Leonard Cohen: You Do Not Have To Love Me At Auction (Or Anywhere Else)

by Stephen J. Gertz

A copy of Canadian poet and songwriter-singer Leonard Cohen's poem, You Do Not Have To Love Me is being offered by PBA Galleries in its Beats, Counterculture & the Avant Garde, Richard Synchef Collection Part II sale tomorrow, January 30, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $400 - $600.

In letterpress designed and printed by Bill Roberts (of Bottle of Smoke Press) and tipped-in to black paper card, it is copy "N" of 26 lettered copies signed by Cohen of a total edition of 126. Originally published in 1968, it is here issued as Sore Dove Press Broadside Series Number 33, published in 2008. It has already become quite collectible.

Facing the poem is an original oil painting by artist-poet Soheyl Dahl.

Included in the lot are seven Sore Dove Press postcards celebrating Cohen, two duplicated with black lettering.

As part of the lot, a copy of singer-songwriter (and Leonard Cohen collaborator) Anjani Thomas' poem, Holy Ground, is being offered. No. 31 of 100 signed copies, it, too, is in letterpress designed and printed by Bill Roberts. It was published by Sore Dove Press in 2009.

"Sore Dove Press is edited and published by Soheyl Dahi, an artist and poet living in San Francisco. It is a progressive press that publishes poetry chapbooks and broadsides by established poets ranging from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, and Jack Hirschman to newcomers like the talented actress and poet Amber Tamblyn. The press also actively looks for and publishes poets to make their debut in print. The chapbooks and broadsides are printed in small editions. A limited number are signed by the poets and when possible a lettered edition with an original painting by the poets is included" (website).

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Images courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Seven More Stunning Modernist Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

More from Swann Galleries' Modernist Posters sale, held yesterday.

James Harley Minter designed this poster, Bal Pa'Pillon, in 1931 for The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1911 by Carl Moellman and William Sommer, young American artists inspired by the Dadaist movement and similar avant-garde organizations in Europe, and modeled after New York's Kit Kat Club. The club held annual costume balls, which began in 1913 and continued through 1938.

"This decadent, cubist-influenced image is an electric, microcosmic view of Cleveland's avant-garde artistic community. Presaging the psychedelic posters of the 1960s and reflecting many of the concurrent graphic art trends in Europe, this poster, and the entire series for the club's yearly balls, are bright, bold, daring and stand out as exciting and innovative examples of American design. Each poster also served as an invitation to the event, with the invitee's name written in across the bottom" (Nicholas D. Lowry). I hope Margaret Brennan had as much fun at this soirée as I did viewing its poster.

I am pleased to report that the head-snapping whiplash I experienced after learning that Cleveland possessed an avant-garde artistic community has been successfully treated via review of gangbuster Elliot Ness's checkered career as Cleveland's Public Safety Director followed by an unsuccessful run for mayor of Cleveland in 1938. I have no snobbish animus toward Cleveland; I simply had no idea that the city possessed a hip culture. 

For more about The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, including a survey of other gorgeous posters for its costume balls go here.

For Viaggiate Di Notte (1930), designed by famed graphic artist Adolphe Mouron Cassandre (1901-1968) for Wagons Lits (a railroad sleeping car company),  the artist chose an "unquestionably persuasive" (Mouron p. 69) symbolic and poetic approach to advertising.

"The breathtakingly simple device of a red light glowing in the foggy darkness of a railroad siding is perfectly consistent with our poetically charged experience of looking out the window of a speeding night express" (op cit, Mouron).

"It is an elegant and inviting approach, evoking travel by night. The poster exists with different text variants, but this one is the least cluttered. This is also the rare Italian version. We could locate only one other copy in the collection of the Suntory Museum in Japan" (Lowry).

Cassandre, again. Turmac / La Cigarette is one of his earliest posters, designed in 1925. "It predates the time when his work began to reflect his radical and ingenious design theories. He employs a sensuous approach which doesn't appear again in his work until 1937, when a similar smoldering cigarette is featured in his poster for Sensation Cigarettes. Nevertheless, it also foreshadows some of his subsequent graphic finesse: within the stylized smoke and the outside border, he plays with the interchange between shades of blue, white and black in a manner that presages his typographic work in later posters such as Pivolo, Nord Express and Étoile du Nord. The actual typography on this poster is an exceptional mix of Art Deco and the Arabesque. We have not found another copy at auction for the past 30 years" (Lowry). 

Jac Leonard (1904-1980), a Canadian artist, created Beware The Walls Have Ears c. 1940, It's one in a series of posters printed by Canada's Wartime Information Board, similar in aim and approach to those published by the American War Office in its Careless Talk Kills series issued during World War II.

A swastika-eyed secret villain, photo-montage, bold, bright typography and powerful imagery - this progressive design has it all and makes its point as firmly as a hammer to the noggin.

Edgar Scauflaire (1893-1960) was a Belgian artist who studied at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Liége, where he was born. Many of his paintings clearly reflect the influence of Picasso and Braque. He also designed murals and tapestries. This Art Deco-inspired, aquatic allegory is one of at least two posters used to promote the International Exposition de L'Eau of 1939.

After studying art at the Munich Academy under Julius Diez and Angelo Jank, Hermann Keimel (1889-1948) went on to become a teacher at the same institution. He was a member of the artistic group "The Twelve," and also of the new Munich Association of Poster Artists. He designed numerous commercial posters, generally employing a crisp Art Deco style. Muenchner / Plakat Kunst (1931) is his masterpiece and remains an icon of poster self-promotion: to promote an exhibition of Munich poster art Keimel constructed this cubist face out of colored sheets of printing paper.

Manilo Parrini (1901-1968) created this striking aeronautical-themed poster for the 3d International Aircraft Exhibition held in conjunction with the Milan Trade Fair of 1939.

He worked during Mussolini's regime in Italy, which is to say in a monumental, over the top, grandiose glory of Rome epic style, light on subtlety; the anvil school of messaging. Here, in a Fascist salute to Il Duce, he incorporates a trio of fasces on the tail fin of the plane in the foreground, while the three planes in the distance are streaming the colors of the Italian flag behind them.

In case anyone misses the symbolism of fasces on the tail, it's a visual representation of baciarmi il  Fascista culo,  if not an official, explicit political slogan, a casually implicit one.

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Réne Magritte designed posters and sheet music? Stop by Booktryst tomorrow for the story.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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I Wrote For the Mafia

by Stephen J. Gertz

In late 1988, desperate for something green other than mold in my bank account, I contacted an editor at Pacific News, a periodicals distributor located in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, at the suggestion of a friend.

Pacific News had nothing to do with news. It was, rather, one of the major publishers and distributors of pornography in print, arguably the largest on the West Coast, one of the many wholesalers that, until his conviction in 1989 for income tax evasion (he refused to pay any. None. At all), had been a part of the infamous Reuben Sturman’s shady international porn empire. How shady was it? Sturman was  protected by the Gambino family of New York, soliciting their security services (read: partnership) after Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno of Los Angeles shook him down and beat him up. After Reuben’s incarceration, escape, and recapture - on the lam from everybody, he was nabbed with his girlfriend in a cheap motel room across the street from Disneyland in Southern California, his version of Fantasyland up for grabs - his organized-crime partners split up the syndicate he had created. Paul Wisner, who had been Sturman’s straw-man when he bought Pacific News in 1974, was still nominally in charge while the true owners remained in the background.

Reuben Sturman, behind bars.
This is one of the very few photographs of the man,
who, prior to his imprisonment, hated having his picture
taken and often wore Groucho glasses with rubber nose,
bushy eyebrows and moustache to vex photogs.

When I decide to write a porn novel I don’t mess around. I want a publisher with muscle in the marketplace.

I met the editor, Dennis Rodriguez, who had been working in the porn trade on and off since the 1960s. Without   benefit  of   writing   sample  he gave  me an  assignment and  informed me  of  the   basics.     "35,000 words; 150 pages, twenty-five lines to a page; a sex scene every three pages. All rights ceded outright." The fee? $500.

In 1968 pulp porn writers were earning upwards of $1200 per manuscript. That $500 in 1988 was worth $120 in 1968. With the visual supplanting the verbal the writers market for porn had drastically shrunk.

Speaking of the visual, Pacific's offices had my retinas working in overdrive. Three or four average-looking, to all appearances prim, secretaries sat at desks strewn with humongous upright dildoes. The women were blasé. One had a lampshade precariously balanced atop a particularly anatomically correct and ambitious latex proxy. Another used a Doc Johnson special as a paperweight. Just another day at the orifice.

O[y] Canada

Dennis made it clear that because the book would be distributed in Canada I'd have to follow a few special guidelines. He handed me a copy of a Canadian Customs Notice dated February 11, 1988.

Subject: Administration of Code 9956.

This is to provide further clarification of Customs guidelines with regard to the interpretation of the terms 'degradation' and 'dehumanization,' as they are applied in the administration of Code 9956 of Schedule VII to the Customs Tariff. The following examples from court jurisprudence are provided to assist Customs officials and the public in their understanding of how these terms may be defined in the context of applying the provisions of Code 9956:

1) Goods which depict or describe degrading or dehumanizing acts tend predominantly to deindividualize and impersonalize sexual acts by inciting the reader or viewer to look upon the     individuals involved as objects or means to be used for one's   personal gratification. In particular, the individuals are deprived of unique human characteristics in that they are portrayed as sexual objects whose only redeeming features are their genitals. For example, this type of degradation can be seen in potrayals of individuals as prizes or trophies for competitions where the winner uses the person as he/she chooses.

2) Goods which depict or describe an aggressive, powerful person who derives pleasure from inflicting pain upon a     weaker individual, degrading the victim by conveying the message that he/'she enjoys abusive anti-social behavior. An example of the manifestation of power used to degrade an individual is evident in pictorials, stories, films, etc., which show individuals who are in positions of power and/or authority who use abuse, force, coercion and threats to get their victims to perform sexual favors.

3) Another common theme which is used in sexually explicit material to degrade and dehumanize individuals is to depict them as having animal characteristics. The imagery of bars,     cages, collars, leashes, etc., is often used to reduce the individual to the status of an animal. In these instances, there is often an element of restraint (i. e., the person is being caged against his/her will) and the implication is that the individual is behaving like an animal.

   

4) Court jurisprudence has established that materials which depict or describe pregnant and/or lactating women in a sexually explicit context debases motherhood and are degrading to all women.

   

5) Further examples of acts which are considered to be degrading and dehumanizing are as follows: Group ejaculation on one person, excessive ejaculation on a person's face, double-penetration of an orifice and the insertion of objects that would or could cause pain, including the fist or foot, and submissive acts such as the licking of another person's boot in a sexual context. Depictions and descriptions such as these have been found by the courts to be obscene in that they exceed the standards of what contemporary Canadian society will tolerate.

Kinda gets the creative juices flowing (but, please, not on a person's face), yes?

Rodriguez further provided me with a company checklist: No force at all; No bondage and discipline; No dominance; No submission; No anal; No fetish; No incest.

I wrote the book in four days. It was difficult. I kept recalling the Canadian Customs Notice: "No lactating women, no pregnant women." It would never have occurred to me to include swollen damsels in my porn novel but Canadian Customs had infected my mind with images of debasing and dehumanizing sexual acts. Now they were all I could think about.

I wrote by the rules: Häagen Dazs™ vanilla bean  in a   hard-core cone. The novel's a snore, strictly scheiss und dreck. It was published by Lusty Library, distributed by Parliament News, and copyrighted by American Art Enterprises.

At the very top of the Customs Notice, a fax, ran the following: "9/28/88 [telephone number] TransMediaGrpUSA   Parliament News."

The Roots of Modern Porn

Pacific News was originally part of '60s porn-magnate Milton Luros' L.A.-based empire, which began in the late 1950s with American Art Agency (later Enterprises), a publisher of girlie magazines. Luros, who began his career as a respected illustrator for  science-fiction pulps during the  1940s - early 1950s,  soon moved into  publishing  nudist magazines, essentially full-frontal porn with legal blessing.  He was the master of the stretch, the cautious, incremental pushing of boundaries. With the U.S. Supreme Court obscenity rulings of the mid- through late-1960s, however, the walls came tumblin' down and hard-core came to town.

Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1951.
Cover by Milton Luros.
From cheesecake in space to
lord of porn: an artist's odyssey.

Early on, Luros established Parliament News (Paul Wisner was a staff-salesman, eventually running it for Luros), to distribute his wares and, over the years, had bought other, smaller, distributorships, including Pacific News, to consolidate his position as the largest, most respected publisher of pornography in the U.S. By 1974,  however, legal pressures had forced his retirement and he sold out to Sturman, who had been anxious to  add the Luros assets to his Cleveland (later L.A.)-based syndicate and extend his control of the East Coast trade to the entire nation. By 1988, Pacific News, under Sturman's arm's length leadership and brilliant (if typically unethical) business smarts (creating a massive, dizzying maze of interlocking corporations), had become  part of a global syndicate that vertically integrated porn across all media, including sex toys, manufacture to retail, and was corporately safe as milk. But still completely shady; the olive oil remained dark green and there was nothing virgin about it. Business methods often involved a little help from his friends, of the physically emphatic sort. The whole operation was creepy. Dave Gardner, who worked as an art director at American Art Enterprises during the 1980s, recalls:

"I worked under Jerry Pecoraro [who may have been the longest surviving staff member of American Art Enterprises, joining in the mid-Sixties] who was doing mostly old-style cheesecake stuff. I worked the softcore side, doing magazine layout and typesetting. They also published some crappy fiction (not porno but cheesey science-fiction, westerns, mysteries, action, etc.), to somewhat legitimize the operation…The 'other side' of the building was off-limits. It housed Paul Wisner's office, other administrative offices, and London Press…One of the other artists had a friend working in London Press, so I got to go over there just once to see the hardcore work they did, but otherwise it was an unwritten law to stay away from there, a separation of smuts, so to speak.

"I saw Paul only occasionally, as his office was on the 'other' forbidden side. Once in a while I'd see this small Italian guy come in and walk around like he owned the place. I asked one of the guys about him, who told me to cool it, that this guy was a serious Mafioso who came up to collect bags of cash, and not to ask any more questions about him."

Under Luros' ownership, American Art Enterprises and all of the Luros constituent division offices were typical businesses; just open the door and walk in. Not so now. Dave Gardner continues:

"At American Art, you had to get buzzed in after being scrutinized by the receptionist. One time, word went through the building that we were going to be raided by LAPD vice. I sure as hell didn't want to to jail, but the boss wouldn't let us go home. So all day, I sat there shaking and wondering when the cops were going to bust through the door and lead me off in handcuffs. It never happened, though. The overall feeling at American Art was crass; I learned how to be ashamed of my work. It had the air of true smuttiness about it. I got the feeling we were just a mob front at American Arts. It was not a very pleasant experience."

When Reuben Sturman entered the trade it was a business. When he exited it was an industry.

What has any of the above have to do with rare books?

Having ultimately written a handful of dirty books for Pacific News/American Art Enterprises, my contributions to the decline of Western civilization have become exceedingly scarce, if not extinct. Print runs for pulp porn had, by 1988, declined to 1500-3000 copies from a late 1960s high of 20,000-50,000, so there were not that many in circulation to begin with. Factor in that, once read, copies were tossed into the garbage, and unsold books pulped. Further consider that few cared to collect paperback DBs, a phenomenon that would not fully emerge until the 1990s, and they were most certainly not collecting mine; only pre-1973  dirty books, the genre charmingly known in the paperback collecting world as “vintage sleaze,” are highly desired. Hell, even I didn’t collect mine; I only have one copy of the four DBs I wrote.

BERMAN, Jay (house pseud., here of SJG). Tales of Lust.
North Hollywood, California: American Art Enterprises, April 1989.
Lusty Library LL-626. 16mo.154 pp. Photo-illustrated wrappers.

Introducing, in its first appearance in twenty-two years, the first published book by “Jay Berman." I submitted it under the pseudonym, “Jacques Toutight.”  My alternative was “Boris Whocutchyakokov,” presciently foreshadowing the John and Lorena Bobbitt story five years hence. (Though sorely tempted I resisted using "Jack Goff," a blue-ribbon porn pseudonym claimed, alas, by another during the '60s).

The plot line is simple: A pedantic, professorial blowhard with a soft spot for  sesquipedalian  exposition regales the patrons of the seedy dive he’s parked in with tall, highly apocryphal tales of his sexual exploits. Yes, it’s autobiographical. The blurb on the rear wrapper succinctly sums things up: “Hot pleasure was what he demanded of life and he was not afraid to walk on the wild side in search of it!”

Absolutely true. I demand  a nice, pleasurable  steam-bath every now and then and once dared to patronize a small, run-down, all-Jewish spa in the Pico-Robertson/Little Tel Aviv district of L.A. where you never know what's going to happen. You don't know from wild until you've witnessed smoked salmon swim Pico Boulevard upstream - during rush-hour traffic, yet  -  as I have.

I would have used the more appropriate Yiddish-Americanism, shvitz-bath, above but feared, given the context of the post, that some might  think it slang for a sexual act forbidden by Canadian Customs.

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Factual information and interview with Dave Gardner referenced from An Amazing Kingdom of Thrills: American Paperback Erotica 1965-1973, the author's unpublished manuscript ©2001 (each rejection letter to my agent gushing before passing on it; Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, which, in part, also dealt with the porn trade, was making the rounds at the same time and got all the attention, i.e. offers).

Readers who would like to learn more about the fascinating Milton Luros - an honorable man in a dishonorable business - should read Everybody Loves Milton: Rabbi Porn, the definitive story, extracted from An Amazing Kingdom... and published in 2004 on veteran porn-trade editor Earl Kemp's website.

Portions of An Amazing Kingdom... were adapted for Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties.

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The Greatest Literary Hoaxster You've Never Heard Of

by Stephen J. Gertz

He was, by his own admission, “an accomplished liar” and a “great practitioner of deceit.” His (now very rare book in first edition) Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) is considered by many to be the most accurate image of Lost Generation Paris ever written yet it is, to a large degree, a memoir of convenience, the chronicle of a young Canadian ex-pat's life in Paris in the late 1920s - early 1930s as he wished it to be, with an keen eye toward writing a best-seller and settling a few old scores. It was  one of a handful of  autobiographical works he composed, each an exercise in apocrypha. 

It's no accident that the new, one and only, must-read biography of the man is subtitled "One Life of..." rather than "The Life of..." Acclaimed Canadian poet, memoirist and translator John Glassco (1909-1981) never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Later edition.

Glassco was born into generous circumstances in Montreal, and, while never wealthy, was fortunate to enjoy a comfortable income from a family inheritance. His early years in Paris were recalled in Morley Callaghan’s memoir, That Summer in Paris and in Robert McAlmon’s The Nightenghouls of Paris. He began his career as a literary hoaxster in Paris, in 1928, when, with Kay Boyle (with whom he had a brief affair), he ghostwrote Relations and Complications (1929), the memoir of Gladys Palmer Brooke, the Dayang Muda of Sarawak.  (Yes, Virginia, there once was a Dayang Muda of Sarawak, to ne'er be confused with Jack Kerouac). The Dyang Muda’s memories were, apparently, so startlingly memorable that she, according to Boyle, was stunned to complete silence leaving Glassco and Boyle to pretty much make the whole thing up.

When your father subjects you to corporal punishment with a little too much gusto and afterward affection and your mother is sexually aroused by your pre-pubescent cries and screams it’s well nigh all but a certainty that erotic flagellation will become a deep-seated fetish that will haunt and inform your personal and professional life. It will lead you to write the most popular sado-masochistic porn novel ever written in English, an instant classic upon publication - anonymously in one edition, under a pseudonym in another - a book that, Glassco true to form, is actually two different books, variants of the same story with the same characters - and both books, in their first few chapters, his near word for word translation of a French flagellation novel from 1913!

The English Governess by Miles Underwood
Pirated edition.
Originally published Paris: Ophelia Press (Olympia Press), 1960.
A rewritten and abbreviated version of...

Harriet Marwood, Governess by Anonymous.
First edition, New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Originally written in 1954 as A Firm Hand.

He had a gift for stylistic mimicry, which came in handy when he decided to  complete, and seamlessly so, Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished work of erotica Under the Hill (aka Venus and Tannhauser). His   pornographic 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), and Victorian porn  were composed in pitch-perfect period English meant to deceive the reader into believing them to be genuine eighteenth and nineteenth century works.

Under the Hill by Aubrey Beardsley & John Glassco.
First edition, Paris, Olympia Press, 1959.

First American edition.
New York: Grove Press, 1959.

So, too, with a seventeenth century pederastic Japanese novel by Ihara Saikaku,  translated by Hideki Okada, with an Introduction by Glassco. Temple of Pederasty was, actually, written  by Glassco in his “erotic collage” method: take a book, in this case, Quaint Stories of the Samurais, a 1928 translation, issued by Glassco’s friend and fellow ex-pat in Paris, Contact Press publisher Robert McAlmon, of a Japanese book from 1687 titled Nanshoku Okagami, and enhance, enlarge, and engorge  it with sex.

The Temple of Pederasty by Ihara Saikaku.
Translated by Hideki Okada. Introduction by John Glassco.
First edition. North Hollywood: Hanover House, 1970.

Let us not forget the now exceedingly scarce in its first edition (it took me five years to find a copy) Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer, Glassco's paean to male submission, female domination, and black latex-wear that "Sylvia Bayer" kindly, with tongue in cheek (or someplace else), dedicated "To John Glassco."

Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer.
First edition. New York: Venus Library, 1972.

Just now released, A Gentleman of Pleasure is the long-awaited biography of Glassco, one of the most fascinating characters of twentieth century literature in English yet one, for the most part, completely unknown. That should change with this thoroughly researched, engaging, and elegantly written book. Author Brian Busby, who has edited several literary anthologies, and is author of Character Parts: Who’s Really Who in Canadian Literature (2003) untangles the complex life and many literary deceptions of Glassco, whose  career as a writer tentatively began in the 1920s and continued with fits, false starts, and time off for bouts of tuberculosis and gentleman farming until, finally, in his 50s, the late bloomer began to blossom.

By the 1960s his poetry - ultimately in four volumes,  The Deficit Made Flesh (1958); A Point of Sky (1964); Selected Poems (1971); and Montreal (1973) - edited anthologies of Canadian poetry, and translations of French Québécois verse into English found their place in the first rank of modern Canadian literature, and Glassco was elevated to the artistic status he so long desired and deserved. Overtly, he was a highly respected Canadian man of letters. Covertly, he was a master of the literary hoax, thoroughly enjoying his deceptions. He moved from one world to the other and back again with the graceful ease of a shapeshifter to the manor born.

After reading the book it's easy to like the man; it may, also, be easy to dislike him. Masochists can be  very demanding. But  it is simply impossible, I think, not to be in sympathy with John Glassco.

And so “we end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. In this way we grasp the truth that a man is not only a living creature but the person of his own creation” (John Glassco on Giacomo Casanova, in Memoirs of Montparnasse, as cited on the bio's quotation leaf).

Glassco in 1976, shortly after his 66th birthday.

"Black-leather dandy, and elegant, martini-sipping beat, John Glassco was a one-man, literary underground. Impeccable in style and provocative in intent, his pornography is poetic, his poetry is arty, but all his writing has the precision and grace of beautiful lies. Yet, his genius has gone too long unheralded and unsung in his native land. Bravo to Brian Busby, then, whose exhaustively researched, exquisitely written, and endlessly interesting biography reveals Glassco's vivid complexity, intricate deceptions, and the convoluted genesis of his deathless triumphs in memoir, translation, lyric, and, yes, his odes to the joys of womanly sadism and boyish masochism. Busby gives us a detailed portrait of a grand bon vivant and a singular intellectual, who was likely English Canada's most gifted, truly radical writer" (George Elliott Clarke).
                                                                                          
BUSBY, Brian. A Gentleman of Pleasure. One Life of John Glassco. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011. Tall octavo. Hardcover. 398 pp.
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Booktryst readers may recall an earlier post of ours, Our Man in the Attic, concerning Mr. Busby.

Take a look at Brian Busby's The Dusty Bookcase, his blog devoted to Canadian literature, high and low, and his new blog devoted to Glassco.
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The Very Rare First Account of New York in English

by Stephen J. Gertz

DENTON, Daniel. A Brief Description of New-York:
Formerly Called New Netherlands.
With the Places thereunto Adjoyning.
Together with the
Manner if its Scituation, Fertility of the Soyle,
Healthfulness of the Climate, and the
Commoditites thence produced.
Also
Some Directions and Advice to such as shall go thither:
An Account of what Commodities they shall take
with them; The Profit and Pleasure
that may accrue to them thereby.
Likewise
A Brief Relation of the Customs of the Indians there.
London: Printed for John Hancock, 1670.

Daniel Denton, an early American colonist of Long Island, NY, was the town clerk for Hempstead, later Jamaica, and, later still, in 1666, Justice of the Peace for New York. He was one of the purchasers of the land tract that would become Elizabeth, New Jersey.

In 1670, after returning to England, he published A Brief Description of New-York: Formerly Called New Netherlands, the first eyewitness account in English of the colony recently acquired from the Dutch, and designed to promote the region for English settlement.

"The first account of New York printed in English and very rare" (Sabin).

FERRIS, Jean Leon Gerome. The Fall of New Amsterdam.
Peter Stuyvesant, in 1664, standing on shore among residents of
New Amsterdam who are pleading with him not to open fire on
the British who have arrived in warships waiting in the harbor
 to claim the territory for England

An outstanding copy of this rare book is coming to auction at Christie's - London on October 27, 2010 in Part II of The Arcana Collection. It is estimated to sell for $46,000 - $60,000.

New York is the land of milk and honey. Give me your tired, your poor, your industrious yearning  for the good life!

"Do men expect profit in what they carry with them to a foreign land? - They need not fear it here, if their goods but suit the country. Would they live in health? - no place so likely to live so in, in this part of America. Would they have plenty of necessaries for food and raiment? - New York, in these, is not unkind; but though a stepmother to those who came from England, yet furnishes them as plentifully, if equally industrious, as their natural county does those who stay behind.

"In short, there is nothing wanting to make the inhabitants thereof happy..."

Come on over, settle down, and take a bite  of the Big Apple, no worms inside.

Yet New York did have its disadvantages, six worms, by Denton's count:

"I shall not speak of every slight and trivial matter, but only those of more considerable importance, which I count to be six. 1st, The wickedness and irreligion of the inhabitants; 2d, want of ministers; 3d, difference of opinion in religion; 4th, a civil dissension; 5th, the heathenism of the Indians; and, 6th, the neighborhood of Canada."

Canada? What gives? Gangs in the 'hood, it seems. You couldn't go to the corner for a bottle of maple liquor without incident.

"By now, of late, since some people are become wealthy enough to purchase and have by them what is worth the taking away, and that the out-parts of the province (where the best land is) towards Canada are so harassed by the French and their Indians, that men are fearful to plant and dwell there..."

It gets worse; welcome to Fun City, in 1670 already earning a dubious reputation:

"...people have fallen into so great debauchery and idleness, thieving is become more frequent; and many considerable robberies have been committed in my time in New York, to the great discouragement of industrious people, and increase in vice and sin."

That's Lou Reed in the background, wandering troubadour in black breeches, waistcoat, and tricorn, singing Walk on the Wild Side while gently strumming his lute.

Don't blame Jews: at the time Denton published, he charted only twenty Jewish families living in New York. It was impossible to get a decent bowl of matzoh ball soup if you weren't well-connected, much less dim-sum.

One passage in the book is considered to be an early proclamation of Manifest Destiny:

"A Divine Hand makes way for them [the English settlers] by removing or cutting off the Indians, either by Wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal Disease."
 

In over thirty-five years only two copies of this book in first edition have come to auction and this copy was one of them, offered at Sotheby's in 1987. This particular copy is exceptional for  another, very important reason. Because of the height of the text on the titlepage, out of proportion relative to the margins of the rest of the book, the "A" at the top or the date at the bottom of the titlepage is usually trimmed by the binder's knife. The date is often completely lost. Not here.

This is an extraordinary copy of an extraordinarily rare book.

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References: Church 608. Howes D-259. Sabin 19611. Wing D-1062.

Titlepage image courtesy of Christie's.

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Our Man in the Attic

Those of us based downstairs in the United States often neglect our upstairs neighbors in Canada who take a lot of ribbing from us for being from, well, Canada. The land of maple leaves has, however, produced some great literature, in addition to being a fertile breeding ground for comedians (think SCTV and the initial cast for Saturday Night Live).

We do not, alas, hear enough about the Canadian literary scene. Brian Busby is doing something about it.

"A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in Canadian Literature (2003), and editor of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War (2005) and Great Canadian Speeches (2008). There are several other odds and ends, some of which I dare not speak."

"The odds and ends, some of which [Brian] dare not speak"  refer to his interest in the far and curious shores of Canadian literature. Brian's blog, The Dusty Bookcase: A Very Casual Exploration of the Dominion's Suppressed, Ignored and Forgotten, is not the place to go to find information about Robertson Davies, unless Robertson Davies has a hidden, heretofore unidentified, pseudonymously written pulp novel in his past, or - I shudder at the thought! - wrote anonymous porn. (In truth, Brian wrote a fine post regarding Davies' essay on fellow Canadian, Stephen Leacock)

Brian is also the author of a new, exhaustively researched and soon to be published biography of Canadian poet, novelist, eccentric, con man, and literary provocateur, John Glassco. This biography, to which I contributed a few tidbits of info, is a must read - Glassco is one of the most colorful characters you'll ever meet, an author incubated in high culture and weaned on the low brow, much like Busby himself (full disclosure: Brian Busby and I were separated and cast out of the asylum for warped neonates soon after transitioning from mother's milk to Kool-Aid). Glassco wrote, amongst other novels, the classic Olympia Press volume, The English Governess by Miles Underwood (1959), and Fetish Girl by Sylvia Bayer (Venus Library,1972. Venus Library evolved from Girodias's Olympia Press - New York imprint), the first edition of which the analgesic Ms. Bayer dedicates to John Glassco  !

But Glassco was also a practical joker, one who perpetrated more than one delightful literary hoax. As I promised Brian not to spill the beans until the book is released, I must keep these a secret.

It's no secret, however, that if you want to stay on top of the wonderful and often weird past and present world of Canadian literature, Brian, our man in the attic, is the go-to guy.
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Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.