Whitey The Irrepressible Infests Europe After Festing With The Queer People Of Hollywood

by Stephen J. Gertz

Cover art by Vincentini.

A lovable and, yes, irrepressible but dissolute American, Whitey, wreaks havoc in Europe in the company of Sonia Varon, a movie star concealing her pregnancy from her producer; Prime Minister Zmiythe, dictator of Gandonia; and various potentates, gangsters, bartenders, and a fat lady - Senorita Francisca Ortiz, in love with Whitey, all 220 pounds of her - who doesn't sing until it's over in Kings Back To Back: Whitey The Irrepressible Infests Europe, the third novel in Carroll and Garrett Graham's Whitey trilogy.

Theodore Anthony "Whitey" White is a New York newspaperman of the Hecht-MacArthur Hildy Johnson/Front Page ilk who, if not exactly a bottom-feeder, avidly grazes on the fringe. So, when he blows into Hollywood, where his dubious reputation in New York and Chicago has not blown west with him, in Queer People - the first Whitey novel - he is at home among the colorful studio folk who populate Hollywood as a colony of bacteria occupy the colon.

Whitey has embraced the past age of enlightenment as the present age to getting lit, and answers any and all questions philosophical or otherwise with "I don't know. Let's take a few drinks and find out." The wisdom of the whiskey bottle is, for him, a modern day oracle at Delphi to be consulted in times of doubt or certainty, which is to say, always, to wit: "By dusk he was always comfortably potted and in a mood for anything." In Whitey, the Playboy of "Queer People" Runs Riot in Manhattan, the second novel in the Graham's trilogy, we are introduced to our hero as he confesses to his fifteenth drink - so far that morning.

Partying was his primary occupation but every now and then, as a result of contacts made at  Hollywood bacchanals, he found work. In a case of mistaken identity,  for instance, in Queer People he is hired by the head of Colossal Pictures to join its story department.

Cover art by Vincentini.

Budd Schulberg, who, as the son of movie pioneer and early Paramount studio chief B.P. Schulberg, knew a thing or two about Hollywood, wrote in the Afterword to the modern reprint of Queer People (Southern Illinois University Press, 1976) that readers may recognize Whitey "as a forerunner of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby, the irrepressible studio hack, part heel, part victim - an All-American, interchangeable with All-Hollywood in these hilarious and desperate days when the Whitey-Pat Hobbys lived off the crumbs from the banquet table of the queer people who combined the decadent flamboyance of Louis XIV with the stupidity of George III."

"Siblings Carroll and Garrett Graham decided to explore the sleazier side of Tinseltown in their novel Queer People (1930)...With its hard-nosed anti-hero, Theodore 'Whitey' White, anticipating Schulberg's newshounds-for-hire, Al Mannheim and Sammy Glick, this disconcerting roman à clef exposed the chasm between fantasy and reality, and suggested that icons and wannabes alike were incapable of distinguishing between performance and life" (Trouble in Tinseltown: Budd Schulberg's Literary Legacy, The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2009)

Cover art by Ann Cantor.

Queer People was a best-seller that went through eleven printings in its first year of publication. It was issued in a paperback digest edition in 1950 under the title, Fleshpots of Malibu (NY: Broadway Novel Monthly), with cover art that does not in any way telegraph that it is a hard-bitten satire but does highlight the book's proto-pulp sensibility.

Little is known about Carroll and Garrett Graham, who appear to have disappeared from the scene faster than a dissident in North Korea. In addition to their Whitey trilogy, the Grahams published Only Human, another from Vanguard Press in 1932 and issued just prior to Kings Back To Back: Whitey The Irrepressible Infests Europe.

Cover art by Vincentini.

"In the ring he was great - a light-footed boxer, and a murderous, relentless slugger who didn't know how to lose a fight and who ploughed his way straight to a championship. Johnny was sure he loved Marjorie, a sheltered, conventional, polished girl to whom he became engaged, but May, who was more at home in a speakeasy than in a drawing room, needed him. And Johnny couldn't disappoint a girl!" (Jacket blurb).

Mention must be made of the beautiful dust jacket art by Vincentini, about whom I've been able to find nothing thus far. The folks at Vanguard Press (in its heyday a Leftist publisher of, among other genres,  novels of social realism) loved his stylish work, so much so that they reproduced Vincentini's DJ art as the front free-endpaper to Kings Back To Back, a highly unusual move not seen from other publishers.

It's very difficult to find first edition, first printing copies of the Whitey trilogy in collectable condition. It's even harder to find them in dust jackets. Vincentini's work is highly desirable. Other examples of his dust jackets can be found here.

As for me, I'm irrepressible, ran riot in Manhattan as a lad, used to run a Hollywood story department, am a whitey in Los Angeles, and only human. So, I'll be exploring the fleshpots of Malibu as soon as I determine whether any actually exist and that Joe's Crab Shack on the coast isn't one of them. You can't be too careful.

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GRAHAM, Carroll and Garrett. Kings Back to Back: Whitey the Irrepressible Infests Europe. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1932. First edition. Octavo. 286 pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

Slide, The Hollywood Novel, p. 113.

GRAHAM, Carroll and Garrett. Queer People. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1930. First edition. Octavo. 276 pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

Slide, p. 112.

GRAHAM, Carroll and Garrett. Whitey; The Playboy of "Queer People" Runs Riot in Manhattan. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1931. First edition. Octavo. 274 pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

Slide, p. 113.

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With the exception of Only Human and Fleshpots of Malibu, images courtesy of ReadInk and Between the Covers, with our thanks. Ond to Google Books for the titlepage to Whitey...
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Dust Jacket Designer Philip Grushkin From Comps To Final

by Stephen J. Gertz

Philip Grushkin working in his Englewood, NJ home studio, c.1950s.

A major archive of renowned dust jacket designer, Philip Grushkin, "whose work made him the standard-bearer throughout the publishing industry," (NY Times obit) is coming to market courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Booktryst got a sneak preview of its catalog, yet another key reference and collectible work as we've come to expect from the NYC-based super dealer.

Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. Its manifesto, embraced by Grushkin, rejected:

• "The stunt jacket that screams for your attention, and then dares you to guess what the book is about."

• "The jacket that is born of the assumption that if the book has a heroine, or if the author is a woman, or the author's mother a female, the jacket must say SEX."

• "Burlap backgrounds, the airbrush doilies and similar clichés as well as the all too many good illustrations that were stretched, squeezed, tortured and mutilated to fit a jacket format with just enough room left for an unrelated title."

1953.

Grushkin's hallmark, like Salter's, was his creative use of calligraphy and lettering in concert with a lightly drawn illustration. His early work tends to mimic Salter's but in the late 194os his own personal style began to emerge, with an emphasis on lettering and calligraphy often to the exclusion of illustration altogether. Perhaps his most recognizable and typical dust jacket from that period is that for Simone De Bouvier's The Second Sex (1953).

If you are unfamiliar with Grushkin his deceptively simple yet visually aggressive pictorial style is distinctive; once you see a Grushkin book jacket you will begin to see them all over the place on books published during the late 1940s - early 1960s.

"Grushkin forged his own brand of modernism, one that owed nothing to the work of Lustig, Rand, or Herbert Bayer, inventing a unique mixture of bold typographic hand lettering, dynamic background patterns, vibrant colors, and abstract symbolism. By the end of the 1950s, Grushkin’s style was distilled to the point where it resembled Paul Bacon’s 'Big Book Look,' with hand lettering - instead of calligraphy - taking center stage, augmented only by a tonally variegated background" (Paul Shaw, Philip Grushkin: a Designer's Archive, catalog to the collection).

Below, a few examples of Grushkin's work in development, from first comp to final jacket.

The Other Side of the Record (1947):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fifth comp.

Final.

The Train From Pittsburgh (1948):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fourth comp, side notes.

The fourth comp of Train..., unusually, has notations, not just by Grushkin, but also by "J" at Knopf (likely production manager Sidney Jacobs). Grushkin’s notes refer to the colors he plans to use - blue, red, and yellow - with a reminder that the jacket will be offset printed. The notation by “J” approves the design but suggests substituting the calligraphic lettering of Julian Farren's name to a clean, serif'ed typeface.

Fifth and final.

Mechanical - Shards of Glass.

Mechanical - Lettering.

Helix (1947):

Partial comp.

In what was, apparently, the first (and partial) comp for David Loughlin's novel, Helix (1947), Grushkin employs a blue background, a single swirling spiral, and title lettering running upward on a diagonal from left to right.

First complete comp.

In the above, the first complete comp for the Helix DJ, Grushkin loses the blue background and substitutes red, has the title lettering on a downward diagonal from left to right, acutely triangulates the author and title, features a series of smudgy, overlapping spirals, and adds a tiny ship moving along a black plane.

Second complete comp.

Grushkin's second complete comp for Helix refined his design in the first comp, downplaying the swirling spirals,  deleting the ship's black path, and adding black "gears," elements that made it to the final published dust jacket.

Final.

Grushkin's final design for Helix cleans up, clarifies, and polishes the second comp.

Limbo mechanical.

Final.

The lettering mechanical for an early comp of Grushkin's DJ for Bernard Wolfe's classic science-fiction novel, Limbo (1952) bears a different subtitle than the final. "A Voyage of Discovery and Adventure in the Fantastic World of 1990" must have seemed a tantalizing teaser in 1952. The teaser to the final certainly hammers it home: "A diabolic tale - mad, merry and monstrous - of men and women caught in the vortex of history yet to happen! Check out that mad, merry, and monstrous year, 1990, more frightening that Wolfe could ever have imagined:

• Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces after acting as dictator of Panama for five years.

• Notorious Gambino crime family leader John "the Dapper Don" Gotti was arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, and various and sundry illegal activities.

• Marion Barry, the flamboyant mayor of Washington D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine in an F.B.I. sting set up in a D.C. hotel room.

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned. 

• The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Moscow, becoming for many a symbol of the nation's new progressive free market ideology.

• The World Wide Web was created, along with the first ever web page and web browser.

• Time Inc and Warner Communications, two of the largest media companies in the world merged to create giant Time Warner.

That's some vortex. We're lucky to have made it through 1990 alive.

The Grushkin archive consists of his book jackets (with related comps, roughs and mechanicals); binders of his cover designs for Mercury Publications; letterhead and logo designs; related ephemera; and a collection of book jackets by George Salter: over 2,000 total items in all, 150 of which are highlighted in the catalog, with the largest and most important portion being the dust jackets by Grushkin.

"'His life was literally books,' said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

"Yet, he was an invisible presence, his work evident only to a book's author, the publisher's editorial and design staff, the printer and the bindery" (Times obit).

"My Dad was also a book designer. He handled in his lifetime close to 1500 books, for many publishers, but most for Harry N. Abrams, the worldwide leader in artbooks. He told me a book design is successful when it's invisible, meaning the reader never has to labor to overcome the designer. In a good book design, the grid and typographic elements illuminate the author's concept along with the book's contents. Nothing jars that reader from experiencing the book - nothing in the design is so boastful that it's the designer who's calling out, before anything else, 'look at MY cleverness'" (Paul Grushkin). 

Book lovers, special collections librarians, and aficionados and collectors of dust jackets will be fortunate to score a copy of the Grushkin Archive catalog, luckier still to acquire the archive itself. While it's not unusual to track a writer's progress through their archive, it isn't often that we have an opportunity to see a dust jacket designer in the midst of their process from conception to completion.

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All images reproduced with the express permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Book Illustrator Ben Shahn Does Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

WE WANT PEACE / REGISTER - VOTE. (1946).

"His codified signature neatly scribbled under any of his images conjures up a peerless world of visual and emotional realism" (Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 1988).

Born in Lithuania in 1898, artist Ben Shahn immigrated to New York with his family in 1906. He apprenticed with a commercial lithographer in 1911 while still a high-school student, and earned his living in the trade until the early 1930s, when he began to receive recognition as a fine artist.

In 1934, after exhibitions of his series of paintings about the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti affairs, he was commissioned to produce a mural by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The following year, Rexford Tugwell, a prominent member of Roosevelt's "brain trust," invited Shahn to join the Resettlement Administration. He worked as an artist in the agency's Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Roy Stryker's photographic section.

His first significant contact with graphic design, however, came in 1942 when he was hired to work in the Office of War Information. Shahn later told biographer Selden Rodman that his chief duty was "to explain in posters to the people who need it what is being done for them and to the others what they are paying for."

This image above  was "used by the CIO in a voter registration drive. [And] it represents, perhaps, the best of Shahn's poster work. One cannot soon erase the memory of the hollow-eyed young face begging for peace. Nowhere is Shahn's genius for drawing more evident than in the thrust of the pleading hand...Using the image of this child in the context of an election campaign seems to say that in a democracy the first step toward healing the ravages of war is to exercise one's right to vote" (Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, p. 132).

Based upon his painting Hunger, Shahn recalled, in 1964, that he told Roy Stryker that a certain photograph of soil erosion would not have a strong impact on viewers. "Look Roy," Shahn said, "you're not going to move anybody with this eroded soil - but the effect this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."

WARNING! INFLATION MEANS DEPRESSION. (1946).

This poster, another for the CIO, "of a farmer, whose seeming integrity and strength greatly impressed Shahn" (Prescott p. 132),  is based on a photograph Shahn took during the 1930s while traveling through Arkansas as a member of the Resettlement Administration and Stryker's photography unit.  It is a haunting image of a troubled working man, memories of the Great Depression fresh and alarming,  yet with an optimistic message to allay his fears : "Register - Vote."

BREAK REACTION'S GRIP / REGISTER VOTE. (c. 1946).

In the years after World War II, Shahn took on a new threat, anti-Labor, Establishment radicals. "The one arm, dressed in coat sleeve and shirt cuff, with hand clasping a colorful map of the United States, represents the country's supposedly small, but powerful, reactionary forces. The poster suggests that however strong, their power could be broken by the greater strength of the progressive forces, as represented by the larger, sleeveless arm" (Prescott, p. 131).

OUR FRIEND. (1944.)

Shahn's political orientation was patent, his views powerful. "This poster was used in the hotly contested 1944 campaign in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term. Shahn presented Roosevelt as a warmly sympathetic man whose visage looms father-like above the crowd" (Prescott p. 128). The image, in retrospect, is a bit disconcerting, the obvious influence of Social Realism suggesting the cult of personality exploited by Stalin in Soviet propaganda. You can, in fact, substitute Stalin's image for Roosevelt's and wind up with a typical 1930s Soviet poster celebrating Papa Joe.

Be that as it may, his work here (and, ultimately, most of his work) was infused with a strong concern regarding the forces that undermine the common man, each a visual editorial protesting social injustice. Shahn was always a champion of the less fortunate.

Shahn's uncle was a bookbinder; he allayed Shahn's childhood hunger for books by bringing him volumes from his shop. After World War II he was chosen by Look magazine as one of the "World's Ten Best Artists." He abandoned painting for good and adopted graphic work for better. The book dust jackets he created (amongst other celebrated graphic designs) during the 1950s and 1960s remain classics.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Innocence Found in Scarce Dust Jacket

by Stephen J. Gertz

Take a good look; you'll likely never see another first edition copy of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920) in its scarce first state dust jacket in this condition ever again. It's usually lost along with the innocence of the age it illuminates, America in the 1870s and the Victorian social standards of contemporary New York high society.

When seen at all the first state dust jacket usually proclaims "Chips Ahoy!" It's a rare cookie without divots aplenty at spine ends and along the edges as if leaf-eating insects chomped a banquet.

First edition, first printing (with "1" on p. 365) copies without dust jacket currently go for $2250-$9000. Copies in the first state dust jacket cost considerably more. The copy under notice, for instance, is being offered by Peter Harrington at $31,400 (£20,000).  Prices are extremely sensitive to DJ condition. Another copy in the first state dust jacket with a chunks missing at the spine head and upper right corner sold for $23,500 not too long ago.

This copy has a Wharton signature tipped-in to a prelim leaf. Per usual with clipped and mounted autographs it adds little to the value of the book. Inscribed and signed copies of The Age of Innocence in any edition, however, are even rarer than copies in the first state dust jacket. Only one such copy has entered the marketplace within the last thirty years, currently offered by Charles Agvent for $31,250.

Put this dj on that inscribed copy and you'd have a lollipazooza, easily worth more than double the price of the two sold separately. It becomes a $75,000-$100,000 book, greater than the sum of its parts.

Clearly, this is one very expensive dust jacket. It's not in the same class as the DJ to The Great Gatsby, which can add up to $175,000 to the price of a first edition copy, but, like Gatsby in DJ, it remains highly scarce and desirable and thus highly susceptible to fraud, i.e. restoration without declaration. Dust jackets to The Age of Innocence that raise suspicion should be examined under black light to reveal evidence of not-so-divine intervention.

First state dust jacket points:

• Quotes on rear panel by Percy Lubbock pulled from The Novels of Edith Wharton, an article that originally appeared in the January 1915 issue of the Quarterly Review.

In the second state dust jacket, Lubbock's quotes are replaced by those by William Phelps that originally appeared in the New York Times review, October 17, 1920.

• The price on the jacket is $2.

“There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as major and Edith Wharton is one" (Gore Vidal).

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WHARTON, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: D. Appleton, 1920. First edition, first printing. Octavo. 364, [2] pp. Publisher's original red cloth. Original first state dust jacket.

Hart 814. Garrison 30.I.a.

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Images courtesy of Peter Harrington, with our thanks.

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Of related Interest:

The $175,000 Dust Jacket Comes To Auction.
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Literary Matchboxes Light Up Christmas Stockings (Close Cover Before Striking)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Those seeking the perfect match when Christmas (or any other kind of) shopping for friends with a literary bent (and all book lovers are proudly a little bent) should look no further than The Matchbox Museum of Fine Arts, the brainchild of Los Angeles-based designer Hillary Kaye. Not simply its curator she's its creator, taking Diamond matchboxes and reproducing celebrated book dust jacket designs upon them.

Point-of-sale display case.

I was turned onto them by a friend who recently presented four sets of the Museum's Petit Fours to me, packages containing a quartet of similarly themed matchboxes.

Delighted and intrigued, I contacted Hillary Kaye to find out what's what and where to get these 1 1/3 x 2 inch tiny gems.

Petit Fours, above and below.

“Tiny gems” is a perfect description of the matchboxes," she responded, "exactly how I see them, each one a miniature world. They’re based on the Diamond penny matchbox which I’ve always found visually pleasing. Only recently when I started working with them did I discover they are the exact dimension of the 'golden rectangle,' a shape used in classical antiquity and the Renaissance because of its aesthetic proportions.

(Upper edges accidentally cropped).

"I created The Matchbox Museum of Fine Arts to help make people aware of the heritage of visual imagery from the golden age of illustration. It can be a memento of favorite books for readers and collectors and an introduction to classics they might have missed.

"I’m guessing your friend must have bought the Petit Fours at Vicente Foods market as they are the only place local [to me, in West Los Angeles] that has them. I sell to indie bookstores not the big chains. They're available in twenty-three States across the country including Tattered Cover, Books and Books, Square Books, etc. In L.A.  they’re also available at Skylight Books, Book Soup and a number of other stores.

Actual size: 1 1/3 x 2 inches each.

"Other than a minimal exposure at www.iceboxicons.com/matchboxmuseum.htm which is basically for paypal ordering; so far I don’t have a website for the matchboxes. Since 9/11 matchboxes can not be sent through the ordinary mail, just UPS. The shipping price for small orders would be high.

From the classic crime series. Scores available in other genres.

"Sets of the matchboxes in a display box have been available at some of the bookstores and I have considered making them available online for collectors. I do special orders on request."

This year set Christmas afire with literary classics from The Matchbook Museum of Fine Arts. If your local indie bookstore or rare book shop doesn't have any,  insist, pester, and persist until they stock them. I have little doubt that they will be great, point-of-purchase impulse items and steady sellers as all-year round gifts.

Dealer inquiries can be directed here.

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Of Related Interest:

Time For Vintage Book Clocks This Christmas.

The Ultimate Gift For Book Lovers.

Rare Book Trading Cards On Santa's Top Shelf.
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For Purple Monsters Majesty Above A Nutty Plain

by Stephen J. Gertz

New York: E.P. Dutton, 1949. First separate edition.

 "What mad universe was this that Keith Winton found himself in?
Where purple monsters from the moon roamed the streets with
no one paying any attention to them?"

While strolling in the park one day, in the merry, merry month of May, I was taken by surprise by a pair of purple eyes, purple limbs, purple torso, bad hair day.

Hi, I'm Keith Winton, editor of a pulp science fiction magazine based in a major market - and I ain't  talkin' Trader Joe's. One day (in May), with my trusty co-worker and glamorous girlfriend, Betty, at my side, I visited  my publisher's elegant Borscht Belt estate in the Catskills, just down the road from Grossinger's, up the street from The Concord, around the corner from The Pines, and next door to The Nevele, which is eleven spelled backwards but don't ask me why. We were in a mad universe of upstate New York Jewish resorts and spritzing, tummling comedians. Rim-shot! Laugh? I thought I'd die.

New York: Bantam Books #835, 1950. Cover by Herman Bischoff.
First edition in paperback.

Unfortunately, on that same day an experimental rocket was launched to the Moon. Simultaneously, Betty was launched back to New York. I was alone, then, in my publisher's' garden, lost in thought, when, suddenly, the Moon rocket (whose launch was a friggin' failure) crashed and exploded on the estate (aka Inanity Acres), careening me into a strange but deceptively similar parallel universe. 

Wild-eyed, as you might imagine (if not, imagine it now), I was astonished to discover that credits had replaced dollars; amazed when I encountered scantily-clad pin-up girls who, it turned out, were distaff astronauts with va-va-voom and oh-la-la lunar dreams; and was stupefied when I encountered a Moon race of seven-foot tall purple beings who insouciantly walked down Broadway in New York City as if they were cast members from a parallel universe production of Rogers and Hammerstein's 1949 sock-o South Pacific and belonged there, enjoying one enchanted evening on The Great White Way. Even a cockeyed optimist would look askance at this parade of purple protoplasm engaged in happy talk. How would Earth wash these purple people right out of its hair?

New York: Bantom Books #1253, 1954. Cover by Charles Binger. Reprint.

What mad 1949 universe was I in where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower makes a cameo appearance? Last I heard he was president of Columbia University and the staff and faculty resented his galavanting around the nation to promote a personal agenda that would one day lead to his nomination and election as President of the United States. Now he's in command of the Venus Sector in defense against the Arcturians with whom we are at war? I like Ike but what mad universe indeed!

Startling Stories - September 1948 - Vol. 18, No. 1
First appearance in print.

And a comic one, yet. Y'know, when a character like yours truly winds up in a science-fiction novel you figure cosmic funereal not interplanetary farce; dying is easy, comedy is hard. But that's exactly what What Mad Universe is, a social and literary satire of modern American life at mid-century and science-fiction genre conventions.

Call me Pirandello minus five but I feel like one character in search of an author, specifically Fredric Brown (1906-1972), who wrote me into  What Mad Universe. I suppose I should consider myself lucky: Brown was a master of the short-short story, often writing fully-developed tales of only one to three pages in length; my story - my life! - could have been dramatically condensed. In 1955, he published Martians Go Home (They Came, They Saw, They Left!), another screwball sci-fi comedy.

London: Grafton, 1987. Artist unknown.

Brown was also a fine mystery writer, his first full-length novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), winning an Edgar Award. For years prior he wrote hundreds of stories for the pulp magazines of his era.

What Mad Universe has become a classic, one of the most popular speculative fiction novels ever written. It has been reprinted many times.

Paris: Le Rayon Fantastique #21 (Hachette/Gallimard), 1953.
First ppk. edition in French. Cover by Rene Caillé.

It was very popular in France, winning immediate critical acclaim upon its release. Many French critics consider it to be one of the major sci-fi novels of all time. But they are equally ga-ga about Jerry Lewis movies, UFOs in the U.S.A. but laff-fests in France. Vive L'Univers en Folie.

What Mad Universe?

Goodbye, I'm Keith Winton, not to be confused with my cousin, Alfred E. Newman, above.

Below, allow me to serenade you with a little bagatelle I recorded in 1959 under an assumed name when the purple people eaters returned to digest and excrete me.

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BROWN, Fredric. What Mad Universe. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1949. First separate edition. Octavo. 255, [1] pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

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The Most Unfortunately Titled Novel Ever Published In English

by Stephen J. Gertz

“They’re not flamingoes, Adrian thought;
there wouldn’t be flamingoes on Dildo Cay in September.” 

"A very unusual book, with a puzzling quality, an indefinable fascination and some very distinguished writing. The strangeness of the setting (an island off Jamaica), the inarticulated intensity of the characters, the mood that pervades the whole is absorbing. For 250 years, the Ainsworths had followed the pattern set by the founder of the name, who had brought some 200 blacks to the island; and continued the tradition of loveless marriage, the family salt mill as a focus of interest, and the impersonal relations with their people. Tension increases, and things come to a head when Delbridge, brought in to help build white prestige, is murdered. Adrian, scion of the Ainsworths, and Carol, hard-surfaced daughter of the slacker, Delbridge, are faced with a decision -- and meet the test. A strange book, very well done. But not a book for the casual reader, seeking entertainment. Read it and see for yourself" (Kirkus Reviews, February 13, 1939).

O-kay, let's read and see for ourselves. But caveat lector: I suspect the only salt from the Ainsworth  mill used by Kirkus to season this review was bath salts because the writer was clearly high on something.

"Ainsworths do not marry for love. They choose their women to carry on the line–thoroughbreds who can endure the loneliness and the eternal wind of the Ainsworth island–Dildo Cay. This speck in the Atlantic lies six hundred miles southeast of Great Bahama. Here the Ainsworths have lived for eleven generations–the one white family among two hundred blacks.

"Young Adrian Ainsworth has followed the family tradition in selecting his wife, Mary. Then Carol arrives with her father, hired to revive the salt industry on which the livelihood of the Ainsworths and the blacks depends. Carol is a glittering and sophisticated creature caught in a strange situation. Adrian’s deep, growing desire for Carol and the tension between her arrogant father and the blacks mount to an electric climax. Without sentimentality, but with a powerful honesty, the author paints a consuming passion against a romantic and exotic background" (Dust jacket flap blurb).

For the record, the dildo referred to in the title has nothing to do with phallic mascots. Acanthocereus tetragonus, aka the dildo cactus, abundant on Dildo Cay (a real place, aka Salt Cay, "The island that time forgot" in the Turks and Caicos, a handful of sand with salt), is a cactus species native to southern Florida and the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the United States, Mexico, Central America, Caribbean, and northern South America. Wherever for whatever, be careful where you plant it.

The Dildo Cactus (Acanthocereus tetragonus).

The book was, apparently, loosely based upon the Harriot family of Salt Cay, who dominated the tiny island's salt plantations, production, and export from 1829 until the local industry's WWII collapse, hence Carol and father arrive to revive with a saline solution to the Ainsworth's woe. "The Harriotts were very angry at being the basis for the book Dildo Cay by Nelson Hayes... Lawsuits were threatened. Winnie Harriott thought the best-selling book 'scandalous'" (Salt Cay Inside the White House).

Yes, you heard right. Dildo Cay was a best-seller. A British edition was issued in the same year, and - with no irony at all given the city was the locus of the 60's Sexual Revolution in Europe - an  edition out of Copenhagen.

"Dildo Cay is bad in ways that surpass its title. The product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, the novel’s prose is so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion. Herein, I’d like to suggest, is the triumph of an exquisitely bad book such as Dildo Cay: it is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question. In many ways, of course, the novel parades the typically forgettable qualities of other undistinguished midcentury fiction: tawdry displays of local color, liberal deployments of racism and misogyny, textbook Oedipal conflicts, and the hypertrophic use of italics. But Dildo Cay boasts countless passages that far exceed these indistinctions:

‘Father, I want to talk with you!’

Adrian had been watching his father walk the dike unsteadily, and suddenly he had seen himself at the age of sixty walking the dike unsteadily, and on top of his restlessness it was too much for him.

‘How strong do you think that pickle is?’ his father asked, ignoring the tone of Adrian’s voice.

"If ever the family romance has so forcefully raised its pickle, I know few other novels so susceptible to accidental (?) allegory. We all walk the dike unsteadily" ((Jonathan P. Eburn, Pennsylvannia State University, American Book Review Volume 31, Number 2, January/February 2010).

Rather than walk the dike, Hollywood decided to walk the plank with the novel in the hope of making a big splash.

Dildo Cay was bought by Paramount, adapted for the screen by Hayes and Virginia Van Upp, and released as Bahama Passage (1942) starring Madeleine Carroll and Sterling Hayden, with Dorothy Dandridge co-starring as the exotic West Indian maid, Thalia.

"The two most gorgeous humans you've ever beheld - caressed by soft tropic winds - tossed by the tides of love!" (Movie splashline).

"Bahama Passage is a leisurely bit of Technicolor exotica starring Madeleine Carroll and her future husband Sterling Hayden. Based on Nelson Hayes novel Dildo Cay, the story takes place on a remote Bahaman island where the principal commodity-in fact, the only—is salt. The owner of the island is young Adrian (Sterling Hayden), who inherited Dildo Cay from his family. The stultifying dullness of life on the island has caused all the wives of Adrians forebears to eventually descend into insanity, and it looks as though the same thing might happen to Adrians sweetheart Carol (Madeleine Carroll), despite her uncanny ability to look 
after herself. While Carol does not go crazy, her presence on the island proves to be something of a jinx, resulting in dissension amongst the native population. The most striking aspect of Bahama Passage is the extremely casual clothing worn by the stars: Why, one would think that Paramount was trying to get the audiences mind off the films slower passages by showing off as much cheesecake and beefcake as possible" (Bosley Crowther, New York Times, February 19, 1942).

Other books in the Hayes ouevre include Blockade (1935); Bahama Passage (photoplay edition of Dildo Cay, 1940); and The Roof of the Wind (1962). 

Salt Cay, aka Dildo Cay, Turks and Caicos. 2.5 miles long.

Those still interested in reading the novel may wish to heed the accidental cautionary note that serves as the book's last line: “Keep your jib full…our course is for Dildo Cay."

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HAYES, Nelson. Dildo Cay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. First edition. Octavo. 328 pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

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