Unrecorded Philip K. Dick Archive Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

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

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

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

First edition.

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

That's what I do when consumed by ennui.

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

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

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

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

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

To which Dick responded on December 28, 1969:

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

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

Leaf from typescript, with holograph corrections.

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

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

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

This post was written on Ecstasis-9, a barren pebble located in the third quadrant of meta-cyberspace by someone who looks, acts and talks exactly as I do but may be a figment of my fecund imagination, "Stephen J. Gertz" the product of long-term use of Substance-D by someone who shares my DNA but has been known  since  birth  as Agent  Murray, a  defrocked  rabbi  with personality issues working undercover  to  investigate "Stephen J. Gertz" for  the  Department  of  Homeland  Security, Section 8.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this archive, with our thanks. Click here for full details of archive content.

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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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Door in the Wall Reveals Haunting Photogravures

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Door in the Wall.

"...The Door in the Wall was a real door leading through a real wall to immortal realities..." (H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall).

One of those immortal realities is that the photogravures by Alvin Langdon Coburn illustrating The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, a collection of eight short pieces by H.G. Wells, are amongst the most beautiful to ever grace a book.

Capri.

The Garden by Moonlight.

Born in Boston, Coburn (1882-1966) was a prodigy. When he was eight years old he was given a little Kodak camera. He fell in love with it. Within just a few years he demonstrated a precocious talent for visual composition and darkroom technique. At sixteen he was encouraged to make photography his career. At seventeen nine of his photographs were exhibited in London.

The Enchanted Garden.

The Country of the Blind.

He studied with Edward Steichen, Robert Demachy, and, later, with Gertrude Käsebier. Alfred Stieglitz began publishing Coburn prints in Camera Work. He had one-man shows in the U.S. and Europe. By 1907 George Bernard Shaw, who had posed for Coburn, declared him "the greatest photographer in the world." Alvin Langdon Coburn was twenty-four.

Edge of the Black Country.

The Embankment.

The Lord of the Dynamos.

A master of Pictorialism, he was firmly a part of the Photo-Secessionist movement. As the second decade of the twentieth century wore on he became increasingly interested in abstraction. His  fascination and deep involvement with spiritualism drew him away from photography; by 1930 he was almost completely removed from it. Convinced that his past was just that, he destroyed over 15,000 glass and film negatives, almost his entire archive.

The White Cloud.

The Star.

The Door in the Wall is considered to be Wells' best short story, its theme of science v. imagination as fresh today as it was when originally published. 

Retired from photography for the last thirty-six years of his life Alvin Langdon Coburn is today, unfortunately, remembered only by the photography cognoscenti. Yet his photographs - certainly these - remain technical and artistic achievements amongst the most important, influential, and hauntingly evocative of his era.

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WELLS. H[erbert]. G[eorge]. COBURN, Alvin Langdon (photog.). The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories. Illustrated with Photogravures from Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911.

First edition, one of 300 copies (of a total edition of 600) containing all ten photogravures; the remaining 300 contained only one photogravure, the other nine as aquatone (a half-tone process) reproductions, or all ten in aquatone.

Small folio (370 x 262 mm). iv, 51, [1] pp., printed on French hand-made paper. Ten hand-pulled and mounted photogravures "from plates prepared by the artist and printed under his personal supervision."  Quarter tan cloth over reddish-brown boards with printed spine label.

Contains: The Door in the Wall; The Star; A Dream of Armageddon; The Cone; A Moonlight Fable; The Diamond Maker; The Lord of the Dynamos; and The Country of the Blind.

Cary 70. Truthful Lens 184.

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Images courtesy of Art of the Photogravure.

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Future Utopia In Brooklyn, 1992! (In Case You Missed It)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Brooklyn, 1992, a great place to live.

It is cleaner; you can eat off the sidewalks. It is more peaceful; on Sundays you can hear a pin drop. It is healthier, and generally better than ever before. A 2¢ plain, (seltzer, i.e. seltza!) presumably, still costs two cents. Mass electrification via solar power and mechanization have brought widespread prosperity, and the extremes of wealth and poverty have been shaved. The electric car is standard (though not a Prius in sight). Government and the economy have meshed as a cooperative commonwealth. All land is owned by the state; people lease the sites of their palatial  - yes, palatial - homes.; every house a McMansion. Men and women are fully equal. Religion and science have buried the hatchet and are now best buds; indeed science and religion are one. Color photography has finally arrived. Various super-duper gizmos have increased the breadth and efficiency of personal communications.  Contact has been been made with Mars. The borough is now part of the city of Columbia, formerly New York. War is a thing of the past. The whole scene is, as they say in Brooklyn, "Cherce."

Oh, and dogs now understand human speech and can respond with a code of staccato barks.

Big changes since 1893, when the above was predicted. Bigger than when Bohemia colonized the Williamsburg district, bigger than when its HQ (hip quotient) burst the thermometer and led to gentrification, bohemian exodus, and Starbucks.

 

Earth Revisited is one of the more unusual novels of Utopian literature, a genre that thrived during the latter part of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

In 1892 Herbert Atheron is a successful businessman with a wife and two children. Only fifty, he contracts a fatal disease; he is dying as the novel opens. He regrets his life of crass money-making and rues the loss of Teresa, a young woman he was in love with in youth but who had tragically died. He loses consciousness.

When he awakens, he is a twenty-seven year old named Harold Amesbury, a man who has been ill and delirious for the last three months, nursed by Helen, who brings him back to a semblance of mental balance and introduces him to the world, Brooklyn, one hundred years later, a place of "bewildering magnificence and beauty." 

Helen and Harold draw close but his obsession with the long-lost Teresa drives a wedge between them and she leaves him. He boards at a house owned by a medium who leads him on a spiritual journey through time and space to the now-evergreen Sahara where he meets up with Helen. They experience a spiritual mind-meld and learn that Helen is the reincarnation of Teresa. They marry, take the last exit to Brooklyn, watch a tree grow there, and live happily ever after.

Byron Alden Brooks (1845–1911) "was a native New Yorker, born in the small town of Theresa. He was educated at Wesleyan University. Brooks was a teacher, journalist, and inventor as well as the author of several other literary works. His first book was King Saul (1876). As an inventor, he produced improvements in typewriters and linotype machines; his most notable innovation was probably the first typewriter that could shift between upper- and lower-case letters" (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography).

Only one thing remains in Brooklyn 1992 as it was in 1892. Dogs cannot scoop up their own poop. And they call it utopia...
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BROOKS, Byron. Earth Revisited. Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1893. First edition. Octavo. 318, (4 publisher's catalog) pp. Publisher's blue cloth boards, lettered in gilt.

Bleiler, Science-Fiction the Early Years 277. Negley 149. Sargent, p.49.
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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books.

Read the entire text of Earth Revisited here.
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Mars Needs Lawyers! (A Rare Book Adventure)

SCHACHNER, Nat. Space Lawyer. NY: Gnome Press,1953.
Cover by Ric Binkley.

“Nat Schachner’s first science fiction novel in book form is delightfully different reading for the thousands of readers who are becoming tired of the many involved and stereotyped stories of science fiction being published today. With deft skill and an irresistible humor he tells an intriguing story of the legal problems that are bound to crop up when man has finally opened up the new frontier out in space; but it is essentially the captivating tale of the space lawyer’s ingenious use of legalism in space to triumph over his opponent, Old Fireball” (Dust jacket blurb).

“Old Fireball” is space lawyer Kerry Dale’s former employer, Simeon Kenton, owner and president of Space Enterprises Unlimited whose “spaceships fastened their flags on the spongy marshes of Venus, on the desolate wastes of Mars, on rocky asteroids and mighty Jupiter itself.” It’s torts on Titan, litigation, and petitions on Pluto from Gnome Press. But it is one of the ironies of the space lawyer’s lot that in space no one can hear oral arguments, much less scream. The upside, however, is a minimum of solar windbags. The downside? Undue hardship on Uranus; the space lawyer’s job is a pain in the ass. The exclusionary rule, alas, prevents further disclosure of the plot, leaving me in forma pauperis as a book reviewer.

Forgive the following statement; there’s no way around it: Gnome was a small publisher. Established in 1948 by science fiction fans Martin Greenberg and David A. Kyle in New York, it survived a hand-to-mouth existence for fourteen years before ceasing publication in 1962. In its early years Gnome published books by authors who would become giants in the genre, ogres if you will, including Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951-53), Robert A. Heinlein's Sixth Column (1951),  Robert E. Howard’s Conan series (1950-55), L. Ron Hubbard's Typewriter in the Sky (1951), and Arthur C. Clark’s Sands of Mars (1952) and Against the Fall of the Night (1953). Gnome Press published screenwriter Leigh Brackett's The Starmen (1952), and books by L. Sprague de Camp, and Frederik Pohl.

Nathaniel Schachner (1895-1955) was an attorney and chemist who compounded Space Lawyer for Astounding Stories  in 1941. His first published work appeared in Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1930. In addition to writing under his own name he used the pseudonyms Chan Corbett and Walter Glamis. Schachner, when not lost in space, could be found writing non-fiction historical titles, including Aaron Burr, A Biography (1937); The Medieval Universities (1938); Alexander Hamilton (1946); The Price of Liberty (1948), an unofficial history of the American Jewish Committee; and Thomas Jefferson (1951), a biography in two volumes.

Space Lawyer is not a great book. It is barely good. Chromo-spectrograph analysis revealed little color and less humor frequencies than advertised. But it does address a major lacuna in science-fiction literature, the near complete absence of personnel beyond space warrior, space doctor, space systems analyst, spaceship captain, etc. etc. After finishing Space Lawyer you will slap your head with the of course! realization that, not only does outer space need lawyers, it needs accountants, dentists, plumbers, real estate agents, insurance salesmen, tailors, taxidermists, day-traders, and, perhaps the most egregious of omissions, space librarians and rare book dealers and collectors in space. Attention budding science-fiction writers: Opportunity knocks (but in space you can't hear it).

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The saga of finding Space Lawyer provides an object lesson in the value of book fairs. I’d have never discovered the book had I searched for it on the Net; you can't find what you don't know exists. But this past weekend, at the Santa Monica Book Fair, it delivered itself unto me via display in the booth of Vic Zoschak’s Tavistock Books. My eyes were arrested by the title, I picked the book up, marveled at its loopiness, chuckled, and put the book back on its easel.

I brought three people over to check it out and urged them to buy it. I walked that aisle another six or seven times, and stopped by the booth to look at the book another six or seven times before I realized I was hooked; this book was a keeper and I was powerless to resist its wacked-out charm. Zoschak, perhaps because he had an elephant-sized frog in his throat secondary to a horse-sized case of  hoarseness, did the sage thing, salesmanship-wise, and kept quiet to allow collector-neurosis  to run wild and consume me. The buy hawk on my left shoulder went toe to toe with the buy dove on my right shoulder and plucked him, but good. Space Lawyer was Circe and I succumbed to her song. I shoulda ducked the sucker punch.

Yet I do not regret my temporary insanity; every time I look at the book my brain breaks out into a smile that spans both cerebral hemispheres. It’s the satisfying reward of a book collector who found gold in an octavo-sized slab of lead, the alchemy of book collecting - high-brow, low-brow, no-brow - at its best.

A publisher's logo worth the price of the book: 
Reader-astronaut riding a book-rocket blasting into Outer Space.

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