a work to be judged obscene its "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" without any redeeming social value whatsoever opened the door to soft-porn. Soon, "redeeming social value" could be found in anything no matter how hard-core, particularly if publishers hired medical professionals or literary critics (real or otherwise) to write prefaces explaining why Doing It With Dad and Brother Dan While Mom Sings Hawaiian War Chant presents an intimate family interpersonal dynamic with deep psychological insight into the human condition and a penetrating sociological view of the exotic byways of love in an All-American metropolis, thus saving it from  Vice Squad condemnation.

Scholars and citizens with an interest in modern literature and the struggle for frank expression and publication of  candid material in a free society will be captivated by Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. I believe every library should own a copy; it's a must-acquire. For those fascinated by the shadow world of clandestine publishing and modern lit. in the U.S. it's a must-read.

But it's not a free read; you have to pay for it and that's how it should be. Yet at $74.95 it may be a bit too un-free. Issued by University Press of Florida it's a case study of what has gone so wrong with university press and books-on-books publishing. While the volume is very attractive its production quality is not what you'd expect from a book costing $75. And the $75 cost is likely connected to its print run, which, given the current state of the market (dismal), cannot have been more than 500 copies.

I can't help but think that if Roth were alive and the publisher, the book would have been issued as a fine trade paperback for $25 in an initial print-run of 2,000 copies and distributed via mail order and through every newsstand location in the country with accompanying hard-sell suggestive and sensational hoopla and ballyhoo using every free marketing tool available to spread the word that this is a sizzler, a book the major publishers found too hot to handle, an important book on American literary and publishing history about the man who died so that Ulysses, Casanova Jr.'s Tales, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pageant of Lust, and The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (Roth's best-selling exposé of President Herbert Hoover, 1931) could live, and made it possible for the huddled masses to not only breathe but read free.

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GERTZMAN, Jay A. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xxviii, 387, [1] pp. Illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. $74.95. Release: 4/23/2013.

UPDATE: 
A PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT ($30 total) HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE: Order online at http://www.upf.com/ book.asp?id=GERTZ001
This link will appear as: University Press of Florida: Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist
Click on “add cloth to cart”
Click on “apply code” (just above the “check out” button) and enter code: PP113
Follow ordering instructions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface

Chapter One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University.

Chapter Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters.

Chapter Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce.

Chapter Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy.

Chapter Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Chapter Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary.

Chapter Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy.

Chapter Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche.

Chapter Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg.

Chapter Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission.

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names.

Bibliography.

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Other books by Jay A. Gertzman:

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. 
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Full Disclosure: Mr. Gertzman and I are friends, and he kindly acknowledges me in the book as a source, however modest my contribution - and it was, indeed, very modest.

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Image of My Sister and I advertisement courtesy of Mr. Gertzman's website, with our thanks.
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