Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Q: What is with all the men’s magazines?

A: Oh, I read them for the articles.

Really? In part. Take exhibit A: the July 1961 issue of Swank. For anybody interested in the textual history of Naked Lunch, this issue proves to be very interesting. Burroughs contributes “The Word,” “a first draft of a section of [Naked Lunch] and contains material that has never been published before — given to Swank by poet Allen Ginsberg.” In the introduction to the piece, John Fles, a former editor at Chicago Review during the Naked Lunch scandal in 1958, writes “The Word is the striptease the author does for you with the snake of language. The Word — this is just a thin slice of a 60pp unpub’d ms. — is the précis of all of Naked Lunch…” In fact, this piece of The Word manuscript appears in cannibalized form in the Atrophied Preface section of the Olympia Press and Grove Press Naked Lunch. The prefaces of the Grove and Olympia printings differ from each other and differ from this selection in Swank. In fact, this piece from Swank does not directly correspond with the version of “Word” that was published in Interzone.

In July of 1961, Naked Lunch had yet to be published by Grove. The book was, in certain circles, highly anticipated and expected at any moment. A note attached to Fles’ Introduction states that publication was expected in April or May of 1961. The book was not officially released until November 20, 1962, over a year later. One reason for the delay was the expected (and rightly so) obscenity trial following the novel’s publication. Barney Rosset and Grove Press were waiting until the time was right to defend the novel in the courts and the court of public opinion. The trials surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer set the stage. The potential obscenity trial surrounding Floating Bear 9 which published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in June 1961 further put matters on hold. Every magazine appearance and review relating to Naked Lunch was potential material for the trial, so even this issue of Swank can be viewed as an exhibit for the defense of the novel.

This section of “The Word” coupled with Fles’ introduction stands alongside the more obvious “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness” and “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” as a document that provides a statement of purpose for the seemingly immoral and inexplicable Naked Lunch. “The Word” is described as a “striptease” and a “précis.” It is an unveiling, a revealing of the mysteries of the novel. In it, Burroughs lays the text bare in his own trademark style. He shows his hand. I have written elsewhere about how the prospect of an obscenity trial dictated critical and readerly approaches to the novel that continue to be in force to this day. The peek into the flesh of Naked Lunch that Burroughs allows in Word becomes something of a complete revelation in the Deposition. Or does it? Elsewhere, I have also discussed how these statements of purpose are a drain on the power of the novel, and can be considered a con of sorts. Such ideas are by no means original to me or to critics, like Jennie Skerl or Robin Lydenberg, who made similar statements in William Burroughs: At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. There were concerns about the literary cost entailed in defending Naked Lunch back in the 1960s.

Take “Sigma Project No. 13,” the minutes from the inaugural meeting of John Calder’s Writers Night at Better Books in November 1964 that included Peter Brook, John Arden, and Adrian Mitchell discussing The Theatre and Its Future. This single mimeographed sheet was a supplement to the Moving Times, a rather nebulous newspaper / little magazine project of Burroughs’ that appeared in My Own Mag as well as in a broadside poster issued by the Sigma Project as Project No. 1. The minutes state, 

How much longer must we wait before it dawns on us that the world of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is far more real and even at its most phantasmagoric, more to the point than this blind, self-perpetuating, hysterical delusion we call modern civilization.

The fact that we can allow ourselves again and again to be sidetracked into “seriously” discussing whether Burroughs’ book is “obscene” or “art” or anything else underscores how deeply we are immersed in our delusion and just how widely we have missed the point he is making.

Our tactics for defending its publication must surely be relative to the nature of the resistance it engenders and, if they are to be effective, must break entirely with the terms in which that resistance in (sic) expressed. They must be an OUTFLANKING.

The time is NOW. The climate is changing. Let us indulge no longer in the kind of mutual masturbation that will allow the Times Cultural Consensate to show your benevolent faces (incolour) lined up behind Mr. Wesker’s record player as is pumps Bach’s 42nd concerto for Wind, Culture and Community down the coal-mines of the Provinces.

Calder published Naked Lunch in the United Kingdom in 1964 so a similar process of defense to Grove’s was in progress at the time of this meeting. Champions of Naked Lunch were offended by all the various stripteases surrounding Naked Lunch. Some things should be left to the imagination.

Clearly, the July 1961 issue of Swank proves of interest to those immersed in Burroughs on several levels. This issue advertised itself as “the search for sex in hipdom’s high society.” Here are articles on jazz (Charles Parker), blues (Billie Holiday), the French, modern art, and beatniks. Jonas Mekas, the critical voice of underground cinema, contributes an article entitled “The Honest Art of Hollywood.” Tuli Kupferberg, who later gained fame as a member of the Fugs, writes an article. Check out Tuli’s staple bound treasures from around 1961/1962, Yeah and Birth, if you get a chance. They are a sign of the times around the corner. Similarly, the gumbo of obsessions that boiled over later in the decade is present in this issue of Swank.

I mentioned in an earlier post that a collection of men’s magazines is an inexpensive way to collect the writers of the Beat Generation. As you can see from this issue of Swank, such a collection is very informative as well. The multifaceted role of sex in the avant-garde and counterculture is a field that has been turned over by scholars for years, but there is much left to uncover. Publishers, like Taschen, have issued multiple volumes on the history of men’s magazines, but for the most part these books reproduce images rather than study them. Stephen Gertz’s book, Dope Menace, provides a similar look into elements of sleaze in drugstore paperbacks. Yet his essay introducing the book is worth a close look as well and opens the door to future scholarly attention. Gertz’s book has gotten quite a bit of notice in the media. At last count, two dozen University libraries have purchased the book, and Gertz has been asked to lecture on the subject at the University level.

And then there are the photos. The recent death of Betty Page brings to the forefront that many images from men’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s have become iconic. Many people appreciate them as art. Many enjoy their comic elements, just as many others despise them. For better or worse, the men’s magazines of the post-WWII era are a major part of the story of not just the sexual revolution but the myriad other revolutions occurring after Hiroshima. As a brief scan of these magazine covers related to Kerouac and Burroughs reveals, much has changed in the presentation of sex since the 1950s and 1960s, but much has remained the same. The story of the sexual revolution is still in the act of being told. Whether you are telling a cautionary or celebratory tale, a close look at the photos and articles of men’s magazines are an essential part of the history.

William Burroughs in Swank

	“The Word” Swank (Front cover) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Introduction by John Fles) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 1) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 2) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

by Oliver Harris

This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007.

I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured I am to be in present company. However, at the immediate risk of testing your hospitality, I want to read you a review of my latest publication — this new edition of The Yage Letters by William Burroughs — that begs the question as to whether it’s an honour I deserve.

“It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavour to the study of the life and works of William Burroughs, not as a case history of psychopathology, or as an example of how bad writing can sustain a large reputation among weak-minded intellectuals, but as if his literary output were worthy of serious consideration. A third of this volume is devoted to the professor’s minute and scholarly reconstruction of how The Yage Letters came to be published in its present form (we learn, for example, that one part of it was first published by the no doubt aptly named Fuck You Press), which is as if all the resources of biblical scholarship were utilized to explicate the provenance and deeper meaning of The Wind in the Willows. In an age of academic hyper-inflation, there is, it seems, no subject that does not find its scholar.”

(Antony Daniels, “All Bark, No Bite,” The New Criterion, November 2006, p. 77)

If this is funny, what exactly is the joke? Is it the reviewer’s blindness to the unarguable truth that William Burroughs is “worthy of serious consideration”? Or is it the assumption that textual scholarship is self-evidently the highest measure of taking a writer seriously, and so must be reserved for only those truly worthy of a place in the academy?

The question of status is a paradox. On the one hand, at this Symposium, William Burroughs is allowed to rub shoulders with the likes of Shakespeare, Malory, Jonson, and Jane Austen. On the other hand, within the Burroughs community, there is in fact a definite residue of ambivalence about bringing into such a respectable and venerable fold as textual studies a writer valued precisely for his status as an iconoclastic outsider, a black sheep in the literary flock. So, paradoxically, it’s some of his friends, as well as Burroughs’ enemies, who worry about the institutional respectability conferred by scholarly editing.

This paradox brings me to another, which is to do with that other key imprimatur of literary value — a place in the archive. Here, I’m thinking specifically of the acquisition, just over a year ago by the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, of what is by far the largest and most important collection of Burroughs’ manuscripts, papers, and assorted material. The Berg’s acquisition would seem to contradict quite flatly the derisory tone of my reviewing nemesis, and of course, given the choice, I’m inclined to defer to the authority of the former. But the custodians of the archive exercise an interesting kind of authority, since it is necessarily driven by professional and economic self-interest. That’s to say, prestige in this context is always a conveniently two-way street.

For the housing of Burroughs’ archive in the Berg confers value on his literary worth, but at the same time the Berg claims an increase in its own value as a consequence. This at least is the opinion of Dr. Paul LeClerc, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Public Library, who claimed that: “Burroughs’ archive is a fantastic addition to the Berg Collection and solidifies the New York Public Library’s position as the world’s leading center for the study of Beat literature”. And yet, in the very same press release, the Curator of the Berg, Isaac Gewirtz, hails the acquisition of Burroughs as a “fiercely sinister and corrosive” figure. Now, since he presumably doesn’t anticipate that Burroughs’ papers will corrode the other manuscripts he curates, there is an inescapable contradiction here in one of the guardians of the academy’s holy relics championing a toxic heretic — notorious not only for being a homosexual heroin addict who shot his wife playing a drunken game of William Tell, but also for making his books by cutting up his writing with a pair of scissors.

Unsurprisingly, my interest in the Berg’s acquisition of Burroughs’ papers is directly related to my past and, I hope, future, as a Burroughs scholar — and in the second half of this talk I am going to focus on the relationship between Burroughs’ manuscript history and the papers now held in the Berg. But before that I want to do two things: firstly, to sketch the outlines of a forthcoming project which is to explore what I call “the politics of the archive” — and, secondly, to return to the specifics of the Berg Collection by discussing the catalogue of Burroughs literary archive produced by the agent for its sale.

The politics of the archive sounds, and is meant to be, a very broad umbrella term, and it came to me when my thoughts began to shift from producing the next new edition to thinking about the very processes by which such editions become — or indeed do not become — possible in the first place.

So naturally, one of the key issues is ownership — the ways in which manuscript collections pass between various hands, from the author’s to agents to private collectors to those of university or public body curators.

Ownership in turn has clear implications for access — what constraints and limits are placed, whether by private collectors or institutions, under what conditions materials can be viewed, when and by whom. So access also includes the construction of collections, their housing, their cataloguing, and policies for managing the archive, whether local ones peculiar to a specific institution or those laid down by professional bodies.

Then there’s the issue of use — of what materials can be cited or published, and so on.

And finally, there are a whole series of issues related to how the constraints placed on access to and use of archival material impact on scholarship and, thereby, on a writer’s reception. This concerns not only the production of specific scholarly editions, but the interpretation of a writer’s entire literary history, which is necessarily determined by what texts are actually available at any given time. So the stakes are potentially very high for both those who house archives and those who want access to them.

And in this context, there arises what might be called a “diplomatics of the archive” — by which I mean the extreme tact with which we have to work — and speak about our work — in order to keep the archival doors open to us. Being even more necessary in print than in speech, this diplomacy entails, for example, the editing of the present paper for publication…

My sense — and here I am genuinely interested to hear from others — is that any scholar engaged in textual studies must be familiar with these issues, but that there’s been no broad study of the ways in which the archive operates. In the absence of such a study, it’s hard to contextualise one’s own experience, and I for one have no clear idea if the problems I’ve encountered are particular to me, or if the relationship between Burroughs’ archives and textual scholarship is not a special case but a commonplace.

Literary Status and Archival Ownership

Well, before turning to Burroughs’ textual history, I want to highlight two related issues arising from this — the sale catalogue of the Burroughs literary archive — a beautiful production put together and written by Ken Lopez, a noted rare book and manuscript dealer.

The two issues concern the relationship of literary status to archival ownership. As Lopez observes, up until twenty to thirty years ago the Beat writers — loosely including Burroughs — were “viewed with disdain by the literary and academic establishment”: “They were outsiders, and deliberately so, and the literary establishment returned the favor by treating them as such. As so often happens, private collectors became the repository for these works.” (Ken Lopez, William S. Burroughs Literary Archive, 2005, p. 6)

In recent years, all that has changed, however, and the archives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and now William Burroughs are, as Lopez notes, “among the most highly valued (in both dollar figures and sheer prestige)” by the very same academy that once shunned their work (19).

The other half of the story, which Lopez goes on to discuss, is the access — or rather, denial of access — during the time the Burroughs archive remained in private hands. In this case, since the archive was assembled in 1973, sold first to the Swiss-based dealer, Richard Aaron, and then in the early 1980s to an American owner, that means a thirty-three year period up until the sale last March. So that has been the situation for the whole of my professional life.

As Lopez puts it, “because the Burroughs archive has been in private hands all these years and not in a research institution, that access has been extremely limited. Various scholars have vilified Aaron and the others in print, labelling them as ‘uncooperative’. In reality, a private home is not a good place for conducting scholarly research [...] and these complaints have been essentially misguided, confusing an awareness of an archive with an innate right of access to it.” (6)

I’ve quoted Lopez at length to show two things going on at once. Most obviously, there’s this claim that us scholars, just because we want to put the materials to use, delude ourselves if we think we have any rights to access — the other side of which is that millionaire collectors have a perfect right to prevent access solely by virtue of their bank accounts. Reading between the lines, you might realize that what’s going on here is actually a coded defence of the then-owner of the Burroughs archive, whose sale Lopez was negotiating. Now, if this cat could talk, what tales he could tell — but, for reasons of professional self-interest, I simply can’t. This is what I mean by the diplomatics of the archive…

The second issue raised by Lopez is, in a material sense, the most intriguing and, quite possibly, unique to William Burroughs as a writer. He says:

“As rich as Burroughs’ novels are [...] they pale beside the archive, which is his actual work. As spinoffs or byproducts of that work, the books themselves seem almost desiccated in comparison to the main body of his work — this archive — like tree branches broken off of the main living, growing trunk.” (4)

Lopez could hardly up the ante any further: the archive not only as a vital secondary resource, a mother lode of raw materials that can be picked over to underpin the production of new texts and new understandings, but itself, as a totality, the Real Thing, the true creative product and therefore the true object of study and interpretation.

This is by no means snake oil or just sales talk, since Lopez bases his claim on a statement made by Burroughs that has been often quoted by his critics:

“In a sense,” Burroughs once said, “all my books are one book. It’s just a continuous book” (cited in Lopez, 3).

In claiming that the literary archive is this “one book,” Lopez builds on a central understanding about Burroughs’ working methods — namely, the constant overlap and interrelation of his manuscripts — that in turn accounts for the extraordinarily dense intertextuality of his writing. And equally important is the remarkable way in which, as a product of his working methods, the material history of Burroughs’ texts provides precise analogues for his central thematics.

Since this is the point I’m going to end on, I’ll briefly clarify what I mean. The most visible formal feature of Burroughs’ writing from Naked Lunch onwards is his version of a collage aesthetic, in which all the text’s units — whether narrative episodes or brief verbal fragments — coexist in dynamic and mobile juxtaposition. The result is a kind of haphazard montage that replaces the linear unities of realist, narrative temporality with a kaleidoscopic geography in which past and future, identities and places, dissolve and run together. To Burroughs, his texts were literally experiments in a kind of time travel and exploration of unmapped realities generated through textual recombinations.

If this striking formal feature embodies the central thematic of Burroughs’ writing — disrupting fixed and stable notions of reality — then both are determined by the way in which he embraced random factors to assemble his texts from manuscript fragments. Lopez’s claim for the archive plausibly identifies individual books as partial materializations of this larger ongoing project. As I say, I’ll come back to this idea in my conclusion.

“Definitive” Editions

Now, as a way into a brief account of my exploration of Burroughs’ early literary history, I want to pick up on another, related claim made by Lopez, concerning textual scholarship. Discussing Burroughs’ most famous novel, he writes:

“No one has seen the ‘definitive’ Naked Lunch — despite the recent publication of something called Naked Lunch: The Restored Text — because no one has had access to the complete Burroughs papers that were sealed over 30 years ago.” (3)

Putting these two claims together forms a natural bridge to my own work as a textual scholar, in which I have focused on the three novels that Burroughs wrote before Naked Lunch — a title that, for several years, he actually applied to this early trilogy. In what follows, I want to go into the broad outlines of the textual and publishing history of these three novels in order to think about both the “definitive” edition and its relation to the archive.

I begin with the term “definitive” in order to make a very simple point concerning the first and third of these early novels. The first of my re-edited editions had “definitive” in its subtitle — Junky: the Definitive Text of ‘Junk’ — while the second — The Yage Letters Redux — is trumpeted as such on the publisher’s web site. Since I was unhappy about Viking Penguin’s use of the term first time around, for the second book, I directly requested that it be avoided — especially since my introduction explicitly denied that “the re-edited text is now final and definitive”: “This is because the paradox true of all texts — that they are both fixed and flexible, defined in one form and context only to be redefined in another — is exactly what the historical record reveals so powerfully. Redux is part of that historical process, not its perfect conclusion” (xliv).

Needless to say, if you visit the web site of City Lights Books, you will find the “D” word is still up there today. And that’s because commercial publishers aren’t interested in editing theory; they’re interested in selling books. (Likewise, for their edition of Naked Lunch, Grauerholz and Miles were careful to avoid the term — although you might say that “restored” begs other questions — while the jacket blurb insisted on identifying the text as “the definitive version”.) The active agency of publishers is an important issue so far as William Burroughs is concerned, especially early on in his career — and is a story written in miniature in the very title of his first novel.

In 1950, he titled his manuscript “Junk”; in 1953 it was published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict; in 1977 the “unexpurgated and complete” edition was published under the title Junky. Although the only title Burroughs ever wanted was the first — “Junk” — I lost the argument with Penguin’s marketing department, and the best I could do was to smuggle this into its subtitle. Unhappily, the “D” word rather undercut the point I wanted to make, which is why for The Yage Letters Redux, a text whose history is even more chequered and contingent, I laboured the point in the Editor’s Introduction.

My larger case is twofold. Firstly, that while Lopez’s claim about Burroughs’ “one book” oeuvre has some truth to it, on the one hand, it risks dehistoricizing his work, and on the other, the opposite is equally true — namely that each of Burroughs’ texts is radically plural, a cut-up of manuscripts, a composite of several distinct material histories, in which contingent factors, including the decisions of publishers, played a decisive role in determining content as well as title. And secondly, I want to argue for the importance of recognising this history because, as I’ve already suggested, it had a direct impact on both the thematics and methods of Burroughs’ writing.

The Textual History of Burroughs’ Early Novels

Now to clarify all this, I want to run through the manuscript and publishing history of this trilogy of short novels — whose re-editing I’m hoping to complete next year, now with the benefit of access to the Berg Collection.

To begin at the beginning, whereas the fact of Naked Lunch‘s complex genetic history is well known — albeit most often in the form of inaccurate myths — the first three novels Burroughs wrote have long been seen as straightforward, conventional autobiographical narratives.

Certainly, the compositional history seems to suggest a simple, linear sequence, as each text fictionalised a period of Burroughs’ recent experience one after another, during a four year period in which he lived in Mexico City:

The apparent tight linearity of this trilogy is, however, destabilized by the publication history, which scrambled the chronological order of its writing across four decades:

But there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see if we go through the manuscripts individually.

When it was published in 1953, Junkie looked, crudely, like this —

– where I’ve used dark blue to represent the narrative set in America, and purple for the narrative set in Mexico.

But the manuscript of “Junk” he finished in 1950 had almost none of this second narrative:

Since Burroughs scholars believed his original manuscript was lost, what happened wasn’t clear. My research established that this manuscript was in fact held at Columbia, while the missing material turned up among the Ginsberg papers at Stanford. Why it was added and where it came from tell us a good deal about the decisive part played by Burroughs’ publishers in determining the integrity of his texts.

For the reason Burroughs added a new final quarter to “Junk” — about 14,000 words, all set in Mexico — was because, in summer 1952, his publishers, Ace Books, told him to make it longer. And most of this material he cannibalized from the opening chapters of the new novel he had started writing, but which Ace did not want to publish, namely, Queer. Since this was written in the 3rd person, whereas “Junk” used the 1st, this required a good deal of rewriting but, since he was working to order and in haste, all sorts of small but significant contradictions crept in.

Although I was quite confident I had all I needed, to complete the editing of Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” properly required access to the only complete manuscript of “Queer” — but in 2003 that remained in private hands, so the new edition was published without it.

Now, if we turn to “Queer”: with its first two chapters removed to make up the last sections of Junkie, when a manuscript surfaced in 1984 — having been presumed lost for 30 years — its publishers, Viking, were faced with an even worse problem than Ace Books, since Burroughs never finished the manuscript and all that was left was a fragment too short to even call a novella. What to do? Well, same problem, same solution. So they raided an unused manuscript to make a new ending, which was duly added on for the publication of Queer in 1985 as an Epilogue. This, combined with a long Introduction Burroughs was required to write, added up to a full quarter of the whole book:

“Queer” (1952)

Queer (1985)

Even though this material is in the 1st person, not the 3rd, the new ending, entitled “Mexico City Return,” seemed to follow on perfectly from the end of “Queer”. Where that had Burroughs’ fictional alter-ego travelling from Mexico to South America, this has him travelling back from South America to Mexico. Since both are set in late summer, the gap in time between them seems a few weeks at most.

However, if we go back to the chronology of composition, there’s a striking parallel between summer 1951 and summer 1953. Sure enough, it turns out that the actual time gap was not two weeks but two years, because this material was written in 1953 to describe not Burroughs’ first trip to South America and back, but his second.

Which brings us to the next issue: where this epilogue came from. It turns out that it came from the third manuscript in Burroughs’ trilogy, “Yage,” which narrated his 1953 trip to South America. In fact, this was the ending of that original manuscript, but seems to have become separated from it when the rest of the manuscript was lost in the mid-’50s.

This in turn meant that, when “Yage” was published in 1963, the 1953 material was now so short it had to be combined with miscellaneous other letters and texts written in the 1960s.

“Yage” Ms. (1953)

The Yage Letters (1963)

Needless to say, as I was working on the new edition of The Yage Letters, I was aware that the Burroughs archive contained a manuscript that might possibly have been this long lost original from 1953. But, since access was not forthcoming — and couldn’t have been anticipated in the near future — the edition went ahead without it.

Now, to end with two final points. Firstly, back in late 1953, with Junkie published but no prospects for either “Queer” or “Yage,” Burroughs sketched in his notebook — due to be published later this year — a completely different arrangement of all the material he had written over the past two years. He thought of making a composite text out of six sections of material (including two short pieces which would have been written from scratch) that overlapped the end of Junky, all of “Queer,” and all of “Yage.”

Mexican Composite Manuscript

The result would have been to make one book based on Burroughs’ two journeys from Mexico to South America and back. If this had been published as the sequel to Junkie, then neither Queer nor The Yage Letters would have ever appeared.

But if this one book had come about, the result would have been a single, entirely coherent, linear narrative. It would therefore have contradicted the evolving thematic focus of these manuscripts and so undone Burroughs’ early steps towards his trademark collage aesthetic in which times, places, and identities escape their fixed location. The thematic direction of Burroughs’ writing at this point is summed up by his visionary, yagé-fuelled account of the “Composite City” that concluded “Yage” as published — a topographic fantasy space where “the unknown past and the emergent future meet” (Yage, 53) — and by the description of Mexico City that concluded Queer as published, in which the city is envisioned as “a terminal of space-time travel” (Queer, 131).

And this is why I think it’s hard to see Burroughs’ books as broken branches fallen from the tree of his archive.

For as actually published, Queer and The Yage Letters are radically composite works, each a mix of manuscripts put together only by a series of contingent histories: the end of Burroughs’ first novel had been lifted from the beginning of his second, while the ending of his second novel was taken from the end of his third, and of course since these cannibalizations took place over four decades and the novels were published out of sequence, the chronology of Burroughs’ potentially straightforward autobiographical narrative was, in effect, cut up.

The material contingencies of publication therefore modelled the very disruption of temporality that would inspire Burroughs to methodically cut up his manuscripts to make composite texts, and to speak of moving out of Time and into Space. He came to recognise this only in retrospect, at the time of assembling Naked Lunch — another haphazard, piecemeal composite production — but it confirmed the direction of his work, and his attitude towards publication, from then onwards.

Therefore, the one thing that the archive, as a work in itself, necessarily lacks, is the determining effect on Burroughs’ writing of the simple but material fact of publication. Hence the importance of representing, rather than repressing, the contingent manuscript histories of Burroughs’ novels through scholarly editions — always assuming that his literary output is indeed worthy of serious consideration…

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

This list is by no means comprehensive, although I attempted to make it as complete as possible. I combed through Maynard & Miles and Eric Shoaf’s Checklist marking down all the men’s magazines with William Burroughs fiction, essays, or interviews. I took adult men’s magazines to be glossy magazines with a mixture of nude pictorials, fiction, and lifestyle articles. Basically, they are skin or porno mags; be it girlie or gay.

The key element to this list is the glossy Time / Life magazine format mixed with the nude photos. As a result, the Mayfair Academy Rip-off of 1973 did not make the list although this publication would be a nice addition to a Beat / men’s magazine collection and is a simple way to get a hold of the many Mayfair articles in one place. I did not include Olympia Magazine or the later issues of Evergreen Review (especially the issues of the late 1960s) which flirt with the men’s magazine format but remain literary magazines at heart. I also listed gay magazines (a men’s magazine from a different bent if you will), most notably Playgirl, to show the changing ways Burroughs’ image and works could be utilized. In some cases, I just was not sure if the magazine was in fact a glossy men’s magazine at all. I listed Suck, National Screw, and Blueboy, for example. National Screw started as a newspaper tabloid format like an underground sex paper, but morphed into a glossy after a couple of issues. I know little about Suck and Blueboy but they clearly are sex-oriented magazines and they tell an interesting story about Burroughs so I included them. Any additions to this list would be greatly appreciated as well as a brief write up describing its contents both Burroughs related and otherwise.

William Burroughs in Wildcat Adventures

	Excerpt from Junkie Man’s Wildcat Adventures (Front Cover) Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)
	Excerpt from Junkie Man’s Wildcat Adventures (First Page of Burroughs Text) Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)

William Burroughs in Swank

	“The Word” Swank (Front cover) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Introduction by John Fles) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 1) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).
	“The Word” Swank (Burroughs text, page 2) Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William Burroughs in Mayfair

	“Interview” and “The Future of Sex and Drugs” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 1) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 10, pp 11-15. London: October 1967
	“The Engram Theory” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 2) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 11, pp 28-31. London: November 1967
	“Where’s Our Killer Whistle?” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 3) Mayfair Vol. 2, No. 12, pp 54-56. London: December 1967
	“Scientology Revisited” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 4) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 1, pp 29-31. London: January 1968
	“The Last Broadcast” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 5) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 2, pp 28-29. London: February 1968
	“By Far The Most Efficient and Precise Language We Possess is the Common Cold” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 6) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 3, 54-56. London: March 1968
	“The Fire Breaks Out” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 7) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1968
	“In That Year of 1969, Astonished Motorists Were Hustled at Random into the Death Cells for Parking Offenses” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 8) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 5, pp 54-55. London: May 1968
	“Switch On and Be Your Own Hero” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 9) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 6, 52-54. London: June 1968
	“The Academy’s Ultimate Offer — Immunity to Death” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 10) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 7, 52-54. London: July 1968
	“Do You Remember Tomorrow?” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 11) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 28-29. London: August 1968
	“Oh God, Get Me Out of This!” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 12) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 32-34. London: September 1968
	“Wind Die You Die We Die” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 13) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 10, pp 52-53, 62. London: October 1968
	“Man, You Voted for a Goddam Ape” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 14) Mayfair Vol. 3, No. 12, pp 52-54. London: December 1968
	“Rally Around the Secrets, Boys” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 15) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 1, pp 52-54. London: January 1969
	“Infiltration” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 16) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 2, pp 52-53. London: February 1969
	“The Brain Grinders” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 17) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1969
	“I’m Scared, I’m Scared, I’m Not” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 18) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 5, pp 52-54. London: May 1969
	“The Final Crusade of the Veteran Warriors” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 19) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 6, pp 52-54, 56, 58. London: June 1969
	“The Voracious Aliens” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 20) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 8, 32-34. London: August 1969
	“Days of Great Luxury Are Coming Back” (The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 21) Mayfair Vol. 4, No. 9, 54-56. London: September 1969
	“My Challenge to Scientology” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 1. London: January 1970
	“The Transplant Apocalypse” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 32-33. London: February 1970
	“Without Your Name, Who Are You?” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 52-54. London: March 1970
	“And a Final Word From William Burroughs” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 36. London: June 1970
	“D.E. My Super Efficiency System” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 52-54. London: July 1970
	“Twilights Last Gleamings” Mayfair Vol. 5, No. 12, pp 61-62. London: December 1970
	Mayfair Academy (More or Less) Urgency Press Rip Off, 1973 Contains ten of the Burroughs “Academy Bulletins” from Mayfair

William Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill in National Screw

	“Los Niños Locos” National Screw June 1977
	“Los Niños Locos” National Screw June 1977
	“Day Is Done” National Screw August 1977
	“Day Is Done” National Screw August 1977

William Burroughs in Various Men’s Mags

	“Prophet or Pornographer” Jaguar New York: January 1966. (Interview with Jaguar Staff)
	“Exterminator!” King pp 58-60. London: July 1966 (7s 6d)
	“O Say Can You See If Bently’s Who He Appears to Be?” Cavalier Vol 18, No. 12, pp 43, 57. New York: October 1968 (60 cents)
	“William Burroughs ‘I’ve Noticed a Regrettable Vagueness in Accounts of Hallucinogenic Drugs. In Time I Think These Just Lead to a Sort of Dreamland State” Penthouse Vol. 3, No. 7, pp 44,46, 52. New York: March 1972. (reprint of June 1971 Interview)
	“Face to Face with the Goat God” Oui 2, No. 8, pp 68, 92, 94. Chicago: August 1973

Jack Kerouac in Escapade and Mayfair

	Kerouac on our “bloody mad history” Escapade February 1960
	Kerouac on the Berlin Question Escapade April 1960
	Kerouac on Zen Escapade October 1960
	Kerouac on Jazz Escapade December 1960
	Kerouac on Cody and the Road Escapade April 1961
	Kerouac “In the Ring” Mayfair November 1968

More Burroughs in Men’s Mags

“Discussion Playboy Panel: The Drug Revolution”, Playboy Magazine, 17, No. 2, pp 53-74, 200-201. Chicago: February 1970 ($1.00)

“William Burroughs: Mind Engineer”, Penthouse, 6, No. 6, pp 37-40, 60. London: June 1971 (30p). (Interview with Graham Masterson and Andrew Rossabi)

“The Penny Arcade Peep Show / The Wild Boys Smile”, Suck, 5, pp 10, 15. Amsterdam: Summer 1971

“Blue Movie/Who Are These Boys?”, Suck, 6, pp 15-16. Amsterdam: 1971

“William Burroughs Takes a Look at Sex Films”, Suck, 6, p 15. Amsterdam: 1971

“First Meetings: One Dozen Memories from the Files of William Burroughs”, National Screw, April 1977. Taken from discussions with Victor Bockris

“Los Ninos Locos”, National Screw, Vol. 1, No. 7. June 1977. Part of Port of Saints

“Day is Done”, National Screw, August 1977. First issue as a glossy magazine

“My Life on Orgone Boxes”, Oui Magazine, October 1977

“The Health Officer”, Club Magazine, October 1977.

“Women: A Biological Mistake?”, Playgirl Magazine, March 1978.

“Dear Allen…Love Bill”, Blueboy, April 1978.

“Dinner with Andy and Bill”, Blueboy, October 1980. Interview with Warhol and Burroughs

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Continued from Part 1, Introduction to Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines.

From the 1950s to the late 1970s, William Burroughs supplied men’s magazines with fiction, essays, and interviews. The sheer number of pieces Burroughs provided to the skin trade is amazing. Burroughs first appeared in a men’s magazine in June 1959. I have written about Man’s Wildcat Adventures elsewhere and I do not want repeat myself. I do want to make clear that I consider this to be a very important publication for Burroughs and one that deserves much closer consideration. As the recent auction on eBay proves, other collectors agree. On one level, the magazine represents an early and rare Burroughs appearance in a fascinating setting. On another level, the magazine is collectible as a nice example of drug and sex exploitation. The illustrations accompanying the Junkie selection are highly prized by collectors of drug images. Like the Ace and Digit Junkies, Man’s Wildcat Adventures ranks with Reefer Madness in the 1930s or the various LSD exploitation movies, books, and posters of the 1960s. It should be noted that in June 1959, before the publication of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press, Burroughs is marketed by the publishing industry as a sensationalistic, pulp, exploitation writer. Despite the fact that Junkie was a serious, objective look at drug culture, the book and its author were not treated that way.

By 1961, Burroughs cut a much different figure in the publishing industry, including the men’s magazines. Burroughs’ breakout appearance occurred at the Edinburgh Writer’s Conference and the Grove Press Naked Lunch in 1962, but even before then, the little magazines and the small press had performed miracles. No longer perceived as a pulp writer, Burroughs was a member of the international avant garde. Burroughs’ appearance in Swank in July 1961 makes this clear. Like the little magazines, Swank ignores Junkie and publishes a piece from the Naked Lunch cycle of material. I do not own this issue of Swank, but I would guess that “The Word” represents a part of the just published Soft Machine. The myth surrounding Burroughs and Burroughs the experimental writer become the sensational and titillating commodity. Rumors abounded about Naked Lunch and Soft Machine then unavailable in the United States. The mere mention of his name suggested the forbidden, the criminal, the pornographic. Never mind that the fiction selected for publication in men’s mags rarely delivered the goods. Burroughs’ reputation as a drug addict, pornographer, murderer, trust-fund baby, avant garde writer provides the hook to the square reading public. The mystery surrounding Burroughs sold magazines even more than the writing. A 1966 interview in Jaguar entitled, “Prophet or Pornographer?,” underlines the hype that surrounded Burroughs.

Many people closely associated with Burroughs considered his cut-up experiments commercial suicide. Mainstream publishers did not know what to do with the writing and thought it unpublishable. Adult men’s magazines were no exception. When Burroughs returned to the United States in late 1964, Playboy commissioned him to write an article on his impressions of a return to his hometown. Burroughs wrote “St. Louis Return,” a piece full of nostalgia and the demented logic of cut-ups. Playboy rejected the piece. Paris Review published it in 1965 along with the first full-length interview with Burroughs in which he talks about the art of fiction. A selection of Burroughs’ manuscript was also printed. The publication in Paris Review testifies to the high literary quality of Burroughs’ work. Was it too much to consider Burroughs’ piece an early form of new journalism as practiced in the pages of Playboy by Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson throughout the 1960s and 1970s? Playboy thought so. The content was tame and lacked sex appeal; not to mention that the form utilized the textual and visual cut-up. Burroughs’ reputation hurt him here: “St. Louis Return” presented neither prophet nor pornographer, merely a literary experimenter.

I did not mention homosexual in my rap sheet on Burroughs. I wonder how Burroughs could be marketed as a pornographic fictioneer to the straight public when so much of his sexually explicit writing is gay in nature. In addition, what was a misogynist like Burroughs who was disgusted by and wary of women as sexual beings and objects doing in men’s magazines? I suspect that Burroughs’ fiction in these magazines tended not to emphasize the pornographic nature of his writing. I can not comment on the content of “The Word” in Swank, but in the July 1966 issue of King, the short story “Exterminator!” presents Burroughs in his most accessible writing style (no cut-ups) concentrating on a bit of his mythologized past: his job as an exterminator in the late 1930s. Again this highlights the fact that Burroughs the mythic, pop culture figure (representative of vanguard literature in the newly emerging underground) was highlighted over actually presenting the pornographic and experimental nature of his fiction. Unlike Bukowski, Burroughs did not provide sex stories, and the underground little magazines, like My Own Mag, remained the outlet for the cut-up.

The sexual aspect of Burroughs’ fiction tended to appear outside of the heterosexual men’s mag market. From what I can tell, Suck (edited by Bill Levy who also edited Insect Trust Gazette which published Burroughs’ cut-up experiments in the mid 1960s) explored all aspects of the new sexual freedoms as well as taking advantage of Amsterdam’s freedom of the press. Selections from The Wild Boys, Burroughs fantastic smash-up of the sexual, gay and youth revolutions, appear in Suck‘s pages. Burroughs also reviews sex films in an issue. Only after Stonewall in 1969 would gay sex go glossy, like Playboy. Not surprisingly, Burroughs’ sex life became a topic for readers. Burroughs’ most misogynist statements from The Job appear in the 1978 issue of Playgirl. In addition, Burroughs’ love life is featured Blueboy (also in 1978) when the magazine published a selection of Burroughs’ letters to Allen Ginsberg revealing a more vulnerable and intimate side of his personality.

As demonstrated by the rejection by Playboy and the selection by King, men’s magazines presented a watered-down version of Burroughs’ fictional content and style. Like Kerouac, Burroughs was better represented in his monthly columns, occasional articles, and interviews that appeared side by side with nude pictorials. From 1967-1973, Mayfair featured more than twenty pieces by Burroughs, most of them in the form of the “Burroughs Academy Bulletin.” Mayfair was the British equivalent of Playboy. These appearances overlapped with Burroughs’ stay in London. The regular column provided Burroughs with some much needed money, since by 1966 Burroughs made his living only on his writing. He no longer received a stipend from his parents. Mayfair provided Burroughs with a sounding board for his various obsessions, of which Scientology was a major one. Several of Burroughs’ Mayfair pieces deal with his in-depth examination of L. Ron Hubbard’s religion. In Mayfair and other magazines, Burroughs wrote on the 1960s political scene, Moroccan music, and drug hysteria. In 1973, the Mayfair articles were bootlegged as the Mayfair Academy Series More or Less by Urgency Press Rip-Off in a run of 650. Burroughs also planned a book called Academy 23 which would have included The Wild Boys and Mayfair material.

The adult magazines’ changing attitude towards drugs as well as Burroughs’ thoughts on drugs are particularly interesting. In 1959, Burroughs’ drug narrative was treated as an Amazing Story and pulp fodder. By 1970, Burroughs sat on a panel discussion on drugs in the pages of Playboy. The magazine treated Burroughs as an authority on drugs and drug culture. In addition, drugs were treated as a serious topic for discussion and a part of the fabric of modern society, not a shadowy and sensationalistic underworld.

In fact the packaging of Burroughs in men’s magazines highlights the changing perception of Burroughs by the literary community and the public at large. In essays, articles, and interviews, Burroughs was presented as an authority on religion, politics, drugs, and sex. In Mayfair, Penthouse, and Playboy, Burroughs was interviewed in depth on all these topics. While he clearly presented an outsider’s view, his thoughts were not demonized or downplayed. Burroughs had something of value to say to the hip, intelligent reader and it was not just shock value. Cultural elements that were considered a deviant, degraded underworld in the 1950s were by the 1960s and 1970s elements of a flourishing counterculture that threatened to become mainstream. As Burroughs’ presence on a legendary album cover, as well as in men’s magazines, proves, he morphed from a sinister, mysterious figure into a counterculture icon and a revered talking head.

It sounds like a joke, but in the case of the Beats, men’s magazines are collectible for the articles. The magazines are desirable for a host of other reasons as well. Magazines, like Man’s Wildcat Adventures, are collectible for their exploitative images of sex and drugs. Like Reefer Madness of the 1930s, these depictions are important pieces of cultural history. The advertisements for liquor, cigarettes, cars, and the other accessories of the good life detail the consumer culture of the post World War II era. Many of these images are collectible. Men’s magazines provide a unique view of the world through the lens of sex. Again ads and even want ads demonstrate changing sexual images. The fiction, interviews, panels and articles of these magazines all document the changing popular culture of the Western world. For example, a review of the pictorials of Man’s Wildcat Adventures and Escapade provides a look into the sexualized and idealized image of women just before the Pill and the revolutions of the 1960s. These pictorials tap into what was considered beautiful, sexy, trashy, dangerous, or refined by the American male at a particular time. Body image, body shape, and body hair all change over time. In some cases, particular models, like Bettie Page or Marilyn Monroe, become icons. Photographers become associated with a particular look or style; and there develops a cult following around their images. A review of Escapade, Swank and Mayfair records the sweeping changes of the Sexual Revolution, but the effect of all the various revolutions of the post World War II era are in evidence.

The Beats helped create the atmosphere that made men’s magazines publishable and popular on a larger scale. It could be argued that the proliferation of pornography (gay and straight; good and bad), as well as the rise of profanity into everyday conversation or the changing definitions of obscenity, can all be traced back to the trailblazing candor of the Beats. As a recent book called Queer Beats makes clear, the Beats in large part turned America on to sex and pushed it out into the open. It makes perfect sense that the Beats appear in men’s magazines, since they were the leading figures in most of the major cultural changes after 1945. A comprehensive collection of men’s magazines with Beat appearances documents this influence in an unusual and rather inexpensive way.

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In the last few weeks, eBay featured a couple of men’s magazines with William Burroughs appearances. A nice copy of Man’s Wildcat Adventures attracted several bidders and sold to a book dealer in California. Later, a copy of the little known British magazine King appeared on the market. On a whim, I picked up it for around $40 with shipping. Having never noticed the magazine before, I have no idea if this is a good price or not. But these two items reinforced an idea gestating for quite some time: men’s magazines with a Beat appearance would make an unusual and interesting collection.

By men’s magazines, I mean adult men’s magazines: the glossies fashioned in the style of Time / Life magazines featuring nude pictorials, lifestyle articles, essays, interviews, and fiction. Playboy remains the epitome of this genre; not GQ or Esquire. I will discuss adult periodicals all across the exploitative / explanatory spectrum. A handful of Beat and Beat-related authors graced the pages of these mags. The authors that immediately come to mind are Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs.

After the publication of On the Road thrust Kerouac in the spotlight, he became a heavily sought after and well-paid writer for hire. Not surprisingly given the sex, drugs and jazz elements of On the Road, men’s magazines, like Playboy, asked Kerouac to define the Beat Generation within their pages. Kerouac’s good looks did not hurt either. It was like James Dean and Marlon Brando could write. For the most part, Kerouac wrote non-fiction presenting his world view. Kerouac’s most sustained work in this area was with Escapade. Escapade was a high circulation competitor of Playboy that featured major authors like Nelson Algren and Ray Bradbury as well as articles on Hemingway and Salinger. From June 1959 to April 1960, Kerouac wrote a monthly column called “The Last Word” on a variety of topics like jazz, baseball, Zen, and the literary scene. Readers might expect Kerouac to chronicle the hot, racy underground culture he depicted in On the Road. He writes on the underground but not the world of the sexually hip. Instead, Kerouac’s jazz articles show him to be knowledgeable about the avant garde music scene. In a column on the literary scene, he champions the yet unpublished Naked Lunch as well as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Kerouac ends that piece calling for a revamping of the publishing industry and urging the growth of independent publishing. His writings on Zen are groundbreaking in addressing Eastern religion before it swept across the American consciousness. Yet, his eleven pieces (thirteen if you count an earlier piece in April 1959 and a much later rewrite of his first “Last Word” column in January 1967) also reveal the rather nostalgic and conservative side of Kerouac that fully emerged in the late 1960s. This side becomes most clear in his columns on baseball, world history, and politics. The Escapade pieces have been published in their entirety in the Good Blonde collection. The material collected in Good Blonde, of which Escapade plays a major part, is essential reading for anybody wanting to get a fuller understanding of the real nature of Jack Kerouac and not just the mythic figure. Tom Clark, author of a biography on Kerouac, wrote an essay entitled: “Kerouac’s Last Word: Jack Kerouac in Escapade.” It was printed in a small run of 500 copies by Water Row Press in 1986. I have not read Clark’s piece, but clearly, Kerouac’s essays and articles merit such treatment.

Charles Bukowski also enjoyed a long relationship with the adult publishing industry. I do not think Bukowski ever wrote a column for a men’s magazine, like his cult classic “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for Open City or his openly sexual column for The LA Free Press. Bukowski flourished in the underground papers in Los Angeles. In addition, I do not remember him often being interviewed or consulted on issues concerning the hip and oversexed, although he may have been interviewed by Hustler on the topic of sex. When I think of Bukowski and the men’s mags, I think of Buk’s short stories of the 1970s. Buk on the make both financially and sexually. Buk just about to make it big in the writing game. The Buk of Women, reading engagements, Love Is a Dog from Hell, and Linda King. As Bukowski’s cult fame grew, so did the line of women eager to get in between his dingy sheets. One product of this period was a steady stream of explicit short stories depicting his sexual fantasies and exploits. Buk had sex on the brain and the men’s magazines, like Adam, Fling, Hustler, and Screw, ate it up. For Bukowski, such writing was profitable (it helped supplement the checks from Black Sparrow Press), but generally it was not fun or easy. Like the porno writers for Olympia Press, this material was not Bukowski’s best work, and the work was in some cases poor and forced. Unlike Burroughs and Kerouac, Bukowski wrote for the harder porno mags of the time. And his material is of the type one would expect to see in a very explicit men’s mag. Howard Sounes in Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life writes of this period, “Bukowski commonly used extreme language to shock: women were ‘whores’ and intercourse was ‘rape’, pandering to his reader’s basest expectations.” In some cases, Bukowski’s work proved even too strange for the likes of Hustler. Like Kerouac, Bukowski’s writing for pornographic magazines has been overlooked. A closer look at these works provides interesting insights into role of sex, pornography and women in his fiction. If Women and Love Is a Dog from Hell are considered classics and enjoy critical scrutiny, then the underside of that coin deserves attention as well. Bukowski’s pornographic stories (both well and poorly written) bear re-reading by both critics and laymen.

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Also see Jed Birmingham’s Floating Bear Archive and article on Floating Bear 24.

After my deal to obtain Floating Bear #24 fell through a month or so ago, Floating Bears have been much on my mind. I broke down and bought a run of 31 of these fragile mimeos from William Reese Company. This bookstore is proof positive of the value and importance of the true bookman. I received three catalogs along with my purchase including a two volume catalog of 20th Century periodicals. These are worth their weight in gold. (See my previous article on book catalogues.) These catalogs grew out of the Robert Wendler collection to which William Reese added over the years. Close to 2000 different periodicals were available for sale beginning in 2003. Yugen, Floating Bear, Fuck You, Kulchur, Insect Trust Gazette, Marijuana Newsletter. Even a few copies of the elusive Sinking Bear. Most of the magazines I have written about were available not to mention large runs of important and rare Modernist littles (Broom, Blast, Little Review, Others, The Dial, The Exile et al) as well as magazines of social protest from the 1930s and 1940s, such as The New Masses, that link the little magazine traditions of High Modernism with the little magazine revolution detailed in Secret Location on the Lower East Side. The catalogs serve as a valuable bibliography of the history and importance of the periodical in 20th Century literature. William Reese Company is well known as an expert on Americana (Reese’s performance at the Frank Siebert Sale in 1999 established him as the bookman of his generation), but you can be sure that he and his associates will treat with meticulous care and scrupulous detail all aspects of printing and literary history they come in contact with.

I was very happy with the Floating Bears I received. As usual, the magazines had seen better days. In most cases, they were folded for mailing with stamps and address labels. Many copies were stained or poorly mimeo’d, but that is a large part of the charm of Floating Bear. You can see that these magazines were used. They were argued over, read aloud, passed around. As I mentioned before, Floating Bear could not be bought over the counter and was distributed through a mailing list. Receiving a copy meant you were part of a literary and artistic community. This is proven by the address labels on my copies. Many of my issues were sent to Eila Kokkinen, an art critic of the time. Kokkinen served on the editorial board of The Chicago Review when that publication introduced William Burroughs to the American public. Along with Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, she resigned the board to protest the suppression of the Winter Issue. The Winter Issue evetually became Big Table 1. She was good friends with Rosenthal who helped edit Naked Lunch for Grove Press. Rosenthal wrote a now forgotten novel of the 1960s entitled Sheeper that I have yet to read.

A couple of my other issues were mailed to Dan Rice. Rice was a student at Black Mountain College. He studied there during Charles Olson’s tenure as Rector. Rice was a fixture in the New York Art scene and active in the Cedar Bar circle. That Rice received Floating Bear highlights the magazine’s merging of Black Mountain, New York art and dance circles, and the Beat Generation. It is a very nice association. Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology began the process of canonization for these schools in 1960.

I also have an issue that was sent to Frank Davey. Davey is a Canadian poet and writer who helped start the influential literary magazines Tish and Open Letter. Tish evolved out of the excitement and interest generated by the Vancouver Poetry Conferences of the early 1960s. Vancouver was one of many hotspots in North America tuned in to the birth and spread of the new poetry. Robert Duncan suggested the creation of a magazine called Shit and Tish was the compromised result. Tish and Open Letter present the British Columbia poetry scene that was galvanized by the new writing of Olson, Duncan, Jack Spicer and others.

Another issue was sent to Corinth Books. Yet another was sent to Bill Wilentz. This highlights the link between the little magazine, the small press, and the independent bookshop. Eli and Ted Wilentz ran Eighth Street Bookshop, a haven for writers and artists in New York City. I don’t know if Bill Wilentz is related in any way, but I can not help but think there is a connection to the Wilentz Brothers. The importance of the independent bookshop to the development of a literary community cannot be overstated. City Lights in San Francisco, Peace Eye Books in the Lower East Side, The English Bookshop in Paris, Better Books and Indica in London, Asphodel Bookshop in Cleveland. There must be countless others. These stores provided a meeting place for the literary community as well as an outlet for selling new writing. As my checks from the Phoenix Bookshop prove, these stores provided artists and writers with cash. In many cases, these bookstores acted as publishers themselves. The Wilentz Brothers founded Corinth Books in 1959. Corinth Books published Leroi Jones, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Diane Di Prima, and a host of others. Corinth teamed up with other small publishers like Totem (Leroi Jones’s press) and Jargon (Jonathan Williams). Jones and Di Prima were intimately involved with the Wilentz’s publishing efforts. Naturally, Corinth received a copy of the Bear.

In this cache of Floating Bears, I finally got a hold of issue 24. According to the William Reese catalog, the legend of its rarity may be anecdotal. Yet my experience suggests there is a lot of truth to the myth. Issue 24 definitely has a different feel to it. The paper is thinner; the mimeo job is as poor as Diane Di Prima states. Looking at all the issues together, it stands out.

This is also true of the issues beginning with Number 26. Leroi Jones left as editor with Issue 25, and Diane Di Prima took over full editorial duties. Issue 27 has a cover page like the title page of a book. By Issue 28, there are pictorial covers by a host of important artists like George Herms, Jess, and Wallace Berman. You can see the geographical shift from New York to California as well. Herms, Jess, and Berman were all active in the California art scene that moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Billy Linich otherwise known as Billy Name, the man who made Warhol’s Factory silver, assists with a few issues after Jones’s departure. This suggests Floating Bear‘s links to the speed culture of the New York art scene in the 1960s.

Floating Bear is very hard to scan or at least I find it so. I did the best I could. For the most part, the images give a sense of the feel and appearance of the magazine. In any case, they allow the curious viewer to track the changes to Floating Bear in close to 40 issues and over nearly a decade of publishing.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For more information about Floating Bear, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Floating Bear and Floating Bear 24. You can also download this spreadsheet mapping the recipients to whom copies of Floating Bear were mailed.

Floating Bear 1
February 1961

Floating Bear 2
February 1961

Floating Bear 3
March 1961

Floating Bear 4
March 1961

Floating Bear 5
April 1961

Floating Bear 6
April 1961

Floating Bear 7
May 1961

Floating Bear 8
May 1961

Floating Bear 9
June 1961

Floating Bear 10
June 1961

Floating Bear 11
July 1961

Floating Bear 12
August 1961

Floating Bear 13
September 1961

Floating Bear 14
October 1961

Floating Bear 15
November 1961

Floating Bear 16
December 1961

Floating Bear 17
January 1962

Floating Bear 18
February 1962

Floating Bear 19
March 1962

Floating Bear 20
May 1962

Floating Bear 21
August 1962

Floating Bear 22
August 1962

Floating Bear 23
September 1962

Floating Bear 24
September-October 1962

Floating Bear 25
November 1962 – March 1963

Floating Bear 26
October 1963

Floating Bear 27
November 1963

Floating Bear 28
December 1963

Floating Bear 29
March 1964

Floating Bear 30
November 1964

Floating Bear 31
June 1965

Floating Bear 32
February 1966

Floating Bear 33
February 1967

Floating Bear 34
November 1967

Floating Bear 35
April 1968

Floating Bear 36
January – July 1969

Floating Bear 37
March – July 1969

Floating Bear 38
Summer 1971

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Thank goodness!!! I just finished Nicholson Baker’s book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and guess what: paper, even the most acidified paper, is much more durable than I was led to imagine. Some of the jewels of a William Burroughs collection have reputations for being extremely volatile and fragile. My Own Mag, Floating Bear and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts were produced on very cheap paper subject to rapid deterioration and yellowing over the years. In addition, much of this material was subjected to rough treatment by their owners who actively read, used and passed them around. My copy of Floating Bear #9 possesses all manner of creases (Floating Bear was folded to be sent through the mail) and wear, not to mention water damage which occurred during a flood at poet John Thomas’s residence. The premier issue of Fuck You has oxidized on the cover leaving stains on the construction paper. Issue 9 of My Own Mag was vandalized intentionally by publisher Jeff Nuttall. A green stain runs across the cover and issue six has a cut-out hole in the cover. Other issues were burned intentionally. Besides many My Own Mags have seen better days over the years as the surrounding elements have worked over the unstable paper.

This does not even mention the early Burroughs novels: the two editions of Junkie. The Ace and Digit versions like most examples of pulp fiction were printed on just that: ground wood pulp. Time has not been kind to books of this type. The glue in the binding is poor and the paper yellows and becomes brittle quickly. These books were meant to be disposable not collectible. The Library of Congress owns a substantial collection of dime store novels that as Nicholson Baker details are is a terrible state. For years the books were stored in humid and high heat conditions resulting in considerable damage. According to Michael Waters, a head conservator at the Library of Congress, interviewed by Baker, the dime novel collection was “some of the most brittle material that you could ever wish to see.” This sent my heart racing. But all is not lost. Waters adds, “Now the collection has been boxed, and if I could live for a hundred years, I would still expect them to be in the condition that they are now, providing they are not physically abused.”

Baker makes clear that the dangers of “brittle books” have been much over-hyped. The standard test for determining if a book is brittle and therefore supposedly usable is the Double Fold test. The lower right corner of the page is folded up into a triangle and then folded back to the other side of the page to a breaking point. That is not all. In some cases the page is given a tug as well. An endangered page must survive upwards of four rounds of this rough treatment to pass muster. As Baker argues, this is nonsense. With proper attention and careful use, a brittle book can be used countless times without further damage. Despite all the hand wringing, the books in our libraries are not turning into dust although they may tear in your hand due to vigorous testing. I am reminded of an overzealous grandmother demonstrating her affection by twisting one’s ear. Clearly, there are better ways of showing one’s love.

For the last couple of years, I sat up nights worrying about the state of my book collection. People have suggested expensive deacidification processes to help my books live until the next century. Yet as Baker shows and Waters knows from experience, paper is remarkably resilient. Paper does not need expensive processes to ensure their survival just respect, common sense, and desire.

As Double Fold reveals, librarians and administrators at many of the most hallowed libraries in the world, like the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the New York Public Library, and a host of university institutions, lack these needed attributes. Baker chronicles the development and implementation of the “destroying to preserve” movement. Since World War II, libraries have been waging war on paper in the form of early newspapers, and books and pamphlets in a desire to acquire more space. The main weapon in this war was microfilm and continues anew with digital scanning. The harsh truth is that scanning while it may preserve the text in another medium destroys the original paper format. Newspapers and books must be disbanded for optimal scanning. The libraries in many cases sell or destroy the disbanded sheets arguing that they have a copy so why keep the originals.

In fact there are a multitude of reasons for keeping the originals. Proponents of scanning may not like to admit it, but microfilm, to put it bluntly, sucks. Researchers hate to use it as it makes you nauseous and is a tedious process. In many cases, microfilm is of poor quality and not a faithful recreation of the original. This is most obvious if the original is in color. Microfilm may not be any more stable than paper as the microfilm also reacts with the environment and deteriorates. Due to libraries’ misguided policy, all we have now of some newspapers and books are inferior microfilm. All originals have been destroyed. Baker details these points with fascinating thoroughness.

In an interesting subplot to this story, Baker shows how this policy of destruction grew out of World War II and the Cold War. Many of the masterminds of this policy began their careers in the emerging military industrial complex of the post World War II era. Big business and shadowy government agencies all had their hand in the assault on paper. All these forces created a comedy of errors that would be funny if not so tragic. The use of the highly unstable compound diethyl zinc in a harebrained scheme to deacidify paper is just one of several such stories. This story involves government agencies, technology mad administrators, big business, and of course big money (coming from tax payers dollars, naturally).

The problem is clearly space and the solution might be simply: obtain more space. In the long run just buckling down and investing in more storage facilities might be less expensive than the millions of dollars spent on sexier technology based schemes. Such a plan is less destructive as well. Baker realizes there is a place for technology in the preservation of the world’s paper archives but these tactics have to be implemented with more respect and understanding of paper.

In the Double Fold, one of the biggest villains is microfilm which begs the question is today’s digital scanning, such as OCR, any better or are we heading down the same road. As a researcher in a law firm and an amateur researcher of literary texts, I understand the value of today’s computer technology in getting complex analyses of paper documents done. Quite simply I could not do my job with out OCR’d documents and electronic databases. Such technology allows me to complete tasks with a level of thoroughness and complexity that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Yet the key to the law firm’s approach that differs from the policy of the leading libraries of the 1980s and 1990s and even today is the mantra: keep the originals. That means paper if they exist. Even the most up to the minute computer reproductions are far from perfect. An office mate of mine was researching a land deed from 1907 today. This document will not scan perfectly and in the legal world a single word or even a single punctuation mark can win or lose a case. As a legal researcher for almost 10 years, I cannot say how many different databases and computer formats I have had to deal with, but paper always remains the same and remains reliable. Computer technology and even microfilm are invaluable resources but they are only one link in the chain. Paper is a necessary evil. As a collector, I happen to think it is divine.

So what happens to all these discarded newspapers, books, pamphlets and other ephemera? In some tragic circumstances, it is destroyed, but in other cases it goes to rare book and other paper dealers. Perform a search on Abebooks with the search term “library stamp” and see how many books pop up. Over 1 million books. Not all of them are relevant to this discussion but thousands of them are. Rare book dealers regularly obtain extremely valuable books that have been withdrawn from libraries, like the Library of Congress or the British Museum. Baker details several breathtaking examples of extraordinary (and in some case one of a kind) books made available in just such a manner.

Even rare William Burroughs material turns up in this fashion. In 1999 at the Nelson Lyon sale, several rare magazines came from the New Mexico University Library. It is understood that ex-libris copies of books are generally less desirable than books without a library stamp. Like everything in the book world, there are exceptions to this such as books that come from a famous person’s library and have his personal bookplate. In any case, Nelson Lyon obtained numerous magazines such as Mayfair, Film, Glebe, Insect Trust Gazette 2, and Grist from the New Mexico Library. I have been looking for years for a copy of Insect Trust Gazette 2. Possibly all the copies are in libraries. You might think that these magazines were irreparably damaged if a library got rid of them. Not so. I bought a copy of Rhinozeros #7 with the New Mexico stamp and but for the stamp the magazine is in remarkable condition. Who knows why the library got rid of such treasures but they do it everyday in an effort to create space.

I highly recommend Baker’s book to anybody interested in the future of our paper resources. Like the more publicized oil crisis with its mismanagement of resources and failure to properly develop new technologies, the paper crisis affects the entire population. And like the events surrounding the oil crisis that make headline news seemingly every minute of the day, there is nothing less at stake than the history of civilization.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For those of you chomping at the bit to sneak a peek at the Burroughs Archive in the Berg Collection, do not book your ticket to New York just yet. The archive is massive and could take awhile to organize and to catalog. I have contacted a former employee of the New York Public Library, a Burroughs scholar, and members of the New York publishing community. The general consensus is that the process could take as long as two years to complete.

In addition, the Library is notoriously stingy in providing access to its special collections, particularly its holdings in the Beats and counterculture. An application process must be completed with emphasis on academic goals and credentials. Casual drive-bys are not tolerated.

All is not lost. William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Barry Miles spent considerable time and effort in putting the initial archive together. They published their efforts in a signed limited edition in 1974. This catalog is available on the rare book market for $400 and up. Ken Lopez, the bookseller who brokered the Robert Jackson sale, offers a condensed, but highly informative, version of the catalog for $20. I highly recommend it. (www.lopezbooks.com)

Roberto Altman, the man who bought the initial archive, never touched the collection and for years it remained in its initial packaging. Robert and Donna Jackson kept the collection in impeccable condition and provided limited access. Ted Morgan, the William Burroughs biographer, only looked at the collection for three days. As a result, the collection should be well organized and in great shape for the cataloguers. Hopefully, Burroughs fans will be able to look at this incredible piece of literary history sooner rather than later.

Catalogue Excerpt by Ken Lopez

In March 2006 the New York Public Library purchased the William S. Burroughs Literary Archive from collectors Robert and Donna Jackson. This sale was brokered by Ken Lopez Bookseller, who put together an extremely nice catalogue describing the archive and situating its importance in the Burroughs corpus. For those who can’t afford the limited edition A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, published in 1973 and costing hundreds of dollars on the rare book market, the Lopez catalogue gives an illustrated overview of materials that we all hope the New York Public Library will exhibit soon. (Contact Ken Lopez Bookseller for ordering information.)

Meanwhile, Mr. Lopez graciously gave permission to RealityStudio to excerpt the third chapter from his catalogue, which gives an excellent overview of the contents of the archive. The chapter was written primarily by Bob Moore.

This collection of materials, the “Vaduz Archive,” was originally assembled by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in 1972 and catalogued by Barry Miles (published as A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, London, 1973). The material ranges from the early 1950s through 1971 and covers the author’s movements from Morocco to Paris, London and back to the U.S. Much of the material dates from roughly around the time Burroughs first met Gysin and fully details their collaborative work at the “Beat Hotel” in Paris and then London, from the inception and application of Gysin’s “cut-up” technique through film, performance, audio and visual work. The archive includes numerous original drafts of Burroughs’ early books and publications; over 11,000 pages of manuscript material, much of it unpublished; some 3,000 pages of highly personal literary and artistic correspondence; original collaged dream calendars; diaries and holograph notebooks; hundreds of cut-ups; unreleased tape recordings; folders of original photographs both by and of Burroughs; his avant garde publication archive; and numerous folders of personal research. This collection also includes much of Brion Gysin’s own literary archive (original manuscripts, calligraphy, literary correspondence) from the time of the very first cut-ups in the late 1950s through 1963. Moreover, the collection contains much unique and/or unpublished material by their collaborators and contemporaries, both literary and artistic. The placement of this collection in an institution will inaugurate an entire new era in Burroughs and Gysin research, publication and appreciation, in particular their early relation to and involvement in avant garde art, film, and even poetry.

Among the highlights are the original Queer manuscript from 1952 (as well as attendant materials from the 1985 publication) and excised and variant manuscript material from all of Burroughs’ books from Naked Lunch to Ah Pook is Here, including Minutes to Go; Exterminator; the “Nova Trilogy” of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express; Dead Fingers Talk; The Wild Boys; The Last Words of Dutch Schultz; The Job; The Third Mind; et al. Also, there are literally dozens and dozens of shorter pieces, “routines,” cut-ups, essays and film scripts that do much to fill in and illuminate both Burroughs’ literary oeuvre and modus operandi. On a deeper level both artistically and psychically are Burroughs’ dream calendars, working notebooks and diaries, not to mention his own photography, film and performance notes, all of which inform the purely literary output. Burroughs was also an avid correspondent and his correspondence files are full of lengthy, dense, and revealing letters from notable literary figures such as Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno to a widely disparate array of 1960s-era poets, painters, fimmakers, composers, science fiction writers, drug smugglers, rock musicians, underground editors, lovers and critics. The Vaduz archive also contains Burroughs’ research files into subjects ranging from Scientology to Egyptian heiroglyphs, time studies, bio-feedback, drug addiction, homosexuality, totalitarianism and the criminal underworld. One could almost say that Burroughs himself was a walking fourth-dimensional collage of his own life, moving through numerous avant garde milieus, suitcase in hand, hat askew, completely at home with no fixed address.

As much as Burroughs was “l’hombre invisible” and ghost in the machine of late 20th Century avant garde activity, it is nonetheless astonishing to see in this material just how far his connections to various avant gardes extended, from Surrealism to Fluxus, from British “New Wave” Science Fiction to underground film circles, from Beat and Post-Beat beginnings to Concrete Poetry and beyond. His adventures in consciousness, sexuality and writing led him like a thin phantom from the streets of New York City to Mexico to the jungles of South America to Morocco, Paris and London. Wearing his signature slouch hat with a cigarette burning eternally from between stained fingers, Burroughs somehow embodied the form of fictional crime fighter, The Shadow, taking it upon himself to know exactly what evil lurked in the hearts of men and report on it. In this way, he came to fully understand the natures of Addiction, Control, Police States and Viruses, thus eerily predicting the late 20th Century crises of AIDS, the Internet (and its panoply of “Viruses”, “Worms,” “Hosts,” and “Spyware” not to mention the pervasive virus-like affliction called “Information Sickness”), the wars on drugs and terrorism, the cultures of Information and Surveillance, dissolution of national borders in Africa and elsewhere, and the pervasive presence of War itself. Burroughs’ vision is cold and chilling, not because he was a cold and chilling individual, but because he saw through the rosy patina of the post-WWII world to a darker underlying reality-not only “nature, red in tooth and claw,” but human nature “red in tooth and claw.” His scrapbooks are filled with disturbing imagery of street riots, race riots, child soldiers with machine guns and machetes, voodoo masks and dystopic science fiction. Although the material only chronologically extends up through 1972, it fully anticipates the psychic, political, social and sexual chaos of the next 33 years.

Moreover, the archive specifically details piece-by-piece Burroughs’ and Gysin’s “cut-up technique” that, while perhaps initially perceived as a mere literary device or worse, gimmick, has actually been more-or-less the defining form (trope?) of post-WWII culture world wide. Burroughs and Gysin’s initial crude experiments with chopping up and re-arranging bits of paper, pages of text, strips of film stock and audio tape have since been reworked and refined to almost the Nth degree, anticipating and providing the groundwork for artists working in such disparate fields as concrete and sound poetry; dub reggae; psychedelic rock music; industrial and experimental music; underground cinema and video; punk rock and even hip-hop, all the way to contemporary television advertising, news and music videos. However, whereas Burroughs’ original intention was to unlock (and thus free) the Imagination, the techniques seem to have been co-opted by the society at large to serve Control and render the Imagination of its subject impotent by the endless streams of shifting, transitory, shock images and sound-bites. For example, while one salient, shocking Vietnam War image in 1968 once shifted a nation’s attitude toward war, thousands of such images, broadcast repeatedly, can only lead to disinterest, apathy and boredom.

Certainly Burroughs and Gysin have provided a springboard for future generations, but their unique discoveries and experiments were in turn a culmination of various European trends ranging from the early Dada poetics of Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, the collage work of Kurt Schwitters, through several decades of Surrealist activity to Parisian Lettrism and Situationist strategies. One of the most widely held misunderstandings about the avant gard(s) is that avant garde activity is primarily the work of wildly original, lone individuals. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. Avant garde activity is, almost by definition, group activity and collaborative work. One of the truly wonderful aspects of the Burroughs archive is to see first-hand just how closely connected he was personally and collaboratively to all sorts of widely disparate avant garde groups. For it is not simply his original involvement with the Beats that characterizes Burroughs’ true contribution to world (counter)culture, but his pervasive and sinuous presence in and among almost every important breakout avant garde movement of the 1960s: again, from Fluxus to concrete poetry to underground filmmaking to the drug subculture to the Mimeo Revolution and beyond, Burroughs was there, collaborating, contributing, corresponding, giving interviews and constantly provoking the whole way.

In fact, simply the list of individuals who have collaborated with Burroughs comprise a who’s who of international underground literary, artistic and film activity. An incomplete list from this archive would include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Henri Chopin, Bob Gale, Keith Haring, David Budd, David Prentice, Carl Weissner, Claude Pelieu, Anthony Balch, Sinclair Beiles, Harold Norse, Earle Browne, Conrad Rooks, J.G. Ballard and John Giorno. Later collaborators, as Burroughs’ influence continued to percolate throughout contemporary culture, included David Cronenberg, Laurie Anderson, Charles Gatewood, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Frank, Philip Hunt, Derek Jarman, Ridley Scott, Gus Van Sant, Genesis P. Orridge, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Wilson, Kurt Cobain, and many others. The archive details Burroughs’ role as collaborateur par excellence before 1972 via correspondence, unpublished experiments and collage. Indeed, some of Burroughs’ early, important collaborative visual works (esp. w/ painters David Budd and David Prentice) remain to this day unknown or lost and can only be guessed at through the letters in this archive.