Primo Copy Of Piranese's Imaginary Prisons $270,000-$400,000 At Christie's

by Stephen J. Gertz

"I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it" (Piranese).

A magnificent copy of the scarce first edition of Italian artist and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranese's (1720-1778) celebrated suite of designs for an imaginary prison, Invenzioni Capric di Carceri (Rome: Giovanni Bouchard, n.d. [c. 1750]) - which has had an enormous influence upon literature - is being offered by Christie's-Paris in its Importants livres anciens, livres d'artistes & manuscrits sale, April 30, 2014.

With all of its fourteen beautifully designed and etched plates in their first impression, second state (except one), before numbering and retouching, on un-watermarked paper, and in excellent condition, it is estimated to sell for $270,000-$400,000.

The plates depict fanciful subterranean vaults and machines somewhat Kafkaesque in nature, with surreal distortion later found in the work of M.C. Escher, featuring bizarre, labyrinthine structures that are chemerical mash-ups of monumental architecture, epic caprices depicting "ancient Roman or Baroque ruins converted into fantastic, visionary dungeons filled with mysterious scaffolding and instruments of torture" (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Only the engravings of Goya and William Blake have inspired writers as much as those of Piranesi's Carceri.  Their roots lie in the theatrical dioramas that Piranese designed for the Galli da Bibiena family of stage set designers in Bologna as well as those for his father, a stonemason.

The rare second edition, later published by Piranese himself with the plates reworked, contains an extra two plates yet here "in Bouchard's edition the plates are more lightly etched throughout with none of the strong contrasts of light and shade seen in the later edition. There is a wonderful simplicity in the design in the early states, and none shows this quality in greater beauty than plate four of the series" ( Hind ).

The haunting, dream-like quality to the plates fired the imagination of the Romantics.

"The fascination of Piranese's Imaginary Prisons for the literary mind is attested by transmutations in story, poem, and essay. In a recent attempt to explain the appeal, Aldous Huxley remarks that the etchings express obscure psychological truths: they represent 'metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt.' Whatever the explanation may be, the influence of the Prisons on writers of the last two centuries, particularly on the Romantics, will one day make a chapter of literary history which will include the names of Walpole, Beckford, Coleridge, De Quincey, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, and doubtless many others" (Paul F. Jamieson. Musset, de Quincey, and Piranese. Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 2, Feb. 1956).

"Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist...which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him" (Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater).

The Plates:

I - Title
II - The Round Tower
III - The Grand Piazza
IV - The Smoking Fire
V - The Drawbridge
VI - The Staircase with Trophies
VII - The Giant Wheel
VIII - Prisoners on a Projecting Platform
IX - The Arch with a Shell Ornament
X - The Sawhorse
XI - The Well
XII - The Gothic Arch
XIII - The Pier with a Lamp
XIV - The Pier with Chains

"One of the greatest printmakers of the eighteenth century, Piranesi always considered himself an architect. The son of a stonemason and master builder, he received practical training in structural and hydraulic engineering from a maternal uncle who was employed by the Venetian waterworks, while his brother, a Carthusian monk, fired the aspiring architect with enthusiasm for the history and achievements of the ancient Romans. Piranesi also received a thorough background in perspective construction and stage design. Although he had limited success in attracting architectural commissions, this diverse training served him well in the profession that would establish his fame" (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

This copy, formerly in the collection of the National Gallery of Art (with small stamp on the back of each plate with stamp cancellation), was last seen at Christie's-London July 2, 2003 when it sold for $140, 506 (£83,650; €101,704).

Grégoire Dupond created the below animated film for Factum Arte, based upon Piranesi's engravings for Invenzioni Capric di Carceri, as a walk through the artist's amazing spaces:

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Images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
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Henry Miller Loathed Salvador Dali (And Anais Nin Wasn't Crazy About Him, Either)

by Stephen J. Gertz

For a few months during late summer 1940, Henry Miller and Anais Nin visited their mutual friend from Paris, Caresse Crosby (1892-1970), for  an extended stay at Hampton Manor, a 486 acre estate  in Bowling Green, Virginia with a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion built in 1847 by John Hampton DeJarnette that Crosby had bought and renovated. At the same time Salvador Dali and his not-yet wife, Gala, were living at the estate.

Miller had met Dali years earlier in Paris. He was not impressed. Their relationship was antagonistic from the start. When Salvador and Gala, and Henry and Anais were thrown together at Hampton Manor Dali's antics and eccentricities, Miller's personality, and Gala's domineering nature led to a train wreck, when egos collide.

As Nin wrote in her dairies 1934-1944, "They hadn’t counted on Mrs. Dali’s talent for organization. Before anyone realized what was happening, the entire household was there for the sole purpose of making the Dalis happy. No one was allowed to set foot in the library because he wanted to work there. - Would [John] Dudley be so kind and drive to Richmond to pick up something or other that Dali needed for painting? Would she [Nin] mind translating an article for him? Was Caresse going to invite LIFE magazine for a visit? In other words, everyone performed the tasks assigned to them. All the while, Mrs. Dali never raised her voice, never tried to seduce or flatter them: it was implicitly assumed that all were there to serve Dali, the great, indisputable artist."

Amongst a laundry list of things the Dalis did to annoy Miller and Nin was the couple's incessant public displays of affection, pawing each other at every opportunity; it was a bit much. Dali's art projects at Hampton Manor proved tiresome; everything had to be subsumed to Dali's muse, Gala. Caresse Crosby was away in Reno, Nevada at this time and there was no one to serve as referee. Dali's sympathies for Franco in Spain were further reason for clashes; Miller and Nin were anti-Fascist.

Yes, Crosby invited it and in its April, 1941 issue Life magazine ran story on Dali, Gala, and the hubbub at Hampton Manor. "Their host, Mrs. Crosby…likes interesting guests," Life reported, "and does not object when her visitors linger on, but they must be as industrious as they are stimulating." Life said that Dali arose every morning at 7:30, put on dark trousers, a velvet jacket and a red vest, and "spent his days painting and 'enchanting' and his evenings writing" his autobiography.

According to Life, for one of the paintings Dali had black servants pose in ankle-deep snow in front of the mansion with a piano and a slaughtered deer. One of the photographs that accompanied the story depicted Dali, Gala, and Caresse Crosby having their afternoon coffee while a live Hereford bull kneeled on the floor between them.

"Here today," Life continued, "Dali busies himself from dawn to dusk 'enchanting' the grounds and gardens with such surrealistic fancies as floating pianos, multi-colored rabbits and spiders with the faces of girls."

"The Divine Dali," as he called himself, was not so divine to Miller, who, as many, considered the artist more a poseur-exhibitionist than genius, a talent flawed by his ego-centrism - a pitfall Miller, with no small ego himself managed to escape; his ego was central to his talent, a friend and not an enemy. What was enchanting to Dali  - who once grandly proclaimed, "I am Surrealism!" to the disdain of every other Surrealist in the world - was clap-trap to Miller, the realist who called a prick a prick in his work and knew one when he saw one.  

The visit ended in a wild shouting match at dinner when the man who Crosby was divorcing in Nevada showed-up in Virginia and raised a ruckus. Miller and Nin fled Hampton Manor, and Dali, already holding a place of prominence, zoomed to the top of Miller's Z-list and became persona non grata.

On two occasions, Miller expressed his feelings about Dali in books inscribed to Pierre Sicari,  Henry's barber in Southern California, friend, and confidant, as well as one of the foremost Miller collectors in the world.  On the front endpaper to a copy of Billy Rose's Dali-illustrrated Wine, Women and Words (1948) Miller wrote, "To me S.D. is a prick of the first water, I know, from intimate contact. May he live to screw himself!  Henry Miller  1/31/73  Especially inscribed for  Pierre Sicari  recently of Corsica."

On the front free endpaper to a copy of Dali (NY: Abrams, 1968), Miller, a month later, wrote "For Pierre - Dali is the biggest 'prick' of the 20th century! (Entre nous) Henry Miller 2/25/73."

From left: Dali, Gala, Miller, Barnet B, Ruder, Sept. 10, 1940.

There is a photograph of Miller, Dali and Gala, and New York bookseller Barnet B. Ruder (the NY agent for Ardmore, Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy M. Johnson, the man who anonymously commissioned, through Ruder, Miller, Nin, Crosby, etc., etc. to write clandestine porn manuscripts for his personal satisfaction) at Hampton Manor dated September 10, 1940. This was surely a calm moment before the Hereford bull hit the fan, a brief respite during the Hampton Manor tumult when two giant egos, one literary, the other, artistic, met on the field of battle and crossed swords as two big, sharp-edged pricks, one from Catalonia the other from Brooklyn. There is no record, as far as I've learned, of Dali's recollections of this affair; Miller, the writer, has the last word. Dali, like Boris in Tropic of Cancer, was lousy but without the lice.

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Photoprint of Henry Miller, Barnet B. Ruder, and Mr. & Mrs. Salvador Dali, Accession # 7022-h, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Inscription image from Wine, Women and Words courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.

In 2010, Joseph Kishton wrote and directed a documentary, Perceptions and Memories, about the contentious relationship between Miller and Dali.

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Living With Burroughs

The following originally appeared in e*I*21, Volume 4, Number 4, August 2005 in slightly different form.

by Stephen J. Gertz

For one year I lived with the grandmaster of Beat literature, William S. Burroughs. I remember it well. It was 2002. Burroughs died in 1997. Though I have paranormal experiences from time to time (generally confined to sexual encounters) this was not one of them. Although….

If the soul of an author resides within their text, their spirit haunts the manifestation of the text, the physical object that is the book itself. Handling and, I dare say, fondling the book can evoke the jinn within; the book as an Aladdin's lamp, the essence of a writer summoned forth with a caress.

I've had Marie Antoinette in my hands: I handled a set of beautifully bound volumes in full crimson morocco leather with elaborate gilt decoration and ornamentation with the armorial device of Antoinette; her copy, and I experienced an olfactory hallucination, her scent in my nostrils. I spent an afternoon with Mark Twain, examining and cataloging a copy of his A Dog's Tale with a particularly intimate and poignant inscription written in his hand. I felt he was at my side, whispering in my ear; we shared a cigar.

I've had many similar experiences but none more dramatic than the year I was surrounded by arguably the finest private collection of William Burroughs material in the world. Joe Zinnato, a friend and book dealer, had amassed the collection over a 30-year period but was now seeking capital to expand his holdings in another area of literary interest. We made a deal whereby Dailey Rare Books of Los Angeles, the rare book sanctuary I once called home, would represent the collection's sale, an amalgamation of original manuscripts with corrections in Burroughs' hand; letters, scribbled scraps; the overwhelming majority of Burroughs' titles and editions found in Maynard & Miles' bibliography, many signed; over 150 magazines with Burroughs' contributions, all quite rare, many signed, with additional articles/stories of interest from other notable writers, including Charles Bukowski; Burroughs contributions to other books and anthologies; a great deal of ephemera including autograph post- and greeting cards, a boxful of private snapshots and more formal photographs all but one never published; LP records, videos, reel-to-reel and cassette tapes featuring Burroughs; original cover art by frequent collaborator, Brion Gysin; artwork by the literary artist himself; and a sheaf of letters from Paul Bowles to a third party discussing Burroughs, Tangier, Maurice Girodias, and more.

I was surrounded by eighteen boxes representing not just the man's work but his life. And Burroughs' presence was palpable; El Hombre Invisible, the nickname bestowed upon him due to his tall, gaunt, ashen, spectral appearance - he looked like a hip undertaker; his life, indeed, a hip if painful undertaking - was in attendance. Like a kid in a candy store, I was in nirvana, Burroughs at my side as I examined each piece.

It isn't often that one has the opportunity to track a literary creation from conception, drafts, layouts, printing, publication and sales but here it was: the archive to Burroughs' TIME, one of his better "cut-ups."

Though Dadaist Tristan Tzara had experimented with the form, taking established text, deconstructing it by scissoring it into pieces and reassembling the scraps into a literary collage, it was Burroughs who fully explored and exploited the idea, one that began when artist and Burroughs' friend and frequent collaborator, Brion Gysin, accidentally cut through a newspaper he was using as under pad for an art piece he was cropping with a razor-knife. It was a natural extension to what Burroughs had done with Naked Lunch, which was written in pieces, scraps and shards of text over time, then typed into manuscript. The manuscript was then deliberately shuffled like a deck of cards; the text requiring a few shuffles before Girodias finally accepted it for publication. The shuffles were never random; this was not a chaotic, chance editorial exercise but rather the willful reorganization of text toward a determined, ordered end.

And so here was the original issue of Time magazine Burroughs used with all the spaces where text had been cut-out; a 26-page signed, typed manuscript with corrections in his hand; another draft, a 14-page typed manuscript with autograph corrections; an 11-page typed manuscript/collage with title page; a 12-page photo-negative of the prior item with extra drawings and highlighting by Joe Brainard; a 32-page small mock-up of the book in ink by Brainard; the cover as prepared by Burroughs with art by Gysin; the publisher's ledger/account book with production costs, orders to whom and how many; and over 100 pieces of mail concerning ordering and publication, including the copyright certificate, and the complete list of where copies of the 1-10 edition and 1-100 edition were sold, providing a remarkable insight into the marketing of the book.

I have not been able to read Time magazine since without reflexively juxtaposing text:

"J-Lo and Ben split over Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Martha Stewart Living With Alzheimer's Disease in the Sudan where civil war fought with box-office bomb Gigli poisoned well-water taints the oases bottom line Kofi Annan Lincoln's secret lover on Martha's 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets during K-Mart Blue-Light Special Forces operations in Afghanistan to flush Osama from movie theaters in Darfur where children are starving for entertainment the whole family can enjoy without retribution from death squads Martha claims ‘innocent!’”

There's an 8x10 black and white photograph of Burroughs in Paris standing on rue Git-le-Coeur outside of the most famous fleabag-flophouse in literary history, the nameless joint otherwise known as The Beat Hotel by its eccentric guests, whom John De St Jorre in his history of the Olympia Press, Venus Bound (1996), characterized as "a colorful collection of painters and prostitutes, jazz musicians and petty criminals, poets and hustlers, writers and junkies." Whoosh! I’m carried away on a magic carpet to my spiritual home; I've a room down the hall from Burroughs, picking goatee'd hipster lice in berets out of my hair while Burroughs, in the communal latrine, curses in his deadpan-ironic nasal monotone that octopus tentacles are strangling his bowels, that he'd give Jesus a blowjob for a decent shit, his cuckoo ca-ca clock clamorin' for constipation's end.

Another: Burroughs and Gysin superimposed over a section of Notre Dame cathedral taking their place as the stoned saints of Beat amongst the saints in stone bas-relief that adorn its façade.

And another, perhaps the most succinctly defining image of Burroughs ever, he at a construction site standing in front of a large sign: "DANGER."

I open the box of snapshots - over 60 color photos, many taken by Burroughs' bibliographer and friend, Barry Miles - and I'm immersed in Burroughs private life in Tangier as no other who didn't know him personally or view these photographs could be: WSB in a red bathing suit sunning himself on the roof of his apartment building--a startling image as he is almost always seen in his uniform: dark suit, white shirt and tie; Burroughs comfortably sitting between two of his Moroccan boy-toys, youngsters in full Arab drag with crossed swords in their belts, and Burroughs’s jinn whispers in my ear: "those junior janissaries of jism had Damascus steel in their shorts and lips made for mouthfuls of phallic mirth"; Burroughs sitting in front of his typewriter, caught in the act with Gysin standing at his side; and many, many others. I'm embarrassed yet thrilled by the intimacy; I'm a fly-on-the-wall spying into WSB's quotidian life.

I want to dive into the boxes of books but simple physics prevents me from jack-knifing into the library, so I take them out individually: a pristine copy of a first edition Naked Lunch in very fine dust jacket. Few realize that many of Girodias' Traveller's Companion paperbacks with their simple, uniformly designed printed green wrappers, were issued with djs. I pass my hand over the stylishly designed dj and, to my surprise and annoyance, Jack Kerouac shows up, dripping 100-proof ectoplasm. The guy needs to be seriously squeegeed. He’s a bloated, bleary wreck.

“What brings you here, Jack-o?” Bill politely asks.

“Stakin’ my claim, Bill, just stakin’ my claim.”

Apparently hung-over from a drinking session with Mom in the afterlife and desperate to shore-up his  literary reputation, he starts riffing on his importance in the literary canon.

"On the Road is the archetype American novel, the quest for bountiful horizons, the car as modern-day horse galloping into flaming sunsets that never sink into the night, toward frontiers unfettered by geography, a road trip of the mind traveled on the double-laned mystic highway boundless and beautiful and fueled by Benzedrine; an American classic that captures - and continues to do so - the optimistic, fundamental American yearning for adventure, redemption and home that is just over the next hill if we have the courage to drive fast and forward. Hell, it so captured the American imagination that an early '60s T.V. show was based on it, Route 66 starring George Maharis and Martin Milner with a theme by Henry Mancini. Whad'ya think, Bill?"

"I'll let 'Unfortunately Straight Steve-arino' answer, ol' Jack." He gave me the nod.

"All you say is true," I began, "and On the Road certainly spawned a T.V. show but it was also responsible for every single piece-of-shit 'buddy' road movie ever made since to its eternal shame. What's more, methinks you a little too enamored by the sound of your own voice in print; you're the Thomas Wolfe of the Beat Generation, verbose 'til the reader wants to scream and I have bad news for you: like Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again. Your writing’s a combination of speed and Ex-Lax, projectile diarrhea of the mind. You weren't really a member of the Beat Generation, you were the prior generation’s last gasp, stuck in an idealized version of a bygone America, your Pre-WWII childhood tethering you unmercifully as you tried to break free of it and your mother.

"Billy-boy, in contrast, shucked all that. He rejected that America of down-home constipated consciousness, that childish yearning for a past that never was, that prolix, 19th century reminiscent novelistic style of yours out of time and out of gas for the Atomic Age. True, Naked Lunch is for many the anti-meal but so is James Joyce, for God's sake. As far as Naked Lunch never being adapted for television, that is all to it's credit. And while Cronenberg imaginatively adapted it for film, Naked Lunch has spawned not one idiotic movie after another as On the Road has. Billiam turned 20th century writing on its ear by sodomizing straight narrative up the Yazoo. Naked Lunch is not an American novel much less an American classic. It is, however, to its glory, a classic of world literature, transcending American parochialism to speak to the transnational, universal consciousness of the trickster renegade within us all that seeks to break the boundaries of the internal landscape. On the Road is petroleum-fueled metal on wheels, a hip bumper-car that ultimately crashes into the walls of East and West Coast; Naked Lunch is a nuclear age powered rocket puncturing the sky, shooting into space to another world.

"You say you influenced pop-culture. True, but that was close to 60 years ago. Naked Lunch, as all great art--and the book is a work of art--though it made an immediate impact amongst the cognoscenti, had a delayed influence upon popular culture. Decades after its publication it would inspire the Punk movement, David Bowie, Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and many others; a who’s who list of poets, artists, novelists, filmmakers, etc. In 1972, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their new group Steely Dan, thereby becoming the first group, musical or otherwise, to be named after a dildo. Not just any dildo but the most famous dildo in all of world literature, Burroughs' keister-pleaser in Naked Lunch, and I chuckle every time I hear Steely Dan on the radio, wondering if station management has any awareness that their disc jockeys are announcing a song by the great dildo band, Fagen's lyrics archetypal examples of Burroughs' Dada-Dante-esque world.

"No one can read your Visions of Cody in its complete, posthumously issued edition without experiencing, to one degree or another, drooping eyelids. One may get nightmares, one may even experience nausea but no one, no way no how, can ever fall asleep reading Naked Lunch.

"But most of all, Jack, you commit the unpardonable sin of absolute humorlessness or at best humor without a trace of tangy, social bite. WSB's work, in contrast, overflows with tartly ironic, acid wit; this guy could do stand-up - certainly not in a typical Vegas lounge but in a nice, seedy roadhouse joint in purgatory, The Infernal Komedy Klub where over-the-top Dadaesque ironic burlesque routines are appreciated.

"I rest Bill's case."

"A little rough on ol' Jack, weren't you, Steve-o?" Burroughs dryly commented.

"He's dead, he can take it," I coolly replied. “The nerve of this uninvited juice-head, horning in on my literary séance!” I turned to Kerouac. “Hit the road, Jack.”

I swear I caught Kerouac posing in his mother's Maidenform bra swilling Jack Daniels before dematerializing in a puffy huff back to wherever he's now calling home.

Envy

Now another: one of only 90 copies of the giant, enclosed in custom wood portfolio edition of Seven Deadly Sins with 7 woodblock silkscreen prints 45 x 31 inches on white 2-ply museum board each signed and numbered, a few of which Joe had archivally mounted and framed. I've got them standing upright on the floor and the effect is as if Burroughs had a mini-cam implanted backward in his forehead and I'm watching streaming, screaming video of Bill's brain at work. I've got so much of this stuff around me, have become so well acquainted with Burroughs that we're now on a first name basis.

Christ! Here's a beautiful copy of the British "Digit" paperback edition of Junkie, a book that comes on the market about once every ten years and now fetches upward of $5K depending upon condition, an almost mythic edition that few have actually seen, the first U.S. edition "double Ace book" paperback almost common by comparison. Joe has wisely enclosed both editions in plastic sleeves; my salivary glands are in overdrive.

I open the boxes of magazines with WSB contributions, the overwhelming majority signed. I've never told Joe but I took all of them out of their meticulously organized order within the boxes and rolled in them: one of 50 copies of the offprint to Burroughs' Letter From A Master Drug Addict to Dangerous Drugs; a copy of Big Table; Floating Bear; City Lights Journal; Cleft1, 2:4-7; Bulletin From Nothing; Insect Trust Gazette; Fruit Cup; Gay Sunshine; and hundreds more, including the rare Marijuana Newsletter 1:1,3.

Oh, my God! A 33-page original typed manuscript of his annotations to the catalog of the Burroughs archive in Lawrence, Kansas - his hometown - containing inked corrections in his hand.

A Xerox typed manuscript of Port of Saints presented to Richard Aaron (Am Here Books) by Burroughs; unique because Burroughs never kept the original manuscript. Aaron provided a sworn, signed statement of provenance and circumstance to Joe. I'm looking the manuscript over and I realize that this is so radically different than the published edition that it constitutes an original unpublished manuscript. I’m one of maybe ten people in the world to have seen and read it.

There's a cryptic autograph scrawl of Burroughs' on Pennsylvania Railroad letterhead that reads: "At Prie Ricard [sic?] rooming with Indian boy - deformed genitals on the other (Gerard) - I was, perhaps, coming down with jaundice - any one can see suffering. Does he think I dislike him? Some one has come for the laundry. I can hardly drag myself around. Then I might put out the dog and the [?] that vowed to bite our [?] where we lay."

A Letter to the Editor of After Dark Magazine on Burroughs' letterhead that sets the record straight, as it were: "Correction: William Burroughs is not going straight [heterosexual]. He knows it. Wouldn't You?"

I'm touched by a Christmas card with a short, warm inscription signed "Bill”; odd evidence that Burroughs, for all his radical, kaleidoscopic prose and messenger from the underbelly persona, is at heart a nice, thoughtfully tender guy from the Midwest. 

An autograph postcard to a publisher passes through my hands.

Dig this: Veteran Sirens, a 17-1/2x23" painting by Bill. It's advanced primitive fingerpainting, and most would say, "I coulda done that," but they didn't. Burroughs did.

Lookit! R. Crumb's Meet The Beats poster #2, one of five copies lettered A-E and signed by WSB. Listen! Original master 7" and 5" reel-to-reel tapes of Burroughs' audio collages, etc., including the master for the Call Me Burroughs LP; Bill's master audio cut-up of Dutch Schultz & Young Queer; Bill reciting Willie The Rat; the master of Bill reciting The Last Words of Hassan Sabha; much more to listen to - my ears are ringing - not the least of which is a tape of Burroughs singing (!) medleys of Marrakesh music; he makes Yoko Ono sound like Barbra Streisand in comparison, and must be heard to be believed but believe it, I heard him.

I reach back into a box and take out The Cat Inside, one of eighteen copies signed by Bill and Brion Gysin out of a total edition of 133 copies, and printed on fine Crisbrook paper, the entire book produced and published by the legendary Grenfell Press in 1986, the last collaboration between Burroughs and Gysin and certainly Burroughs' most sentimentally affecting work, written at a time when his personal and artistic maelstrom had somewhat settled and he could delight in the simple comfort of feline companionship and relate to the feline soul. Yet Burroughs was always--and remains, even after his death--the hippest cat on the scene. Bill's jinn leans over to me and whispers these words from the text, which can stand as a Beat Manifesto: "We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place."

For Burroughs, that place, wherever it might have been in his head when he penned those lines, is in the literary firmament, his outlaw star burning through our polluted atmosphere to illuminate the post-modern human condition which may not be pretty but in the right light - Bill's light - can be seen in all its painfully dissonant beauty.

Epilogue

The dot.com bust pushed the big money into hiding, and institutions cried poverty. I couldn't sell the collection even at a dramatic discount to $225K. I packed it all back into the boxes, those corrugated cardboards filled with Aladdin's lamps. Joe has been selling the collection piecemeal over the last couple of years, and I often wonder if some lucky someone has taken any one of the items into their hands and lovingly rubbed it, thus releasing Bill's jinn for another one-on-one with El Hombre Invisible.
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Special thanks to Joe Zinnato; all Burroughs-related photography courtesy Joe Zinnato Collection, now, alas, broken-up and sold.

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The Picasso of Dust Jacket Design

by Stephen J. Gertz

1952.

He brought poster, advertising, and dust jacket design out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, integrating the aesthetic and forms of modern art into his work. It was welcomed in England. It was rejected in the United States. In his time he was, ultimately, the most significant graphic designer in the English-speaking world.

1929.

Born in Montana, USA, E[dward]. (“Ted”) McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) was one of Europe's most prolific and influential advertising poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s, and as innovative as his French counterpart, A.M. Cassandre. His dust jacket designs are no less celebrated. At a time when marketers preferred simple, representational designs heavy with copy, he took another direction. His dust jackets are highly coveted by rare book collectors.

1935.

This "American designer and painter...was active in England...studied painting first, at evening classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute, San Francisco (1910–12), at the Art Institute of Chicago, with lettering (1912), and in Paris at the Académie Moderne (1913–14). In 1912 he adopted the name of an early patron, Professor Joseph McKnight (1865–1942), as a gesture of gratitude. In 1914 he settled in Britain.

1951.

"From 1915 McKnight Kauffer designed posters for companies such as London Underground Railways (1915–40), Shell UK Ltd, the Daily Herald and British Petroleum (1934–6). One of his master works, Soaring to Success! Daily Herald—The Early Bird (1919), was derived from Japanese prints and from Vorticism. In 1920 he was a founder-member of Group X with Wyndham Lewis and others. McKnight Kauffer’s designs included illustrations for T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems [London, 1927–31, printed by the Curwen Press] and for publications by the Nonesuch Press and Cresset Press, using the pochoir process of coloured hand-stenciling; he also designed photomurals, ephemera such as luggage labels; and theatre and ballet costumes and sets, including Checkmate (1937)...

 

1928.

1929.

"He made skillful use of the airbrush and the montage technique, often applying his knowledge of modern art movements such as Constructivism and Surrealism. In 1940 he went to New York, where he designed posters for war relief agencies, the United Nations and American Airlines (1946–53), as well as many book jackets and illustrations" (Mark Haworth-Booth, Grove Art Online, 2009).

He struggled in New York. It was a highly competitive environment for commercial artists and advertisers were not as open to his work as they were in Britain.

Union of Democratic Control, 1933.

In a review of one of his frequent exhibitions during the Thirties, Kauffer was referred to as the “Picasso of Advertising Design...Mr. McKnight Kauffer is an artist who makes one resent the division of the arts into major and minor" (Anthony Blunt).

Putnam, 1936.

1938.

From 1928 through the early 1950s,  Kauffer designed thirty-one dust jackets for the Modern Library,  including: Sherwood  Anderson's Winesburg Ohio; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale; Boccaccio's Decameron; Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; Cervantes' Don Quixote; Clausewitz's On War; Du Maurier's Rebecca; Falkner's Sanctuary, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses; Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin; Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions; Huxley's Point Counter Point; Henry James' Portrait of a Lady; D,H. Lawrence's Women in Love;  Maurois' Disraeli; Moby Dick; Palgrave's Golden Treasury; The Best of S.J. Perelman;  Rabelais; Spaeth's Guide to Great Orchestral Music; Dracula; Sterne's Tristam Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Arthur Symonds' Life of Michaelangelo; Thackeray's Henry Esmond; Richard Wright's Native Son; and Young's The Medici.

M.Secker, 1923.

1949.

 "In Kauffer's hands the poster (or the book jacket, which for him was a mini-poster) was designed to be interpreted rather than accepted at face value. In this regard he continually struggled with the paradox of how to meet his creative needs, his clients' commercial interests and his viewers' aesthetic preferences, all in a limited period of time. In a speech before the Royal Society of Arts in 1938 ...Kauffer candidly explained his methodology and resultant angst:

Great Western Railway Company, 1934.

1934.

"'When I leave my client's office, I am no longer considering what form my design or my scheme will take, but the urgent fact that I only have so much time in which to produce the finished article. I find this irritating, and am often overcome by a feeling of hopelessness about the whole business. On my way home I think, Will my client understand what I propose to do? Will he understand I may not give him an obvious, logical answer to his problem? Does he suppose I have magical powers, or does he believe that I can solve his sales problem as simply as one might add two and two together and make four?

1928.

1948.

"'I have now reached my studio. I pick up a book. I lay it down. I look out of the window. I stare at a blank wall, I move about. I go to my desk and gaze at a blank piece of paper. I write on it the names of the product. I then paint it in some kind of lettering. I make it larger—smaller—slanting—heavy—light. I make drawings of the object—in outline, with shadow and color, large and then small—within the dimensions I have now set myself''" (Citation, American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal, 1992).

Random House, 1949.

1928.

“Most advertising artists spend their time elaborating symbols that stand for something different from the commodity they are advertising. Soap and refrigerators, scent and automobiles, stockings, holiday resorts, sanitary plumbing are advertised by means of representations of young females disporting themselves in opulent surroundings. Sex and money—these would seem to be the two main interests of civilized human beings. 

1930.

1940.

"McKnight Kauffer prefers the more difficult task of advertising products in terms of forms that are symbolic only of these particular products. Thus, forms symbolic of mechanical power are used to advertise powerful machines; forms symbolic of space, loneliness and distance to advertise a holiday resort where prospects are wide and houses are few. In this matter McKnight Kauffer reveals his affinity with all artists who have ever aimed at expressiveness through simplification, distortion and transportation (Aldous Huxley, Introduction to Posters by E. McKnight Kauffer,  Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog, 1937). 

1944.

Kauffer's difficulties in in New York continued through 1947. It was then that he began to design posters for American Airlines, his biggest client until his death in 1954, and the work that finally brought him the commercial success in the U.S. he so desired.

E. McKnight Kauffer, photograph by Howard Coster, 1927.

Kauffer has always been highly collectible. His visually arresting and compelling designs remain as fresh and dynamic as when originally executed.
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See an excellent survey of the Modern Library dust jackets of E. McKnight Kauffer.

Dust jacket images courtesy of  Flickr, particularly Peacay's Photostream.
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Five Great 20th Century Bindings

by Stephen J. Gertz

Five exquisite bindings recently jumped out of a rare book dealer's catalog, grabbed my eyes and wouldn't let go. Now I'm blind-stamped and bowled-over by them but can't complain; "it is beauty that captures your attention" (Oscar Wilde). It'll capture yours, too.

BRAQUE, Hesiode. Theogonie. Eaux-fortes de Georges Braque. Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1955. Limited to 150 copies o papier d'Auvergne à la main, signed by Georges Braque. Folio. 78 pp. Twenty original etchings (seventeen full page).

Full dark chocolate crushed morocco by Cubism/Surrealism-influenced binder, Paul Bonet (1889-1971), arguably the most celebrated  French binder of his era, with his signature gilt, large curvilinear excised section from front and rear boards with onliad black and white polished calf sections and additional onlaid sections of shaded yellow and green crushed morocco to form two large vignette motifs, onlaid title to spine in Greek, yellow and green suede doublures.

"Born in Paris in 1889 to Belgian parents, Bonet rose to become the leader of French binders. Two particular styles of his work are known as "irradiante," which consists of massed gilt lines giving a three-dimensional optical-illusion effect, and "rayonnante," a sun-burst effect" (Morgan Library).

ALBISOLA, Tullio (poet and designer). MUNARI, Bruno (illustrator).  Poeti Futuristi. L'Anguria Lirica. Presentazione di [Filippo Tommaso]  Marinetti. Roma: Edizioni Futuristi di Poesie, 1934. Limited to fifty copies for sale, of a total edition of 101. Square octavo. Twenty-one metal leaves with lithographic text by d'Albisola and eleven color lithographed plates by Bruno Munari. Typography and mise en page by d'Albisola.

One of three rare and important Futurist metal books (the first, Parole in libertà futuriste, tattili-termiche-olfattive, published in 1932; Libro di latta aggressivo e contundente, published in 1933), a monument to Futurist book production. Binding in full lithographed metal by  Lito-Latta Nosenzo of Savona, a manufacturer of metal storage boxes, after design by Albisola.

MAILLOL, Aristide. HORACE. Odes d'Horace. Texte Latin et Traduction en Vers par le Baron Delort. Gravures sur Bois d'Aristide Maillot. Paris: Philip Gonin, Editeur, 1939.  One of fifty édition de tête copies on papier de chanvre et lin with a suite of all the plates in black and a suite in color, initialed by the publisher on the colophon of each volume and on the wrappers to each suite. Two octavo volumes. 179; 278 pp. Frontispiece,123 woodcut text illustrations.

Full green polished calf by Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985), boards and spines with onlaid section of pale green calf to form two-tone mirrored decorative scheme.

"Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985) ranks high among the outstanding French design binders of the last half century. Trained at the École Estiènne in Paris, he gained experience in several binderies before emerging as a designer in his own right after World War II. His designs are characterized by understated color, impressive three-dimensional effects, and intricate but highly logical applications of geometry" (Six Centuries of Master Bookbinding at Bidwell Library).

ERNST, Max. PÉRET, Benjamin. Je Sublime. Paris: Editions Surrálistes, 1936, 30 June. One of twenty-five hors commerce numbered examples on papier le Roy Louis' tiente Normandie, of a total edition of 241 copies. Octavo. 24 ff. Four original color frottages on cream paper by Max Ernst.

Full white crushed morocco with alligator patterning by Georges Leroux, ruled in blind and applied in cross-grained sections, boards with onlaid lozenges as eyes with applied sections of white and green morocco as pupil and iris, title to spine in green and black.

Georges Leroux (1922-1999), one of the most accomplished and esteemed French binders of the twentieth century, began his career as a poet before becoming a binder in 1959. Marked by the use of exotic materials, inset metal plaques and strong polychromatic color, books from the early stage of his career (as here) were designed and executed (rather than simply designed) by Leroux.

SCHMIED, François-Louis (illustrator and binder). MARDRUS, J.C. Le Livre de la Verité de Parole. Transcription des Textes Egyptiens Antiques. Paris: Chez F.-L. Schmied, 1929. :Limited to 150 copies signed by Schmied, with two suites of the illustrations on Japon, in b&w and color. Quarto. Twelve wood cut illustrations.

Bound in full Jansenist brown crushed morocco by François-Louis Schmied (1873-1941) over beveled wooden boards, with doublures in matching morocco, each decorated with a inlaid lacquer panel, the first representing a falcon in salmon and gold, the second an eagle with wings spread above orange flames, each lacquer panel bordered by inlaid gold bands, with a double set of silk endpapers, one aubergine, the other cardinal red.

"Francois-Louis Schmied [was] a highly accomplished printer [publisher/binder/illustrator] best known today for his de luxe editions of classic works of literature…Based in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and in Morocco in the late 1930s…, Schmied's books' sumptuousness defies easy description and evidences a singular mastery" (Garabedian, M. The Printer in Paris).

"On their first exposure to one of François-Louis Schmied's productions, most Americans…are apt to declare that they have never seen anything like it" (Tabor, S. The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles, p. 136).

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Images courtesy of Sims Reed Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Three Must-See Bindings.

Three More Must-See Bindings.

Five Must-See Modern French Bindings.
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The Day Boxing's Jack Johnson Put Dada Surrealism on Dreamstreet

surreal by Stephen J. Gertz

Note Johnson in tuxedo.

On April 23, 1916, Jack Johnson, the former Heavyweight boxing champion of the world in exile in Europe after fleeing conviction for violating the White-Slave Traffic Act (aka the Mann Act), went mano a mano with modern art.

His nominal opponent was Arthur Cravan née Fabian Lloyd, an Englishman born and educated in Switzerland, who claimed to be the nephew of Oscar Wilde, a professional boxer, singer, art critic, poet - you name it. Living in Paris, he was a performance artist before the genre existed, the subject and theme of his art being himself. Creating a public spectacle was the reason he got out of bed each morning, and once on his feet was a walking happening.

From 1911-1915 Cravan published Maintenant, a literary review that lasted for only five issues but had enormous influence upon the young artists and intellectuals who had come together in Paris and were on the cusp of changing the world.

Maintenant no. 3, October-November 1915.

Cravan brazenly caused sensation wherever he went, whatever he did. In an article in Maintenant about the arts salon of 1912 he explicitly and graphically asserted that a portrait of artist Marie Laurencin suggested to him that she needed a good screwing, an opinion that her lover, poet and literateur Guillaume Apollonaire, took issue with. He challenged Cravan to a duel.

Absurdity, the ridiculous, the eccentric, the striking, the outrageous, and the shocking  were Cravan's bread and butter. His identity was whatever he decided it would be; long before Madonna made self-invention and re-invention standard operating procedure, Cravan practiced it with a vengeance. It is no wonder, then, that Cravan became the darling of Dadaists Marcel Duchamps, Andre Breton, and Francis Picabia.

In 1916, he was desperate to get to the United States (dodging conscription into the French army was nearly a full-time occupation), had moved to Barcelona and fallen in with its colony of French avant-garde artists in exile, and needed money. Whose notion it was to stage a match with Jack Johnson remains unclear but Cravan's fingerprints are all over the patently wacko and divinely nonsensical idea.

Arthur Cravan by Jean-Paul-Louis L'Espoir.

And so, "In early 1916, a frenzied group of fight promoters gathered in Barcelona to organize what promised to be a 'sensational encounter' between former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (the famous black fighter who was living in Europe, a fugitive from his native land because of charges of having violated the Mann Act) and Arthur Cravan, an outspoken, notoriously eccentric Englishman, who claimed not only to be a professional fighter, but also the nephew of Oscar Wilde. Posters were hung throughout the city to publicize the event. In the controversial match, which took place at the Plaza de Toros Monumental on Sunday afternoon, April 23, we can safely surmise that Cravan fought true to form, that is, leading more with his mouth than with his fists. After six rounds of what must have amounted to little more than a skillful demonstration of shadow boxing -  staged more for the benefit of a rolling camera than the disappointed audience - Johnson finally dropped Cravan with an upper-right/left-cross combination. Knockout or not, the audience smelled farce, and because of the guaranteed fifty-thousand-peseta purse, the next day the daily press proclaimed the fight 'The Great Swindle.'

"For Johnson, it was just one more relatively uneventful 'ring contest,' as he called it, arranged for the benefit of his pocketbook. For Cravan, it was the main event in his tragically short life; two and one-half years later, at the age of thirty-one, he would disappear off the coast of Mexico, leaving behind only scant traces of a fascinating and adventurous life, one that stretched from the outback of Australia to the inner circle of vanguard artists and poets on both sides of the Atlantic. Far more significant than the footnote he left in pugilistic histories was the undying legacy of his outrageous behavior, which played a unique role within the development of an artistic and literary avant-garde. Arthur Cravan was, as Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia [Francis Picabia's wife] later asserted, 'a man who personified within himself, and without premeditation, all the elements of surprise to be wished for by a demonstration that was not yet called 'Dada.'
   
"Another release announced that Cravan temporarily abandoned his post as Professor of Real Club Marítimo boxing in preparation for the big fight. He trained publicly at the Bricall Gymnasium with boxers Hoche, Pomés and Jacks. To the press, he is a 'great athlete of the white race.' In order to continue to warm the spirits, it was announced that a great night of boxing with five bouts will be held April 12: Arthur Craven and Jack Johnson will be the arbiters of the last two fights" (Naumann, Francis. New York Dada 1915-23, p.162).

Jack Johnson, 1915.

Reality check: Though he claimed to be a light-heavyweight champion (of something, somewhere) Cravan, according to Boxrec, had absolutely no competitive experience prior to the fight. Indeed, his official record notes  that he fought only three bouts: With Johnson (knocked out); against Frank Hoche (a draw, June 26, 1916); and against Jim Smith ("The Black Diamond" with only this fight to his credit) in Mexico City, September 15, 1918 (knocked out). With a record of no wins, two losses via knock-out, and a draw his only threat as a boxer was to his own safety.

In January 1917, Cravan departed for New York. His shipmate was Leon Trotsky. Upon arrival in the city he was welcomed by Duchamps (who had preceded him), and the collector, critic, and poet Walter Arensberg.

Hollywood has yet to produce a biopic about the fascinating character who was Arthur Cravan; I smell  a ripe indie flick. Johnny Depp on steroids?

The poster for the pre-fight Great Evening of Boxing with Johnson and Cravan as referees (above) with its appeal to collectors of boxing material, Black-Americana, surrealist art and literature alike, is exceptionally scarce and highly desirable. The event it documents is one of the most famous and electrifying episodes in Dada history. Surrealism didn't get much more surreal than these two giant, flamboyant characters - one a phenomenal athlete and the proudest black man on Earth, the other a human artwork in constant progress - going at each other,  two of the most outrageous and out-sized personalities of their time in slam-bang-boing surreal battle-royal theater of the absurd that rocks, Do Wah Dada-Dada Dum Dada-Do.

A fine copy of the poster has just come into the marketplace after a long dry spell. The odds of seeing another copy in similar condition are not much better than Cravan's against Johnson, which is to say, fat chance.



Above, the only known footage of Arthur Cravan "boxing," in Spain 1916, here playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie with an anonymous Mighty Mouse, to all appearances the only living creature Cravan had a chance against. This is, quite possibly (why else would it have been filmed?), Cravan "training" for the fight with Johnson, a demonstration of surreal Dada absurdity exceeded only by the fight itself.
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[JOHNSON, Jack. CRAVAN, Arthur]. Poster advertising boxing matches at Iris-Park, Barcelona, on 12 April 1916, promoting the forthcoming match between Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson. Barcelona: (Societat Editorial Manresana), 1916.

Printed in red and black on wove stock. 3 halftone photographic illus., including a central half-length portrait of Jack Johnson. 431 x 209 mm. (c. 17 x 1/4 inches).

Provenance: Eduardo Arroyo, the Spanish artist, born 1937, whose 1991 portrait drawings of Cravan after the Jack Johnson match were published in the Strasbourg Arthur Cravan catalogue.
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Poster image courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd, currently offering this prize, with our thanks. Image of Maintenant courtesy of University of Iowa Digital Library. Lespoir portrait of Cravan courtesy Wikicommons.
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