Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A couple weeks ago the Wizard behind the curtain at RealityStudio sent me an email alerting me to a proof copy of Dead Fingers Talk offered by Ken Lopez. As Lopez’s catalog description makes clear, this is a highly desirable book. Try finding a proof copy of a Burroughs title before the 1970s. It is hard to do for reasons I will get into later. Dead Fingers Talk is one of my favorite Burroughs titles and one of the prides of my book collection. It would seem to be a no-brainer that this unusual item would get my blood racing. Nope. A complete flat line. I would say I hate proofs and all their relations but that would give them too much credit. Instead proofs do something worse than inspire my ire. They bore me.

As a book-collecting term, the word proof is thrown around quite loosely so I am going to define my terms for those who do not know what uncorrected proofs, galleys, advanced reading copies and review copies are. Quite simply a proof is a trial impression. A test run before the larger final run is printed. There are many levels to this term but here are the main ones courtesy of the book collectors’ glossary at Alibris. If you are interested you should go to the Alibris website and spend some quality time with the glossary. Many of the terms have images along with them that are very instructive.

So here goes:

Proofs: Traditionally, a printed trial-run of the work, bound or unbound, which is used for proofreading and to determine if changes need to be made in the text. The typical publishing process is proof, advanced reading copy, and publication. However, bound proofs are also used for pre-publication publicity and are often sent out in place of advance reading copies to booksellers and reviewers. Also known as galley, galley proof, page proof, and uncorrected proof.

Galley: The earliest printing of a work used by the proofreader and author to check for errors. Galleys are often printed on long continuous strips of paper. Sometimes the term is used interchangeably, although incorrectly, with the term advanced reading copy. Also known as galley proof.

Advanced Reading Copy or ARC: A preview or early review copy of a book that is usually sent to book buyers, reviewers, booksellers, book clubs, and/or publisher sales representatives before the book is published. It could be in a different format, uncorrected, not bound, and/or have a different cover design than the publication issue. The typical publishing process is proof, advance reading copy, and publication.

Review Copy: A copy of a book sent out for review by the publisher to the press, booksellers, and others in order to attract attention to the publication. Frequently review copies will have slips of paper inserted into the book, or have it written on the cover, announcing it as a review copy. Textbook review copies are also known as “desk copies” or “instructor copies” and are given to instructors to review for consideration for adoption of the regular edition.

There is a robust book-collecting market for all this stuff. The basic reason for this is that collectors are obsessed with getting as close to the author as possible. Collectors prize the original. They are in constant search for a book’s beginnings, its source — whatever that is. The proof allows a collector to go along the chain of composition that ultimately leads back to the manuscript. Or even further. The joke goes that what collectors really want is a writer’s DNA. In the mid-1960s, book artist Eleanor Antin touched on this with her book: Blood of a Poet Box. This work gathered the blood of 100 poets on slides and packaged them in a specimen box. At the same time, Ed Sanders captured the madness of book collecting in typical Fuck You fashion by gathering pubic hair from poets like Allen Ginsberg and offering them for sale in a Peace Eye catalog.

Collectors also covet rarity. The one of a kind. The unique. Proofs are generally limited in number and thus in the book-collecting market more valuable. Ken Lopez wrote an essay on proofs that lays out the argument for why you should collect proofs in much more detail. It is interesting reading.

I have read this essay more than once as well as talked with collectors who champion proofs. I just cannot get on board with this mentality. Let me be the first to say that my prejudice against proofs might be very narrow-minded if not downright stupid. Case in point is an uncorrected proof copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Years ago I found a copy of this proof in a $1 bin outside an independent bookstore. This was around the time the book came out, and the bookstore may have gotten the proof as part of a promotion. Little Brown, the book’s publisher, printed about 500 uncorrected proofs of what proved to be Wallace’s defining novel. It just so happened that as part of promoting Infinite Jest Wallace signed many of the proofs, if not all of them. I bought the book with the idea of flipping it for a few bucks. I eventually sold it for $100. A hefty profit. Given Wallace’s suicide, the book is now about $1000.

I can say with certainty that I never would have gotten rid of a first edition Infinite Jest, signed or unsigned, and I would never, even in today’s more active Wallace market, sell a first edition of that book. But the copy I had was a proof, and I just have no interest in proofs. That lack of passion made the book expendable to me despite that fact that even in 1996 I was interested in Wallace and valued his work.

A diligent book collector can find ARCs and review copies of books lying in bargain bins all the time. The Strand in New York City has thousands of them. As Lopez makes clear, the dynamic of the proof market changed around 1978. Proofs became much more common after that date and an important part of corporate book promotion. Let me tell you it is a real drag digging through all this publishing slag. In my opinion most uncorrected proofs are basically the waste material of the mainstream publishers. But sometimes you get lucky and find something interesting and maybe even valuable.

What is the reason for this aversion to proofs? Why does a proof of Dead Fingers Talk fail to get my heart racing? Lopez touches on one reason in his essay. Proofs are ugly. Ugly isn’t quite the right word. Boring. Proofs are boring. On a visual level. Let’s look at Dead Fingers Talk, because it is a perfect example of why I like first editions and disrespect proofs. Compare the plain green wrapper of the proof with the dust jacket of the first edition. In my opinion the dust jacket for Dead Fingers Talk is one of the best in the entire Burroughs bibliography. I absolutely love it. The photo of Burroughs on the back cover is one of my favorites. I like the dust jacket on a design and layout level but I like even better its referentiality and sense of history. Dead Finger Talk collects selections of all the Olympia Press Burroughs titles into one text (by cutting out the sex). The jacket reflects this with the images of the Olympia dust jackets on the cover. Ian Sommerville created that image by manipulating individual photographs of the covers into smaller denser reproductions. This photo experiment ties in with the cut-up and tape recording experiments that obsessed Burroughs throughout the 1960s. The cover also has a sense of biography. The hand refers to Burroughs’ own dead finger that he cut off in a Van Gogh kick over Jack Anderson.

It could be argued that the plain green wrapper of the Dead Fingers Talk proof conjures up images of the plain brown wrapper used for shipping pornography or the infamous green wrappers of Olympia Press. In addition there might be a tenuous link between the Dead Fingers Talk proof and Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings or Yves Klein’s monochromes. Interestingly in 1963, Burroughs’ cut-ups were appearing in an art world context that included Klein’s work. Unfortunately I don’t think proofs work in this way. Proofs may be earlier than first editions but they do not match a first edition’s historicity and referentiality. So proofs do not look good and on top of that what visuals they do have, have nothing to say. If you are ugly you better be able to strike up a conversation.

Admittedly there is a certain less-is-more appeal to proofs. In the case of classic mimeo like Floating Bear, the early Intrepid, or TISH, I feel the pull of this minimalism strongly. I do not with proofs. The reason for this is that I get a sense of the handmade, do-it-yourself spirit from mimeo that I do not get from proofs. I equate proofs with the mechanisms of the mainstream publishing industry. You almost never see proofs, review copies, galleys and the like from the small presses of the Mimeo Revolution.

This type of stuff does exist on some level in the small press world. The Joseph Zinnato Burroughs collection contained an archive related to the publication of Time. Stephen Gertz writes, “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.” This type of stuff is incredible to me and is valuable in financial and scholarly terms. The ultimate would be an archive like this surrounding the publication of the Olympia Naked Lunch. I would love to see galleys and proofs from that period since such information would help solidify the history of the book’s publication, which has been shrouded in mystery for decades.

Forget about the concepts of primacy or rarity, the true value of proofs and their brethren lies for me on a purely academic and scholarly level. A few years ago, Skyline Books had a review copy of On the Road as well as a proof copy. The proof would have some interest to me in that it would help establish the publishing history of Kerouac’s masterpiece, which like Naked Lunch has been the subject of much conjecture. Unfortunately proof material of this level of importance is out of the range of the common collector. The On the Road proof clocked in at $55,000. Most proofs with authorial edits are, like manuscripts, already in institutions and are out of the reach of any collector no matter their bank account. Those that do trickle down to rare booksellers are prohibitively expensive and are also on par monetarily with manuscript material. For example, Royal Books has the galley proofs for Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse with authorial edits for $80,000.

Lopez’s copy of Dead Fingers Talk could fall into the scholarly category. Like Naked Lunch, not much is known about how Dead Fingers Talk was edited and put together. The book is largely forgotten and remains to be studied. It is an assemblage and, as such, a proof captures the spirit of the book’s construction. In addition this proof might actually contain material that was excised from the final published version. Lopez’s copy provides a great opportunity to see what passed the censor at various stages of the book’s editing. As Ken Lopez makes clear in his essay, these additions and deletions make proofs extremely desirable. Completists must have them as they represent another version of the novel. By and large the majority of proofs you see on the rare book market are promotional in nature and do not vary greatly (besides grammatical changes) from the final novel. There are exceptions to this, possibly such as this copy of Dead Fingers Talk, that make proofs an exciting and rewarding proposition.

Although I have very few of them, a review copy can grab my attention. The reason has nothing to do with rarity or an obsession with getting in touch with the author. The interest of review copies lies solely with the ephemera that sometimes accompany them. These press releases comprised of blurbs, release dates, and background information are sometimes fascinating and revealing about how a book was marketed or prepared for popular or critical reception. In the case of Burroughs, topics of this type are extremely important. I have written about the ephemera surrounding the Olympia Press and Grove Press Burroughs titles elsewhere. Give me a catalog or promotional booklet over an advanced reading copy any day.

For the most part the ARC, review copy, or proof that is obtainable by the average collector has no scholarly importance. Instead they are by-products of the corporate publishing world and are, in my mind, artificial rarities. They are merely the promotional tools of the large publishers. The literary equivalent of cosmetic samples. A Burroughs proof highlights for me his move into the mainstream corporate publishing world. Exterminator! and the late trilogy (or any book that was part of that 6-book deal) would all have review copies or proofs. These items capture not so much Burroughs’ move away from experimental writing but his move from the active experimental community exemplified by small presses and little magazines.

You just do not see review copies, ARCs or proofs in my area of interest: the publishers of the Mimeo Revolution. These books and magazines were rarely reviewed and if they were, it was by writers or artists associated with the magazine. At the opposite end of the corporate publishers’ distribution of review copies is the mailing list distribution of a mimeo. Anybody getting a copy of Semina or Floating Bear was already in the circle. There was no need or desire for promotion. In addition, small presses do not have the resources to run off 500 uncorrected proofs to give away to distributors or reviewers. If a mimeo or small press ran a proof it was probably one copy done to actually test the quality of a probably broken down press. This proof was then put in a publisher’s archive to be marketed to a library or institution or more likely it was destroyed. So Ken Lopez is right to trumpet the rarity of a Dead Fingers Talk proof. They are very rare before, let’s say, Exterminator! Even review copies of the Grove titles of the 1960s are extremely unusual. Olympia Press sent review copies of Naked Lunch out to interested parties but almost all of those books were seized at customs and never made it into the United States. The Dead Fingers Talk proof, despite coming from Calder / Olympia Press, is tainted with unsavory associations. The uncorrected proof or the ARC is symbolic of the bloated bureaucracy and commercial, mass consumer nature of corporate publishing.

Book collecting is a very personal affair. Building a book collection is as much about what you exclude as what you include. Looking at what is and is not on a collector’s shelf can reveal a lot about his prides (the first edition of Dead Fingers Talk) and his prejudices (the proof of Dead Fingers Talk).

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Of course, the troubled times refer to the current economy. Its effects are rippling throughout the rare book trade. Booksellers are putting on a brave face, but sometimes the mask slips. Joe McCann in the latest issue of Rare Book Review was upbeat about the sales at the York (England) Book Fair. Sales were up. Yet those were sales among dealers. McCann admitted that sales to non-dealers were down slightly. Heritage Auctions out of Texas issued a press release stating all was well in the industry. They raved about the latest auction results for a rare coin sale. That makes sense as precious metals are a true hedge against inflation. As suggested on the Bunker, books are not. The press release does not mention the rare book market. Silence speaks louder than words in some cases. This was all before the shit really hit the fan in October. What happened at Christie’s in early November might be a scary indicator of where the collectible market is and where it is going. 

In these hard times, you gotta do what you gotta do to make a buck. And that means buyer beware: expect more forged signatures to start popping up on the market. Tom Congalton of Between the Covers alerted me to this troubling trend. He wrote in his column entitled “Forging Ahead” also for Rare Book Review that he was seeing lots of questionable signed copies passing through his shop in the last few months. This dovetails with what I have been observing online, particularly on eBay. There have been some interesting items up for sale, but, boy, red flags galore.  

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that any bookstore or seller is actively forging Burroughs signatures or knowingly selling forged items. I am stating that booksellers have to be especially wary of all the items that pass through their door during a bad economy. That means performing due diligence on every item. That means accurate descriptions. That means full disclosure and open communication. Book collectors have to be similarly vigilant.  

Awhile back, I thought that a copy of The Ticket That Exploded inscribed by Burroughs to Ted Berrigan being offered by Ken Lopez may have been stolen from UCLA. What were the chances of two inscribed copies from Burroughs to Berrigan of the same book? Well, Lopez is one of the best of the best, and he took the matter seriously. He contacted UCLA. He did his research, and it turned out UCLA still had their copy. Lopez felt secure in how he got the book. Everything was on the up and up. Lopez put the book on the market, and it sold rather quickly. Such due diligence is one reason why you are going to pay a bit more for a book sold by Lopez. In addition, he obtains his books from reputable sources. When you buy a signed Hemingway from Lopez, the book is going to be in great condition, and the signature is going to be authentic. You get what you pay for.  

Booksellers like Congalton and Lopez know the good, the bad, and the ugly of the rare book market and, as Congalton showed in his column, he is quite willing to alert buyers to the ugly side of the trade. I suspect he feels it is his ethical responsibility as a bookseller. Such ethics and codes are the number one reason that associations such as the ABAA or the ILAB are not bullshit, but the bedrock of the business. This is especially the case in an industry overrun by megalisters and sparsely populated with true bookman.

Take a copy of Dead Fingers Talk that recently sold on eBay. (pdf of auction) Would Between the Covers or Ken Lopez Booksellers have offered this book without a full explanation of its history and provenance? Most definitely not. The book in question purports to be one of 80 copies of Dead Fingers Talk (Calder / Olympia Press) signed by Burroughs and Ian Sommerville. When I first saw this item, I nearly fell off my chair. What a remarkable item! In the 1960s, Sommerville was a constant companion of Burroughs and, in the case of The Soft Machine, a collaborator. He is a major figure in Burroughs’ personal and creative life, possibly just behind Ginsberg and Brion Gysin in importance. Burroughs’ interest in tape recorder and feedback loops can be directly attributed to Sommerville.

Then the doubts began to creep in. Why was the book so cheap? The Buy It Now was a bit over $200. A Dead Fingers Talk signed by just Burroughs is $300-400. This copy with Sommerville’s signature would have to be around $500-600, right? But that was only guessing since in 15 years of collecting I have never seen Sommerville’s signature on a Burroughs book, let alone Dead Fingers Talk.  

I emailed around in order to authenticate the signature. Other collectors in the game much longer than I were similarly at a loss. The experts could shed no light on Sommerville’s signature. Even those with a personal connection came up blank. For example, Jan Herman received mail from Sommerville, but it was so long ago he could not remember what the signature looked like. I emailed Carl Weissner and sent him an image of the signatures. He replied that the Sommerville signature did, indeed, look authentic. We suddenly had a full-blown mystery on our hands.

The Burroughs signature was more familiar territory, and personally, I did not like the looks of it. I asked around and the Burroughs signature raised red flags with others as well. This is largely a question of feel and experience. It is like pornography; you know it when you see it. Some signatures just look terrible and, like the signature on the copy of Time I discussed a while back, are easy to dismiss. Some are a bit more difficult. This signature proved tricky to nail down. Throughout his life, Burroughs signature was all over the place. On my old web site, I wrote a piece comparing Burroughs’ signature over a 35-year period. I re-post it here for other collectors’ reference.  

But what worried me about this book was less the signatures than the circumstances surrounding the “limited” edition. Where did it come from? When did it occur? Why did I not know about it? Surely if 80 copies were signed, one would have come up for sale in the last 30 years. I asked around and nobody remembered it. Surely, it would have been mentioned in Maynard & Miles or Shoaf. Legendary rarities like the “Letter from a Master Addict” (50 copies) or the Digit Junkie (number of copies unknown) have turned up for sale. Other limited subsets like that of Time or Minutes to Go have been recorded in the bibliographies. Why not this “limited” edition of Dead Fingers Talk? Believe it or not, 80 copies is a lot of copies. There were 4000 copies of the book printed so 80 is a sizable subset.

I needed some information about how this set of 80 copies came to be. And lo and behold, out of the blue, I received an email comment responding to my column on the Washington DC Bookfair. In that column I mentioned Dead Fingers Talk. The email seemed to clear everything up. The comment stated that a subset of 80 copies signed by Sommerville and Burroughs did exist, and, in fact, Sommerville mentioned signing the books in a letter to Ginsberg dated May 11, 1965. Moreover, the letter was in the University of Utah archive. Things got curiouser and curiouser.

A quick search of the electronic catalog at Utah failed to turn up any Ginsberg letter, but to tell the truth I really wanted this copy of Dead Fingers Talk to be authentic. I wanted to believe. So I emailed Craig Dworkin at the University of Utah to help me out. Dworkin runs the Eclipse Project at Utah and knows the special collections there as well as anybody. If the letter existed he would find it. Dworkin could not locate the letter at the University of Utah and in addition he checked other major libraries in the state. Dworkin made clear to me that the letter could still be in Utah, but it is not catalogued correctly.

So on the one hand I had Carl Weissner confirming that the Sommerville signature looked as he remembered it and on the other hand I had a Purloined Letter of sorts hidden in the depths of a library in Utah. Like in Poe’s story, finding the letter would solve the mystery. If anybody can locate this letter and pdf it for me, I will post it as a supplement to this column. What I did have was a complete lack of information on the history and the provenance of this book. Booksellers like Lopez and Between the Covers do not deal in mysteries of this type. They are bad for business.  

As a result of my research I decided to pass on this copy of Dead Fingers Talk. It just did not pass the sniff test for me personally. This could be a major mistake on my part, and I would love to be wrong because it is a remarkable combination of signatures. So again let’s call this column a request for information. If anybody has one of the 80 copies in their possession or has any other information please email. It will help update Burroughs’ bibliography. As Shoaf has shown, new items turn up all the time. I hope this is another new discovery.

Another search on eBay revealed what could be another previously unrecorded item. The same seller had a copy of the Yage Letters (City Lights 1963) signed by Burroughs and Ginsberg. (pdf of auction) Again this was described as a subset of 100 copies so signed by both. Again the Burroughs bibliographies do not mention this subset of signed copies. In addition, Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s bibliographer, did not uncover these copies in his research. Morgan’s work on Ginsberg is recognized as being particularly thorough and meticulous. I attempted to contact Bill Morgan through email, but apparently his email has changed. If anybody can forward this column to him to ask about a signed / numbered Yage Letters I would appreciate it. There were 3000 copies of the first edition of the Yage Letters printed. (Note: The Yage Letters was reprinted several times before the second edition of 1975. Make sure you have the first edition, first printing when collecting Yage Letters. I would assume the later printings are clearly marked as such, but if not, remember the first edition was printed on letterpress in England [by Villiers] and were sewn into the binding. The later reprints were printed in Ann Arbor Michigan and are perfect bound, i.e., glued into the binding as single sheets not as signatures). So a full 3% of Yage Letters were purportedly signed by Ginsberg and Burroughs. Again one of these would have arrived on the market before now. Right??

The price of this copy was another red flag for me. The Buy It Now was around $150 (which it sold for). This is extremely low. Dangerously so. Unsigned copies are around $100. A copy signed by Burroughs can get as high as $300. Signed by both, call it $500-600. Yet these are extremely unusual. More often than not you will find the two signatures on the 1975 second edition. Even so, it is listed for over $500. If the price you paid is too good to be true, there is usually a reason for that.

Take a close look at the Burroughs signature on this copy of Yage Letters. It is almost identical to the signature on Dead Fingers Talk. Maybe even the same pen. The numbers are written the same. That suggests that Burroughs signed the two books at roughly the same time. If the May 11, 1965 letter to Ginsberg exists (and I just could not locate it) then the books were signed between 1963 and May 11, 1965. This is actually a point in the books’ favor since Dead Fingers Talk and Yage Letters were published in 1963. The question remains if Burroughs, Sommerville, and Ginsberg were all together (or were any of them together) during that time period. Burroughs and Ginsberg were in the United States at this time. Again Sommerville (as with his signature) is the wild card. Where was he? Burroughs and Sommerville were in Tangiers together in 1964, then Burroughs went to the United States. Despite Burroughs’ urging, Sommerville did not visit the US while Burroughs was there. So it is doubtful all three were together but the Burroughs / Ginsberg and Burroughs / Sommerville pairings were possible in this time frame.  

So let’s go back to the signatures. Ignore the Burroughs signature and examine Ginsberg’s. To me it just does not look right. Compare this signature with one from July 20, 1963 in a copy of NOW. These signatures would be from roughly the same time period. The Yage Letters signature seems too spread out. If the NOW signature is authentic, the differences are striking. Also damning to me is the lack of flourishes. Ginsberg rarely just signed a book. He often dated, inscribed or added doodles. My copy of NOW has doodles. Ginsberg frequently drew fish or flowers. By the 1970s or so, Ginsberg usually included his mantra “AH” with his signature. On the other hand, there are reasons that the signature may appear strange in this copy of the Yage Letters. Who knows Ginsberg’s state of mind when he signed these 100 copies? He could have been drunk or high, thus spreading out the signature. You will see this with Burroughs’ signature at times, particularly into the 1980s and 1990s. This is also the result of old age. In addition, signing a lot of books at once would loosen-up Ginsberg’s signature as he would be rushing through them. In addition, he probably would not personalize each copy during a mass signing.  

So there is the chance both these books are legit. I take Weissner’s opinion on the Sommerville signature very seriously and if the Sommerville signature is authentic, why wouldn’t the other signatures be? Why, then, have they never appeared for sale before now? I just cannot get around this question. Maybe they were never released into the market and remained in storage somewhere. Possibly one or two copies leaked out and landed in a bookstore in Europe. It is possible but that is a lot of maybes and what ifs. Whoever bought these copies of Dead Fingers Talk and Yage Letters took a risk. With a little more research that risk could pay off big. Or it could prove to be a somewhat costly mistake. With each book, it was roughly a $150 gamble. In the current economic market, I did not feel it was time to take such chances. The question for me was: why were the books available at this moment in time? The online rare book market is too unpredictable right now for me to buy with confidence. This could be my loss and your gain.

In his article in Rare Book Review, Congalton writes, “Be doubly afraid if that hyper-valuable signature appears in an inexpensive reprint, in one of the author’s later books that might be available inexpensively, or copies of first editions that have severe condition problems.” Copies of this type have been appearing on eBay since its inception. A signed fifteenth printing of Naked Lunch. With a later signature without an inscription. Beware signed copies of paperback editions of the Grove novels. Take a close look at those signed copies of Cities of the Red Night without a dust jacket or a major flaw like a tear in the dust jacket. You see books like this online all the time. Jeffrey Marks calls books like these “cheater’s books.” Congalton writes, “Rare is the forger who is either confident enough, or wants to make the substantial investment in a very expensive first edition in order to practice their ‘art.’ Rather he will be more likely to buy very inexpensive reprints that can be discarded without substantial loss [when making mistakes].” It is true that books like these are the types of books that non-collectors would bring to readings for signatures since they are the easiest and cheapest to obtain, but be careful buying books of this type. You might never be able to get rid of them. Remember not every collector is as open-minded in approaching books of this type as you are.  

The cost factor is actually a point in the favor of the above mentioned Dead Fingers Talk and Yage Letters. As first editions, they are worth over $100. The association of the names also makes it possible to build a history and chronology around the book. If you are getting a book signed, try and get it inscribed to you and dated. The more information the better.

Likewise if you are going to take a flyer on a signed reprint, you may want to buy an inscribed copy. As I mentioned before, and Ken Lopez makes clear, there is a shift in the industry in favor of inscribed copies, because they provide more information to prove authenticity. You might be able to construct some provenance about the book based on the inscription. This makes all the difference in books of this type.

That said, a book collector’s most powerful form of protection against forgeries is a personal bond with a book dealer. Buy from those you know and those you trust. If you can shake the bookseller’s hand when you make the deal, all the better. eBay has a lot of deals, but they have a lot of scams as well. Buying online is dangerous. And it is getting even more hairy lately. Even Abebooks is becoming overrun with the dishonest and inexperienced. The inexperienced are the more common. Buying online is where the decline of the bookman is most keenly felt. And the internet contributes to nurturing inexperience. It is a vicious circle. Too many booksellers do not have the resources, knowledge, or inclination to properly describe or research their stock. Yes, this means a potential deal in your favor, but it also can mean a mistake that costs you money.

The increasingly ridiculous atmosphere of online bookdealing is one reason that I think the issuing of catalogs is on the rise. Megalisters and the inexperienced do not issue catalogs. They are too much of an investment in time and money. Mass posting online is far simpler and cheaper. In addition, nothing will reveal a bookseller’s lack of skill and honesty more quickly than a poorly written catalog description. It takes a disreputable dealer with balls to list his goods in hard copy. The evidence remains and does not disappear into the internet ether. On the opposite end of the spectrum, nothing is quite as useful, reassuring, and, yes, entertaining as a catalog entry by a true bookman. Royal Books, Biblioctopus, Ars Libris, Bauman, Between the Covers, Lame Duck Books. These bookstores and their staffs are all masters of the art. No doubt catalogs cost money to produce and that cost get passed on to you, but you get what you pay for. As a result the books in a professional’s catalog are generally a bit more expensive, but authenticity comes with a price. It is worth the extra cash because in book collecting, provenance that has gained the trust and belief of the book collecting industry is priceless.

As the weeks passed, the number of these limiteds seemed in fact unlimited. A signed / numbered Nova Express popped up on eBay. (pdf of auction) A Ticket That Exploded signed and numbered by Brion Gysin, Burroughs, and Sommerville turned up. (pdf of auction) Let’s take a close look at the Ticket. Forget the fact that such a book has never come to market in my 15 years of collecting. Forget the fact that the Burroughs signatures on all four of these books look identical. Forget the absurdly low price. Forget the fact that Gysin, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Sommerville would all have needed to access these books seemingly at the same time. Suspend your disbelief. Then remember the letter from Sommerville to Ginsberg from May 11, 1965 that mentions signing books with Burroughs. I am obsessed with that letter. Unfortunately the Grove Ticket was published in 1967. Based on the letter, Dead Fingers Talk (1963), Yage Letters (1963), and Nova Express (1964) were all possible. The Ticket fails on that account. Of course the letter might only refer to the Dead Fingers Talk, and the Ticket could have been signed at a later date. There must be a rational explanation, right? It is a crazy world out there for collectors right now.

Update

Some additional research on the part of RealityStudio and the purchaser of the “signed” copies of Nova Express and Ticket That Exploded confirmed that the signatures on the books were forgeries. The seller has refunded the cost of the books and the purchaser, to ensure that the signatures will never be mistaken for the real thing, has added a note to the books themselves. (See scans from the forged Nova Express and the forged Ticket That Exploded.) Note also that several comments pertaining to the situation have been removed from RealityStudio as a result of the revelation.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Recently, I received an email attaching an article on megalisters from the Sunday New York Times. For those who do not know, megalisters are database managers masquerading as booksellers. They post thousands of books on internet sites like Amazon and Abebooks selling books for as low as one cent hoping to recoup their money on the margins in the shipping. They deal in volume and efficiency. To my book-scout and bookselling friends megalisters are, like book scanners (those who go through used or rare bookstores with an ISBN scanner to find errors in pricing), the scourge of the industry. If the New York Times is reporting on the phenomenon, it must be an epidemic.

The Times article bears a close read since this crisis in the rare / used book industry has an impact not just on Burroughs collectors but on all those interested in digging a little deeper into the Burroughsian. On the surface, megalisters would appear to be a boon to Burroughs fans. How else are you going to get a used copy of the Grove reprints of Naked Lunch for around $2? Way cheaper than half cover price. You always tend to forget the shipping. In this online world, the megalister makes a little profit; the Burroughs fan gets a cheap book. Everybody is happy.

Not so. The used bookstore in your neighborhood is not excited about this phenomenon for one. The basic brick-and-mortar store does not have the sales volume, sales staff, or distribution to make the one cent sale feasible. Nor do they desire such a sale. As the Time article describes, megalisters can be viewed as merely shippers of widgets. The best of the independent bookstores (new or used) are like the diner, coffee shop, corner barbershop, or general store. They are all gathering spots. Bookstores are indispensible parts of the community in which they serve. Being a citizen of the community takes time and effort. It takes a personality and a point of view. This requires an investment, and the customer pays that price. With a megalister you just pay shipping. They are nameless, faceless, and placeless. I do not want to belabor this point here as I have discussed it numerous times elsewhere. (See especially Burroughs and Bookstores.)

Besides — I know, I know. You do not care. You just want the book at the cheapest price and fast. Well, not so fast. The Grove Naked Lunch may be dirt cheap but the economic affect of the megalister is driving up prices for all those wonderful items that you are going to want after Naked Lunch blows your mind. The price of out-of-print non-fiction is going through the roof. As the Times article states, this market is one area in which the used bookstore can compete. For example the article notes that a hard-to-find, out-of-print book on the rock group Badfinger commands high prices in this market. Back when I worked at a used bookstore Pamela Des Barres’ memoir, I’m With the Band, was a quick $50 in paperback since the book went out of print and demand was high. Books like this were the exception not the rule since most of the non-fiction stock in the store (out of print or not) were affordable and priced to move. Increasingly, the astronomical non-fiction title is becoming the norm.

Let’s take Oliver Harris’ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. It is not unusual to see this book listed for $100. Blame the megalisters. In many cases, they list a book they do not even have. They mark up the price (say, to $100) and then, if they find a sucker willing to pay it, buy the book elsewhere for a lower price. They operate like middlemen.

Again, so what, you say. I just will not buy that book from that seller. Fine but these unfortunately priced titles have a trickle-down effect. megalisters drive up prices. When I worked at the rare book store, I was dependent in many cases on Abebooks or Addall to set prices. As more booksellers become merely shippers of product and less bookmen and bibliophiles, the dependence on the databases is becoming more pronounced. You can see the vicious circle that develops. Prices get artificially inflated by the megalisters re-listing. Then the unknowledgeable bookseller (be it in a brick and mortar store or with an individual on eBay) sets his price based on these faulty prices. The next thing you know The Secret of Fascination, a key book for any Burroughs fans looking to dig deeper than the text of Naked Lunch itself, becomes impractical to purchase. A basic academic text becomes as high priced as a collectible.

I am a hypocrite, I guess, since I can accept literary magazines as collectibles, but I hesitate to accept academic texts on that level. One reason for that is the fact that literary magazines have a value as an object. Semina makes this clear, but I find the simplicity of mimeograph in C, Fuck You, or Floating Bear as fascinating and an example of print as art. There are exceptions, but academic titles have value as information not as object. They should be disseminated as such.

This is a pet peeve of mine, so let me digress. Academic texts, from the textbook to the scholarly journal article, should be available electronically. I would like to see the academic journal go the way of the phonebook. Get online. Non-academics cannot get easy access to scholarly texts. Try getting an article from JSTOR or MUSE if you are not a professor or a student. Historically, academics do not want to address laymen. This is a big loss to scholarship, particularly for topics thought to be outside the canon. Take the Beats. For years, the foundations of Beat scholarship were laid in zines, like the Moody Street Irregulars, Beat Scene, The Kerouac Connection, Dharma Beat and several others. I would suspect that ground-breaking critical work on the graphic novel was done outside academic publications. Same for cyberpunk or poetry slams.

The culture of academic publishing seems to be changing. In the past decade or so, leading academics like Stephen Greenblatt and Jerome McGann are speaking out with passion and intelligence about the necessity of academic publishing to adapt to the times. A new generation of hipster librarians is bringing McGann’s ideas into the archives. This is a dynamic time for academic scholarship. But there is resistance and fear. The need for peer review does not preclude online, openly available publication of scholarly texts. Academics conservatism clothed in the guise of diligence and thoroughness is stunting the growth of scholarship. Quite simply many in the ivory tower hope to remain sequestered and do not want to address the larger public.

Anyway that is how I see it, particularly when I have to pay $100 for an academic title I want. You can begin to see how the megalisters tie into and feed off of the artificial scarcity generated by the culture of academic publishing. The used book market contributes to making academic texts unavailable and unaffordable for non-academics.

A similar dynamic works in the rare book market. I have explained how listings of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch are deceptive and that buyers should beware when assuming that Burroughs’ masterpiece is really the $5000 book some dealers list it as. Recently I have seen the same phenomenon occurring with Big Table, arguably the key magazine appearance for Burroughs. Collectors: beware of buying Big Table at inflated prices.

Years ago I paid $200 for a complete set and I really overpaid even in today’s market. I was just starting out. The bookseller took pity on my inexperience and threw in a couple parting gifts. For years, $200 was the ceiling for a complete set of the five Big Table issues. A complete set of Big Table is not that hard to come across. Ten thousand copies of the first issue were printed. That is nowhere near the 100,000 copies of some issues of Evergreen Review, but it is a huge print run in the world of the literary magazine. As Royal Books points out, the later issues are tougher to find. Interest in the magazine slipped after the hoopla over Burroughs and lack of funds probably resulted in smaller print runs. In any case, the print runs for the later issues were still relatively large. The internet has made book collectors lazy. Big Table is the perfect example of a run of a magazine that can be pieced together through trades, connections and networking, and digging in bookstores. Big Tables, like Evergreen Reviews, turn up in the weirdest places. I pieced together a complete set for under $50. This is unusual but you should be able to beat $200 by buying individually. Brian Cassidy has a complete set for $150 which is a good price and does all the work for you even though the work is all the fun.

Yet in the last year, it seems the complete Big Table is increasing in price. I have only begun watching it closely in the last few months but I would suspect its increase in value to continue based on listings by Maggs Bros. and Royal Books. Maggs lists the set at over $600. Maggs is not a megalister, but their price has a similar effect to a re-listing. Other booksellers see this listing and set their prices accordingly. Sorry, but other booksellers and ebayers are not in Maggs’ or Royal Books’ league and cannot command those prices. They simply do not serve their clientele. In addition other sellers do not have these stores’ expertise or quality of service. High-end booksellers provide more than just the book. Your purchase comes with provenance, a guarantee of quality and authenticity, expertise as well as what amounts to brand name recognition in the book world. For some collectors, buying with dealers like Royal Books or Maggs is a priceless experience. Great book dealers provide even more. Royal Books’ incredible catalogs or The Dark Page are valuable resources. megalisters do not pass on any of these benefits.

megalisters and the dynamic of internet pricing may in the present market have an effect like the recent mortgage crisis. In the coming years, millions of baby boomers are going to begin to get rid of their possessions, like rare books. In addition in tough times, people turn to their attics, basements, and garages for a little extra cash. Both groups may make use of rare books in order to pay for college tuition or to supplement retirement. In many cases, these books were handed down through families or bought for peanuts before the boom on modern firsts in the last 15 years or so. So these books have sat awaiting the time to sell. In other cases, the books were purchased as investments with an eye to sell. Most people depend on the internet for pricing their collections instead of relying on more reliable and conservative pricing indices like auction results. Few have the time, inclination, or resources to track catalog prices over time. As we have seen, many books online are grossly overvalued by megalisters and the inexperienced. This can lead to people falsely believing they have a small jackpot on their hands.

Other books, like those at Maggs, need to be interpreted correctly. Anybody involved in the rare book business has had the experience of a customer entering your store with a beat-up, unjacketed copy of a book (or even a book-of-the-month-club edition) wondering why it is not worth the highest listed price on Abebooks. Ebayers and megalisters fall into the same trap. The website Bookride has been exposing numerous over-valuations of this nature on ebay and on-line for quite some time. When someone tries to sell his copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch for $5000 or his set of Big Table for $600, he is going to get a rude awakening. Your copy of Big Table probably lacks the condition of Maggs’ copy, the subscription cards or the inserts for example. And most importantly access to the market. Any way you look at it, many internet prices, like the real estate appraisals of the last few years, are leading to inflated values. For the most part, books like Naked Lunch or Big Table would never achieve their highest online value at auction.

Like all collectors, I track the prices listed on Abebooks. For a few years, I kept charts of every copy of certain Burroughs books that came on the market. I admit that I would get all Mr. Burns and rub my hands when a saw a copy of a book listed online at a high price. And my copy was in better condition! Then I worked in a bookstore and saw what books bought and sold for. And I saw on a daily basis people like me drawn to books like moths to a flame. We were and are a sorry lot. It was that experience that ended for good any thoughts that book collecting revolves around anything but a love of books. Money is not the paper than matters.

Despite what I see printed elsewhere, you cannot convince me that book collecting, or at least my collection, is an investment. megalisters and scanners are making book collecting as an investment even more difficult and dicey. My bookshelf is a money pit, like a 40 foot yacht or a sports car. Book collecting is a passion that in most cases goes contrary to sound money management. There is a reason book collecting has for centuries been categorized as bibliomania, a sickness and a form of madness. For Burroughs’ fans, it fits well into the old man’s junk paradigm and is best considered an addiction. Addictions take and do not give. Yet there are exceptions. Congratulations to Eric Shoaf. It is a major accomplishment to have your book collection bought by a University, especially one as immersed in the culture of the book as the University of Virginia. I suspect Nelson Lyon made a nice profit on his collection in 1999. Burroughs made a living off of his addiction to drugs and books. But these are exceptions. Book collecting requires a price. In the words of Nancy Reagan, “Just say no.” Or at least know what you are getting into.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Fourteen days, 2500 miles, 7 states, and a slew of bookstores. Vacation is over. The car is shot; the budget was blown; and the bookshelves cannot handle all the new books. In the last few years, it seems that everywhere I turn I see an article about the death of print, the decline of the newspaper (The New York Times reported an 82% decline in profits last quarter), or the closing of an independent bookstore. By the way, the chains are struggling too. Take a look at Borders. It was refreshing to travel the Middle Atlantic and New England and see plenty of books and bookstores. Don’t get me wrong, all was not rosy. Rue Cottage Books in Bass Harbor, which I featured last year, seems to have closed, but Nicol Fox’s interests range far beyond her store. Hopefully, she moved on because she is pursuing those interests, rather than any lack of customer support for the shop. (Any information on the status of Rue Cottage Books would be appreciated.)

Yet there were reasons for optimism. The Book Barn in Niantic seems to be thriving, if sheer number of books (around 350,000) is any indication of financial health. I have been going to this store since it opened in 1988, and the size of the operation has exploded. The store is now part farm, part commune, part oasis. I do not mean to suggest that the Book Barn is a little piece of calm in a stormy world because the activity around the store is intense. People reading books, buying books, selling books, talking books, living and breathing books. There is energy here. The store’s stock is meat and potatoes but, like that corner diner you just cannot live without, they heap your plate with loads of quality books and do not charge a fortune. I bought about 10 books. Nothing earth-shattering but solid books for my research library. Major biographies on Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; all under $10 dollars apiece. I tracked down a copy of Aquarius Revisited, a book on the major players who shaped the 1960s. Burroughs is featured as are Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, and Allen Ginsberg. The Book Barn usually has reading copies of the mainstream press Burroughs titles, like the late trilogy. Dig around and you might find something special behind that ubiquitous copy of the Erica Jong’s The Fear of Flying. For example, a friend got me two early issues of the Evergreen Review from the Book Barn days before I got there.

From Connecticut I headed back up to Gloucester. Dogtown Books was just as I left it. Last year featured a first of Ginsberg’s Howl. This year there was a copy of the Viking first of On the Road. Next year will be the Olympia Naked Lunch no doubt. I loaded up on non-fiction books on Bohemianism, particularly pre-WWII. I found a jacketless copy of A Return to Pagany for $6. This is a history / anthology of that crucial little mag from the early 1930s. Pagany was edited by Richard Johns, and William Carlos Williams played a major role in its formation and direction. In fact the title for the magazine came from Williams’ novel A Voyage to Pagany from 1928.

Dogtown had lots of small-press poetry in the store of a contemporary nature as well. I stopped down at Mystery Train and looked through a ton of spoken word LPs. Lots of readings of The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare, but no Blues and Haikus or Call Me Burroughs. Last year, Mystery Train was a two-floor operation. This year everything was on the first floor. It appears that many of the books on the second floor did not make the trip downstairs. The store is concentrating on music, not books.

Ten Pound Island is also in the process of changing focus. When I last talked to Greg Gibson at the New York Book Fair, he planned to transform his shack / store in Annisquam into an art gallery to be run by his wife. In April 2008, Gibson had yet another book published. This one is a real life thriller involving the intrigue of the book trade centered on a group of Diane Arbus photographs entitled Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare Book Dealer, The Times Square Talker and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus. From what I understand, Gibson will still be at the book fairs, but the flagship bookstore has gone down like the Pequod.

Besides Rue Cottage, all the usual suspects were up and operating in Maine. The area around Acadia National Park still has plenty of bookstores. The Bookshelf in Ellsworth was open. Last year I found a library copy of Stephen Jonas’ complete poems. Jonas is largely a forgotten figure but the experience of finally reading a large sampling of his work was a great memory from 2007. This year I found a second edition of Charles Olson’s Reading at Berkeley published by Coyote Press in 1966. Olson read at Berkeley on the night of July 23, 1965, and it was a wonderful surprise to encounter the book almost exactly 43 years after the reading. Of all the books based on Olson’s lectures and readings that I have read (Olson in Connecticut, Causal Mythology, Poetry and Truth), this was the best. Causal Mythology documents Olson’s lecture at Berkeley on July 20th. The Coyote Press book documents the later reading which has become legendary in literary history as one of the great spoken word performances on record. The reading is a glorious drunken mess. Olson as Falstaff. Part showman, part shaman, part senator, Olson gave the reading of his life. By that I mean it was a defining experience for him as well as a recounting of his biography. Olson tested the patience of his audience (Robert Duncan walked out) as well as their endurance (Olson stopped after several hours only because the building was closing). All in attendance would agree that they had witnessed a spectacle.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference engendered a new generation of poets (I am thinking of Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh) as it celebrated the vitality of the poetry presented in the New American Anthology of Donald Allen. By 1965, the poetry represented in Allen’s book proved to be the poetry that mattered. Olson was in many respects the king of the hill. From the audience, Duncan called Olson the “boss poet” at Olson’s reading. Earlier, Jack Spicer compared Olson to President Johnson. Just as Olson had conquered Eliot, Pound and Williams before him, the “boss poet” must have realized that the upcoming generation would have to slay him in turn. The Berkeley reading was Olson’s confession before his execution. I had flashes of the end of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now as I finished the book. Olson as Brando as Kurtz.

There is not as much in-depth information on the internet about the Poetry Conferences of Vancouver and Berkeley as I would expect, though Wikipedia and the university have some information. Our friend Brian Cassidy has a cool flyer from the Conference for sale for $125. The importance of these events is immense. I would love to see a blow-by-blow account of these conferences in book form with reproductions of ephemera, photographs, personal accounts, and critical essays. I don’t think such a book exists. The most detailed study that I know of is a chapter in Libbie Rifkin’s book Career Moves, which details Olson’s reading at Berkeley.

Reading over what I have written so far, I wonder why I feel such optimism about the state of the bookstore. Rue Cottage and Ten Pound Island have shifted gears. Mystery Train has downsized. And what does any of this column have to do with Burroughs? Well, to paraphrase John Landau from 1975 when he heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time, I have seen the future of the bookstore, and it is Hermitage Books in Beacon NY.

As for Burroughs, most people make a big deal of the fact that Burroughs hung out at Bickford’s, the Bunker, or the Beat Hotel. I like to think that one of Burroughs’ favorite hangouts was the independent bookstore. Let me say that Burroughs would have hung out at Hermitage Books. Think Better Books, Indica, Peace Eye, Le Mistral, Unicorn Books, the Eighth Street Bookshop. Burroughs prowled the aisles of those stores like he did the alleyways of Tangier. Burroughs needed stimulants, and books were a drug of choice. If owner Jon Beacham (along with co-director Christian Toscano) has his way, Hermitage will rank with these great bookstores of the past.

Why? Because Beacham realizes that a truly important (and I mean culturally important) bookstore is about more than the books. It is about a community. See my piece on Burroughs and Bookstores. Do not get me wrong, Beacham has the books. To my mind, he is the go-to-guy if you want second and third generation NY School material. United Artists, Angel Hair, Kulchur Press, C Press. He has your Berrigan, your Brainard / Guston / Schneeman covers, your Padgett, your Waldman, your Mayer. If it was NY School, Beacham just might have it. There are around 278 Angel Hair Press titles on Abebooks; Hermitage has 38 of them ranging from $15-200. Yes, he has Burroughs. He recently had a copy of Time as you might expect. He has the Yugens, Kulchurs, Big Tables, Art and Literatures, and Locus Soluses with the Burroughs appearances along with some modest “A” titles. I do not want to make Hermitage sound more specialized than it is. Beacham procures all types of experimental literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. There are a lot of great San Francisco Renaissance, Fluxus, East and West Coast Language, and Black Mountain titles. Flip through Clay and Phillips’ Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and you will have a good idea of what is available at Hermitage.

Yet Beacham’s approach is self-described as minimalist. He has three small bookshelves, a small glass case, and some books on the wall. His entire stock online (He operates as The Brother in Elysium) is only 618 books. The highest asking price is considerably under $1000. Think bigger is better? Think again. Years ago I went to visit Skyline Books in Forest Knolls, California. James Musser directed me to a small closet in his home. It could have been Fort Knox for all I could see. Everything was desirable. It was all cream. Beacham is not on Musser’s level but you have that same feeling that his stock is groomed. The books on the shelf are an expression of Beacham as a person and an artist.

And that is another aspect of the Hermitage that makes the store special. It is a gallery, a studio, a reading hall, and a printing press. Again think Peace Eye or better yet Jim Lowell’s Asphodel Bookstore in Cleveland. Like those stores of the past, Hermitage functions as work space and art space. Beacham incorporates this idea into his business model, if you can call Beacham’s methods that. Beacham gathers together material for exhibitions to display on the second floor of the store. He has featured Auerhahn Press and da levy already. After the exhibition, Beacham attempts to sell the collection to fund the next show. A show dedicated to the Zephyrus Image is next up. Of course, Beacham has Poltroon Press’ bibliography of Zephyrus Image for sale at the publisher’s price of $40.

I saw the leftovers from the da levy show, which closed two weeks before my arrival. Most of the collection had already sold by the time I got to Beacon, but what I saw was incredible. There were two issues of levy’s early mimeo mag, The Silver Cesspool, printed by levy’s Renegade Press in 1963-1964. I had never seen a copy of any of the five issues up close before, and these examples (Issues four and five) were extraordinary. After viewing the Cesspools, C and Fuck You have the feel of a Sears Catalog to me. Those magazines are bulky, unwieldy. They have all the nuance of a blunt instrument. levy could do that act as well, but not with The Silver Cesspool. Issues Three and Five were like chapbooks, almost fine press. Sanders’ Roosevelt After Inauguration comes to mind. The dimensions of these two mimeo masterpieces are the same, but the paper that levy used sets The Silver Cesspool apart. The paper is delicate like Japanese rice paper, and I love how the paper contrasts with the poor inking off the mimeograph. Beacham also had other examples from levy’s Renegade Press. These were beautiful as well but none of them captured my attention or my imagination like the Cesspools.

Exhibitions dedicated to Auerhahn Press, da levy, and Zephyrus Image are major events in my opinion, but what really gets me excited is the new direction Beacham pursued in connection with the levy exhibit. Beacham printed a collection of levy’s poems entitled: [can we hold hands out here]. Beacham produced 125 copies on a pilot press operated at Hermitage. I bought a copy immediately, and it is a simple but beautifully crafted object. The title highlights Beacham’s attention to typography, and each page demonstrates a similar care with spacing and layout. Beacham did levy proud. Beacham hails from Cleveland, so he has a special connection with that city’s largely forgotten son. It was Beacham’s first major printing project, and it bodes well for his efforts in the future. He plans to further explore this aspect of the Hermitage experience. A recent book art project by Beacham was a success with a museum or two sniffing around for a possible acquisition. Clearly, Beacham and Hermitage would have fit right in on the Lower East Side or Cleveland in the mid-1960s.

The store is much more than a financial venture. It is an experiment in living and an art project. Will this experiment in the book arts in Beacon be a success? I think we have to reassess how we judge success and failure in the case of Hermitage. In my eyes, Hermitage is a ray of hope, not just for the independent bookstore, but for the vitality of print and printing in general. The failure of the store would be yet another example of the bankruptcy of American culture. Beacham, I am sure, would chalk it up as a valuable experience and fodder for his future art, writing and other endeavors. He is already planning for the future outside of Beacon, but I know I’ll be heading up Route 84 to that town by the Hudson River as long as Hermitage and Beacham are there. It is worth the journey.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Ted Dunn collects strictly Beat Generation material, focusing primarily now on William Everson / Brother Antoninus though some may not consider him a member of that elite grouping that included Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso etc., though he should be regarded as a forerunner as an activist poet and self-made printer of relevant poetry leading to the San Francisco Renaissance. Dunn’s collection consists of all aspects of printed material including books, broadsides, letters, handcrafted cards, a scroll, photographs, drawings, lithographs, etc. Material ranges from reading copies to deluxe, limited editions. An abundance of signed and inscribed copies highlight his library.

When you began book collecting did the angle of financial investment play into it? Do you consider your collection an important asset in your portfolio?

My collecting from the beginning up until now never involved the aspect of investment. I have never acquired an item or any material with the idea of future monetary gain. So, I do not regard my collection as an investment as I would the money market, stocks, bonds etc. My collection is a complete entity void of dollar value.

In your experience are books recession-proof, “hedges against inflation?”

I think it all depends upon the material. Right now there is a definite lull in activity, a sluggishness or stagnation in choice material moving off the shelf. At this time I wouldn’t bet on my collection benefiting me in my retirement.

I know you have sold pieces of your collection over the years. What factors play in to you selling what you have acquired?

There aren’t that many factors other than a lessening interest in the material over the years and an increased interest or coveting of different objects whether it is a book, broadside, correspondence etc. Because of a definite increase in asking prices for material over the years it is necessary to weed out the duplicates (if any) and in some cases sell four to acquire one. Mistakes are to be made and regrets will occur. Certain collecting habits can hinder the scope of a complete collection. Sacrifices sometimes need to be made.

In your experience collecting counterculture material, how have these items appreciated over the years? What is your sense of the health of the Burroughs market over your collecting life?

I am extremely fortunate to have acquired the Burroughs material when it was far less expensive than what is being asked at the present time. Much of what I have in my collection I don’t even see being offered. An incredible appreciation has occurred within the last fifteen years or so in counterculture material such as Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg etc. With all of these authors I have noticed also the lack of much material no longer being offered which may be an indication of collectors holding onto their treasures as an investment or merely an unwillingness to release them back into the wilds from captivity for any of a number of personal reasons.

You have been collecting for quite some time. Can you describe what the rare book market was like in 1993-1994 during that downturn or after the crash in 2001?

There was an abundance of material available. I personally had to make many serious decisions regarding what to acquire and what to disregard in hopes of it still being available at a later time when funds were again at hand. And here unfortunately mistakes were made and regrets occurred that I mentioned earlier.

In a recession, do you find that there are more quality books available on the market, i.e. people need cash so they sell their books? Brian Cassidy wrote on his blog that more customers are selling books lately. Have you noticed a change in the supply recently?

I have not seen evidence of that strictly because of a recession, and I’m not quite sure that quality plays into it. There have been a number of auctions recently where the condition of material has been mediocre and somewhat unappealing to collectors such as myself who have a particular standard when it comes to numerous flaws that distract one from any consideration of involvement or participation. Naturally there are different ranks of collectors and I tend to think that a serious collector would have to be quite desperate in order to relinquish a quality book to sustain a lifestyle or economic necessity.

I have only been collecting since 1993 (a down economic market), but I remember the period from 1998-2000 as a remarkable time in terms of the Burroughs and counterculture market. The dot-com boom in Silicon Valley really brought out the great material. Did you find the same?

For me there is no correlation between economic events in either direction and my notice of material surfacing on the market. My collecting has been a steady progression regardless of outside influences. As for the two-year period that you mention, I can honestly say that I cannot pinpoint those years as any more remarkable for me in acquiring material than either before or after until now and the last five years as being less fruitful. Of course it goes without saying that the Internet has played a tremendous role both encouraging and detrimental to collecting.

Do you find yourself buying aggressively in a down market or do you pull back on your collecting activities?

It is difficult to buy aggressively in any state of the market when material is lacking. Personally, if there is something of interest that I find appealing and desirable, I will make an effort to acquire it. As I mentioned, for me, there is no connection between my passion for collecting and whether or not Dow points up or down. It does bring to mind though, regarding the economics of book collecting, the whole matter of supply and demand. I have noticed a down trend in both when it comes to interest in counterculture material especially the Beats, and in particular the rarer, scarce limited edition type tome. Unfortunately, prices for ones that are presently offered have skyrocketed to such an extreme that it is virtually impossible for even those seriously interested in the books to afford, especially collectors just starting out with limited cash flow and those unwilling to risk credit.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Peter T. Leeson is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University. His current research explores the economics of pirates and has been covered by the New Yorker, Freakonomics.com, the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe. His book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, is under contract with Princeton University Press and scheduled to appear in spring 2008. Burroughs fans should check out Invisible Hook, as it promises to highlight some of the aspects of pirate communities that appealed to Burroughs and found its way into Cities of the Red Night.

I just talked with a record dealer, and he said he is seeing a jump in high-end LP sales due to people buying collectibles as a “hedge against inflation.” What does this mean in economic terms and does thinking of this type have any basis in economic fact? How do rare books compare as an asset to art or precious metals?

To understand whether it makes sense to buy collectibles as a hedge against inflation, it’s important to understand what inflation is. Inflation is simply an increase in the supply of money. When government prints new money faster than the economy produces new goods, prices rise and the value of the dollar falls.1 Your money becomes worth less, making you poorer.

To prevent inflation from eroding your wealth, you might think about converting your dollars into assets that aren’t undermined by inflation. This is called hedging. Perhaps the most popular form of hedging is simply purchasing “real goods.” Real goods are commodities that directly satisfy our wants. Rare books, boats, gold, and Happy Meals are all real goods. Inflation may destroy the value of my dollars, but it can’t destroy the value of my Happy Meal. So, if I expect inflation to rise, it may make sense for me to convert some of my wealth into such goods rather than holding it in dollars.

Storing your wealth in real goods isn’t free, however. It costs something. For one, it costs you an improved ability to meet future demands. For instance, if I convert some of my dollars into rare books, I’ll have fewer dollars available to pay next month’s rent or to pay my doctor if an unexpected medical emergency comes up. If I convert too many of my dollars into rare books, I may not be able to pay these bills at all.

If I can easily convert rare books back to dollars when I need them, the cost of storing my wealth in rare books is small. But if it’s hard to convert rare books back into dollars at a price that won’t cause me to lose my shirt, the cost storing my wealth in rare books is much larger. So, one important factor a person who’s thinking about using rare books (or LPs, or any other collectibles) as a hedge against inflation to consider is their salability. How easily could I sell my books at a price that won’t earn a loss if I suddenly need more dollars?

Some real goods are highly salable. Gold is one example, which is a large part of the reason it’s widely used as a hedge against inflation. Gold has a “wide” market; it’s relatively easy to unload if I need to at a price that won’t kill me. Rare books, in contrast, tend to have a much “narrower” market. I’m not a collector myself, but this already tells me something about rare books’ salability. Their weaker salability compared to other goods, such as gold, makes them an inferior hedge against inflation.

Closely related to this is the relative inflation-adjusted rate of return one could expect from hedging against inflation by converting dollars into rare books versus other real goods, such as gold. Hedging against inflation is an act of speculation. You’re betting on the future value of the dollar, the future price of rare books, and the future price of alternative real goods you could use to hedge against inflation. When you convert your dollars into rare books you’re betting that the inflation-adjusted rate of return on this use of your wealth will be higher than alternative uses.

I don’t know the rare book market well, but my intuition is that rare books don’t provide an especially lucrative inflation-adjusted rate of return relative to other goods one could use to hedge against inflation. If they did, you’d see lots of people buying rare books during times of inflation, driving up their price. We don’t see this with rare books but we do see it with gold, suggesting the superiority of the latter in this capacity.

There’s another reason why, compared to gold anyway, rare books are probably not a very good hedge against inflation: If hyperinflation ensues and the dollar loses all of its value, there’s a good chance that gold could temporarily replace dollars as our medium of exchange. There are several reasons for this. Historically, gold was used as money. Gold is easily divisible, meaning that I can break it down into small pieces to make small transactions. Gold has an obvious unit of account, which is some increment of weight. And, as noted above, lots of people want gold. These features make gold a good money substitute if the dollar collapses.

Rare books, in contrast, lack these features. They weren’t previously used as a general medium of exchange. They aren’t divisible (tearing out pages to pay for smaller transactions won’t work). They have no obvious unit of account (unlike a certain quality of gold, the heavier book is not necessarily the more valuable one, and it’s more difficult to verify the quality of a particular rare book than it is do to the same for particular piece of gold). Finally, as noted above, the rare book market is relatively small.

In short, if the dollar collapses and you’ve hedged against this by purchasing rare books, you’re not going to be nearly as well off as the guy who purchased gold (though you’ll be better off than the guy who purchased Happy Meals).

I’ve just elaborated some of the economics behind the sensibility of using rare books as a hedge against inflation. The bottom line is this: it’s probably not a great idea. At least relative to other real goods that could be used to hedge against inflation, such as gold, rare books don’t stack up so well.

But I’ve neglected what’s probably the most important factor for rare book lovers in thinking about converting their dollars into these goods, which is the pleasure collectors derive from holding them. This can alter the calculus considered above rather considerably. If I love holding rare books, I may be willing to convert lots of my dollars into rare books even though I’ll earn a lower rate of return by doing so. I may even be willing to go into arrears on my rent to do this. If this is the case for your, by all means, buy more rare books. I just wouldn’t expect them to act as an effective hedge against inflation.

You stated to me that there is an economic lesson to be learned from the collectible comic book market. What happened to the comic market in the last two decades, and what is that lesson?

Years ago I collected comic books. I still have most of them. Sadly, I believe their price has fallen rather considerably (though I’d be happy to learn otherwise if I’m mistaken here). In my mind, the takeaway from this is that the market for collectibles tends to be rather finicky. Fads and fashions seem to drive these markets more so than they do in many others, for instance the market for gold. Gold is pretty much always in. Punisher #1 isn’t. This stylized impression is connected to the point above about the salability of various goods and why rare books (or comic books) probably aren’t a very good way to try and hedge against inflation.

Throughout history countries that have the most aggressive book collectors seems to be the dominant economic if not world power. In the 18th Century, the great book collectors were English. In the 19th and into the early 20th Century, the Americans took control. I don’t know if this is true but you hear that the great collectors now are Asian or Russian. Does this foreshadow the eventual economic dominance of the Eastern Powers? Has this shift already occurred? How does collecting (be it books or art) factor into world economic hegemony?

Rare books are luxury goods — goods people buy disproportionately more of as their income rises. There’s a reason why the average American has more rare books than the average Sudanese: he’s a lot richer. In poor countries, income is spent mostly on things like shelter and sustenance. Only once you become relatively wealthy and these needs are adequately satisfied can you afford to spend significant income on rare books. The “world powers” you mention were among the wealthiest countries of their times, so it’s no surprise that rare book collecting was more prominent in these places. As Asia’s, Eastern Europe’s, or any other region’s countries grow richer, we can expect increased rare book collecting to follow.

I don’t think rare book collecting figures into “world economic hegemony” because I don’t think such a thing exists. But I will say this much: Based on the reasoning above, if you want rare book collecting to grow, you should encourage economies to grow. In practice, this means encouraging the spread of capitalism. Countries that rely more on free markets and less on government to direct their economies are wealthier than those that do the reverse. So, encourage the growth of capitalism, and the growth of rare book collecting will follow.

Given the rise of digital and virtual technologies, what do you see as the future of the rare book market? Does the death of print mean an even larger cult and fetish developing around print and thus leading to a boom in collecting books?

It’s increasingly common to hear that the rise of electronic media means the death of print media. I just don’t buy it. The logic underlying this common claim suggests that electronic and print media are exclusively substitute goods — when the price of electronic media falls, demand for print media falls with it. But in fact, electronic and print media are often complements. Access to online book reviews, for example, has led me to purchase more print books. The rise of the internet, which made possible electronic books possible, has made it infinitely easier for me to find and purchase print books. Even the electronic availability of some books has led me to find out about and purchase other print books I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased.

I buy many books (though not rare ones), and I’m quite certain that my book consumption is higher post-Amazon.com than it was before Amazon.com. In large part, this is due to the ease with which technology has enabled me to find books I find interesting. So, while the digital revolution has probably crowded out certain types of demand for print media, it has also increased demand for other types of print media. On net, I think the growth of electronic media has benefited print media rather than harmed it.

I should add that I don’t ever see the print book market going away. Some people, like me, just prefer to have printed versions of what we’re reading — and computer printouts don’t cut it. I want the actual book. Publishers can produce various works in electronic and print versions (as many currently do) and charge a higher price for the printed version to people like me who are willing to pay a premium to have it.

My guess is that technology has also made it much easier to collect rare books. This intensifies existing rare book collectors’ demand for rare books, but also serves to introduce new individuals to rare books, who otherwise might not have become collectors. This is both a blessing and a curse for existing rare book collectors. On the one hand, if enough people get into rare book collecting, the price of your current collection will rise (and maybe even enough people will get involved to make rare book collecting a decent hedge against inflation after all). On the other hand, you may have to pay a bit more for your next acquisition.

1. Technically, inflation is an increase in the supply of money not offset by a corresponding increase in the demand for money. Also technically, even if new goods are produced at a rate commensurate with the rate of monetary expansion there is still inflation. In this case, nominal prices will not rise, but prices will be higher than they would have been without the monetary expansion, creating a sort of ‘hidden inflation.’

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Brian Cassidy runs a rare and antiquarian bookshop in Monterey, California. He will be familiar to readers of RealityStudio for his input on Early Photos and Collages by Burroughs, a Rare Burroughs Letter, and other articles in the Bibliographic Bunker.

These interviews on the economics of the rare book market stem from a recent blog of yours in which you mentioned that you have seen a rise in customers selling books recently. Do you believe this is directly related to the down economic market?

I think it is. Over the past two months, I’ve been offered about twice as much material as I normally do. Ironically, the more I’m offered, the pickier I generally have to be about what I’ll buy.

In a down market do you find that serious collectors sell their holdings, buy aggressively, or hold tight? Can a generalization be made on this or is it a case by case issue?

It’s hard to generalize. I do know that one client of mine is liquidating some of his collection to raise capital for a large upcoming purchase. His reasons for doing so, however, I don’t know. All things being equal, the book market is like any other. The down time is the time to hold and buy, not sell.

How about booksellers? Do they greatly increase their general stock in a down market or a strong market?

Well, you have to increase stock no matter what the market. A dealer lives or dies by his new acquisitions. But to give you an idea of how the market is affecting book price… I and another dealer recently bought a very nice collection of autographed material from a Nobel-Prize-winning author. My colleague and I went back and forth on what we should pay for the collection. We had a high and low range of possible offers, and we debated what to present to the seller in order to feel confident he would agree to an acquisition. On the one hand, we very much wanted the collection. On the other, the current market left us wary of paying too much and finding ourselves deep into material we’d have trouble moving. We settled on an offer (which was accepted) at the lower end of our range, but I can tell you a year or two ago we probably would have initially offered at least 20% more.

In my experience, I have found that more books are available in a strong economic market. The dot-com boom of 1998-2000 was incredible for me as a Burroughs collector. So much was available. Is this a false memory on my part? Is this remembered in the industry as a special time for Beat material?

Well, I think there are three things contributing to this impression. First, it wasn’t so much that the internet brought so many more books onto the market (although it did), as it just made them infinitely easier to find. Second, those early years of the internet provided some great buys as dealers had less access to pricing information than they do now. Couple all that with the fact that The Beats were really starting to emerge into their own critically during those years and I can see how it might have felt like a special time. The steals may be harder to find today, but there’s still a ton of good material out there. Indeed, I still think there are great opportunities.

How does the rare bookselling industry do in a recession? There is an argument that the used book business is recession-proof. But what about the rare book business? For instance, do more people buy rare books as a hedge against inflation? Do you see an increase in purchases of blue ribbon collectibles like Ulysses or The Sun Also Rises, i.e. books for which there will always be a demand and market?

Books have traditionally been considered recession-proof because a buyer could get more “bang for their buck” so to speak. In other words, they could spend $20 on a new book which would take many hours to read, or go to a movie which only lasted a couple. Plus, a book is a durable good that retains some value and is more lasting. So when one is watching the budget these can be more attractive qualities. That said sales seem softer to me for more common books than they did the same time last year.

As for rare books, the top of the market remains strong. The best books continue to sell well. But everyone I know is proceeding with caution.

Can rare books truly be considered an alternative asset to the stock market in a portfolio like art? Can Beat highspots like Howl, Naked Lunch or On the Road?

Yes and no. But mostly no. For the simple reason that books are not liquid like other assets. If you want to turn your books into cash, you basically have to either pay 20% or so to an auction and get (uncertain) auction values, or sell to a dealer and get wholesale. This means that your original purchase has to appreciate at least 50-100% before you can earn your original investment back. This is not true of more easily traded assets like stocks which can be liquidated more cheaply and more quickly.

Further complicating the equation are the fickle tastes of the marketplace. This year’s Joyce can be next year’s Galsworthy. In other words, the very foundations of judging value can change. This is less true in other assets, where methods of determining price (P/E ratios, for example) are much more established and transparent.

That said, I often look at auction results and think to myself “In ten years, that’s going to look like a great buy.”

What is the health and future of the William Burroughs market?

To me, Burroughs seems more and more relevant and prescient with each passing year. For better or worse, our world increasingly resembles Burroughs’. This means that readers and other artists and writers will continue to turn to him for inspiration and perspective. All of which bodes well for the Burroughs market.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A handwritten Burroughs letter turned up on eBay a few weeks ago. If I remember correctly the letter was from the mid-1990s and in it, Burroughs expresses his thanks for a $5000 loan. I traded a few emails with Burroughs fans who were surprised that Burroughs was hurting for cash at such a late date. The publication of Naked Lunch and the resulting royalties, particularly from Grove, allowed Burroughs to end his dependence on his parents’ generosity, but this independence did not happen until the 1960s. In 1984, Burroughs signed a $200,000 book deal with Viking, coupled with a 45,000 pound deal for the British rights. At the time, Burroughs had mounting debts (some stemming from his son’s medical expenses), and this deal provided some measure of financial security. As Burroughs became more of a mainstream figure, his financial prospects must have brightened even more. But it is my understanding that Burroughs always struggled with money problems of some type. As one of my email correspondents pointed out, Burroughs needed a collaborator in his financial life as well as his creative one. Without a doubt, James Grauerholz provided creative, personal, and economic stability to Burroughs’ life. Yet financial concerns dogged Burroughs to the end of his life. Burroughs was never the millionaire that Kerouac portrayed Burroughs to be in books and letters. This myth dies hard even today.

The early 1970s was another era of a global recession directly tied to the state of the oil market. In 1973, Burroughs lived in London and he was looking for a way out. In desperation he dug into his voluminous archives. In detailing the Burroughs archive offered for sale by Ken Lopez, I told the story of how Burroughs mortgaged his literary history in order to finance his return to the United States. The archive was sent into private hands and remained under lock and key for decades. That is until the recent sale of the privately held archive to the NYPL. The repercussions on Burroughs criticism were and are immense. Who knows what would have happened to Burroughs’ archives under different personal and global economic circumstances? Yet the benefits to Burroughs personally were even more important. The sale allowed Burroughs to return to the United States and begin the second stage of his creative life that culminated in the trilogy of Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, and Western Lands.

This letter with its insight into the struggles of supporting oneself as a writer or artist in the United States, even for a writer as well-known and seemingly successful as Burroughs, got me thinking about the current state of the economy and what it means for the rare book business and the health of the Burroughs / Beat market. I am not alone. So what does today’s economic market mean for the rare book business? In a recent blog, Brian Cassidy commented that more customers are coming into his store selling books. Rare book bloggers are addressing the affects of a down market on the book trade? Are we going to see an increase in the availability of rare books due to the economic downturn? Do writers and collectors generally sell their literary treasures in tough times, like Burroughs did in 1973? ? In real estate, one always hears that a recession is a buyer’s market. Is a recession the perfect time for a book collector, bookseller, or institution to acquire interesting material? Are rare books good investments? (For conflicting views see David Brass Rare Books or MyFineBooks.) Personally, I remember tons of Burroughs and Beat material being available in the dot.com boom years of the late 1990s. (William Reese on the rare book market in 2000.) Is this a myth like the legend of Burroughs’ trust fund? Does a robust economy directly relationial to a wide selection of great material? Or is this yet another faulty memory? Are there any economic laws relating to book collecting? How does the rare book market reflect on the overall economy?

In an effort to answer some of these questions, I interviewed a bookseller (Brian Cassidy), a book collector (Ted Dunn), and an economist (Peter Leeson) about the economics of the rare book industry.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Read a lot of William Burroughs and soon enough you’ll find evidence of him everywhere. A sense of paranoia develops where everything becomes touched with the Burroughsian. Couple this fascination with a case of bibliomania and it can seem that Burroughs lurks on every page and hides behind every corner. Take John Ciardi’s book of children’s verse: Doodle Soup. When I worked in a used bookstore in the Washington DC area, signed copies of Doodle Soup turned up from time to time. Ciardi dedicated the book to his Aunt. The aunt got a hold of several signed copies of Doodle Soup which she would further inscribe to friends and family for Christmas gifts. Copies continue to find their way into rare bookstores. Talk about re-gifting. This book of light verse includes such gems as “Why Pigs Cannot Write Poems.” It reads as follows:

Pigs cannot write poems because
Nothing rhymes with oink. If you
Think you can find a rhyme, I’ll pause,
But if you wait until you do,
I’ll have forgotten why it was
Pigs cannot write poems because.

Of course, Ciardi is completely off the mark here. Poetically conservative critics, like Ciardi, have been labelling the Beat writers ignorant swine for decades. And that’s to say nothing of what feminist critics have labelled the Beats. In addition, as E.B. White documented in Charlotte’s Web, pigs have been poets for quite some time. The poem below was found in Wilbur’s (not Richard) uncollected writings.

I awoke with
a startled oink
hit by the sudden
realization, boink!,
that I am a mere
forty winks
from being turned
into sausage links.

Some pig! This poem failed to make the pages of Charlotte’s Web and cannot be authenticated. Possibly only a publisher, like Ed Sanders, unscrupulous enough to announce that he would publish anything would dare touch it. In any case, you could argue that Charlotte probably ghost wrote the poem anyway.

While working at the store, I became obsessed with Doodle Soup. One day I could not take it anymore and I bought a copy. It now sits on my rare book shelf, and it is one of the quirky items that fills out my Burroughs collection. Seemingly nothing could be further from the Burroughsian, but Doodle Soup in my paranoia fits in quite nicely right next to my Olympia Naked Lunch and my Big Tables. Madness?? Not really. As I said Burroughs is everywhere.

Ciardi graduated from Tufts University in 1938 and became a prominent member of a circle of poets who, like Robert Lowell, were centered in Cambridge/Boston, a place that dominated the immediate post-WWII poetry scene. Several of them were collected in the Mid-Century American Poets anthology of 1950. In a related side note, another practicioner of children’s verse, X.J. Kennedy, also had ties to Tufts. Kennedy taught there in the early 1960s and my father took his course as an undergraduate English major. According to my father, Kennedy often brought poets from the Cambridge circle into the classroom for reading and discussion. Readers of a certain age are probably very familiar with Kennedy without even knowing it. There is a good chance that Kennedy introduced you to poetry. Kennedy edits several Introduction to Poetry textbooks used in high schools and colleges across the United States. The textbooks indoctrinate young readers into a rather conservative reading of poetic tradition. With the rise of New Formalism, these books have come back into favor. This theme of instructing the young in acceptable literature and protecting them from the disreputable comes into play with Naked Lunch and Ciardi. By the way, try reading the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg for a healthy counterbalance to the established literary tradition.

In the 1950s Ciardi served as poetry editor for the Saturday Review, a weekly magazine. The magazine is largely forgotten now, but in its heyday, it was a rival to the New Yorker as an example of the literary mainstream. To be published in the New Yorker and Saturday Review was to make it to the big leagues as a writer. This is not to say that it was the only game in town. Take the Cambridge of Lowell and Ciardi. Shortly after mid-Century an alternative scene developed. Cid Corman of Origin, Jack Spicer, Joe Dunn of White Rabbit Press, Stephen Jonas, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley formed the core of the Boston Renaissance of the mid-to-late 1950s. The term Renaissance links Boston to a similar literary awakening that was occurring at the same time in San Francisco. Spicer and Blaser were members of the earlier (and largely overlooked) Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s that made the much more publicized San Francisco Scene possible. Of course, Burroughs has Boston ties. As a graduate of Harvard, Burroughs was one of the elite gone to seed. A Satanic figure, Burroughs fit in with a host of degenerate angels who revolted against the kingdom of heaven. In the literary world, that kingdom was academic verse and the tenets of New Criticism. Ciardi was one of the elect.

That said, Ciardi was also one of the first literary men, and maybe the first in print, to recognize Naked Lunch as a “masterpiece.” As editor of Saturday Review, Ciardi wrote an account of the Big Table obscenity trial that included a review of Big Table #1′s contents, ending with a positive review of Naked Lunch. The tie to Burroughs and the quirky value of Doodle Soup becomes more clear. The review was entitled “The Book Burners and Sweet Sixteen,” and it ran on June 27, 1959, a full month before Olympia Press published what Ginsberg thought was to remain published in Heaven. Get a copy of William S. Burroughs At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 edited by Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg. This collection gathers book reviews and other critical responses to Burroughs’ work over three decades. Like the collections of Burroughs’ interviews, this book is an invaluable resource. “Sweet Sixteen” opens the book after a very good introduction by the editors. Matt Theado’s The Beats: A Literary Reference is another essential book. It contains several other Beat-related pieces printed in the Saturday Review, including an abridged version of “Sweet Sixteen.”

In the introduction to At the Front, the point is made that the early critical reception of Burroughs revolved around legal questions. As a result, Burroughs and Naked Lunch had to demonstrate a moral purpose. As I have argued in my Kulchur piece, this is unfortunate, since robbing Burroughs and Naked Lunch of their obscenity and their offensiveness lessens them both in my mind. Readers get robbed as well. To me, the sensation of being shocked and offended is very invigorating. I relish that feeling of shock that accompanied my first reading of Naked Lunch.

Ciardi would be associated with Naked Lunch years after his article. It should be noted that Ciardi’s Wikipedia page fails to mention Ciardi’s pivotal role in the reception of Naked Lunch. The section on Naked Lunch from Ciardi’s review appeared on the dust jacket flap to the Olympia Press version of Naked Lunch. The strange reference to Dante and vulgar language on the flap comes from the fact that Ciardi translated The Divine Comedy and was an expert on the Italian writer. Ciardi was asked to defend Naked Lunch at the Big Table trial. He declined at that time, but he did speak on behalf of the novel during the Boston trial that followed the book’s release by Grove Press. Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg also appeared on the stand to give their two cents. Burroughs stayed clear of the trial. No doubt it was determined that his reputation would precede him and would cloud the issues at hand with questions of murder, homosexuality and drug abuse.

Ciardi’s presence mirrored the presence of Mark Schorer on behalf of Howl nearly a decade earlier. Schorer was a noted academic at the University of California. He wrote the definitive biography on Sinclair Lewis a few years after the Howl trial. If Schorer represented the San Francisco literary establishment, Ciardi served the same purpose in Boston. He had been an esteemed member of the Cambridge poets. In fact, it is interesting that it was in Boston that Naked Lunch went on trial. The phrase “Banned in Boston” has become a cliché. The city’s Puritian tradition makes Boston ever watchful of any type of obscenity. In vulgarity, Naked Lunch would seem offensive to that tradition, but more interesting to me is the fact that Burroughs and Naked Lunch challenged the literary tradition that eminated out of Boston not just in the 1650s (Purtians) or 1850s (Trancendentalists), but in the 1950s.

I admire Ciardi for stepping to the plate and defending Burroughs and Naked Lunch. The book was an assault on the literary establishment he represented, but clearly Ciardi saw a greater danger in the obscenity trials surrounding the novel. That danger was censorship and the oppressive nature of entities like the post office that supposedly protected for the public good. The end of Ciardi’s review reads, “In matters of art, what is official is always inhuman. Neither the barbarians of the Book of Regulations nor the barbarians of sweet-sixteen have any business between the minds of a serious writer and a serious reader. Nor can they be tolerated there. All censorship is a disaster that begins in ignorance and seeks to culminate in demagoguery. No occasion in the turbulences of a complex but still hopefully democratic society calls for stronger language in rebuttal. A curse on all of them as faithless men. Or worse, as men who have subverted faith to expedience. There can be no compromise with the book burners. There is only the duty to hold them in disgust, and hope that they can be made to understand the scorn of freer and better men.”

In Ciardi’s distrust of the official, the then-recent McCarthy hearings come to mind. I can easily see his horror of the book burners. Heine wrote: “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” The Holocaust was only a decade in the rear-view mirror. But I am particularly pleased with Ciardi’s distrust of the Sweet Sixteen mentality. The restriction of the freedom of adults in the name of protecting children infuriates me and this manuever has been used by forces of control as a means to extend their influence seemingly forever. It upset Ciardi as well and it makes me appreciate his book of children’s verse, Doodle Soup, all the more. Doodle Soup may be child’s play for Ciardi, but his appreciation for literature, including Naked Lunch, is not. It is serious play.

It is strange how a book and a poet on the surface so removed from Naked Lunch can relate to it with such force and complexity. As a result, Doodle Soup belongs on my shelf next to my Olympia Naked Lunch. This sense of paranoia that surrounds Burroughs is part of Burroughs’ charm for me. Maybe the entire post-WWII era is Burroughsian. Remember: just because he is invisible does not mean he is not there.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

To be blunt, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair is the shit. Prior to the fair, I went to the Morgan Library to see their Gutenberg Bible and soak in the atmosphere of J.P. Morgan’s study. The display at the New York show was even more impressive to me, Gutenberg Bible aside. To be honest, I would not be surprised to see the most important human achievement of the second millennium sitting under glass at some rare book dealer’s booth at 66th and Park. This show is that big on the rare book scene. As one dealer told me when I expressed surprise on seeing him, he would not miss this event for the world. He referenced bankrobber Willie Sutton: New York is where the money is.

The Morgan did have one Beat jewel on display amongst the gem-encrusted bindings and the illuminated manuscripts. On the second floor of the Library there was an August 22, 1959 letter from Allen Ginsberg to John Ciardi defending Jack Kerouac against Ciardi’s attack on Maggie Cassidy. There was also a September 3, 1959 postcard follow-up to Ciardi’s reply. Ciardi, the editor for The Saturday Review, wrote a review of Maggie Cassidy in July 1959 entitled “In Loving Memory of Myself.” Critical attacks on Kerouac of this nature were common in the mainstream press. Ciardi follow that up with a larger swipe at the Beats titled “Epitaph for the Dead Beats.” Ciardi is an interesting figure in Beat and Burroughs history. More on him at a later date. The Ginsberg letter includes three paragraphs on William Burroughs. This makes sense since Naked Lunch was published just one month earlier in late July and critics were finally able to assess Naked Lunch as a whole. Ginsberg writes of the relationship between Burroughs and Kerouac as writers, “Burroughs working along similar lines different personal angle shorthand transcription of visual image archetypes encountered in total spiritual exploration.” Ginsberg continues, “Indivious comparisons between Burroughs and Keroauc is the sort of speculation which Jealousy will substitute for happy appreciations. They are old friends and fellow workers and learn from each other.” Ginsberg also quotes the line about Burroughs not imposing plot or story: “I am a recording instrument.” The letter concludes with a handwritten line: “New art should not arouse hostility among the learned, but does and alas always has.” it is a fitting epitaph for the Beats and the lively Beat spirit. All in all it is a remarkable document and an example of the type of treasures on hand at the Morgan.

The New York Book Fair had similar jaw-droppers. The one item that caught my eye was a poster announcing the March 9, 1959 reading with Frank O’Hara and Gregory Corso at the Living Theatre. This reading is legendary and shows the sometimes contentious relationship between the Beats and the New York School. David Lehman provides details of this reading in The Last Avant Garde. At the reading, Keroauc famously yelled to O’Hara, “You’re ruining poetry.” O’Hara quickly returned with “That’s more than you’ll ever do.” The poster documents this important moment in literary history in a material and ephemeral way. Such objects never fail to catch my attention.

Yet I was distracted to say the least. I am sure there were several other great items at the fair but the 2008 New York show was all about one thing and that was the Burroughs Archive of photographs and ur-collages on sale from Brian Cassidy and Ken Lopez. Sure there were other Burroughs items, but they were like the opening band than everybody in the audience struggles to sit through before the headliner. In a show crowded with incredible items, this collection held its own and cast a spell over an audience of jaded spectators who have seen it all. One hour before I got to Ken Lopez’s booth, the collection sold to a gallery owner who plans to exhibit them, but I did get to see the items briefly. Seeing them in person I could understand why the Berg would pass on the items. They were not visually spectacular in the way the scrapbooks from the 1960s are. Those items appeal as art objects and examples of avant experimentalism like mail or Fluxus art. The material in Lopez’s possession was small, unassuming, easy to overlook given that libraries, particularly the Berg, are awash in snapshots of and by Beat figures. That said, this collection exuded an aura. I see these items like I would a fragment of text on a scrap of papyrus from Mesopatamia. Or a glyph on a weathered stone. A portal into beginnings. Could these photographs function like a Rosetta Stone allowing interested parties to get uncoded the genesis of Naked Lunch? Scholar as archeologist. I was reminded of Charles Olson describing himself as an archeologist of morning. From what I could see they have the potential be incredibly useful in just such a project as it relates to Burroughs. The images reveal Burroughs in the process of contructing a composite city, a proto-version of Interzone. These pieces are primitive collage, cut-ups, mosaics, cut and paste from a very early date. Pre-Gysin. Nailing down the date of their creation is crucial. The potential implications are far-reaching. These images tie back to the Yage visions and the Composite City section that so fascinate scholars like Oliver Harris and provide a key to his recent scholarship with Yage Letters and the Latin American notebooks. Thankfully they sold as a collection. Once the Berg passed on the collection there were discussions of selling the collection piecemeal.

Ken Lopez and Brian Cassidy are no strangers to the Bibliographic Bunker. (See Burroughs Literary Archive and Brian Cassidy Bookseller and a Rare Burroughs Letter) So as soon as I heard about the collection I fired off some questions for Brian Cassidy to consider. Instead of writing on all the side acts at the fair (though bookseller Peter Stern’s copy for $6000 had one of the finest, brightest dust jackets that I have seen in a while, how many Olympia Press Naked Lunches can you see?), I present Brian Cassidy’s thoughts about the headline act along with a link to the collection.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this archive was where it came from. Who is Richard Lorenz and how did he get these items?

Lorenz was a noted photographer as well as a photo collector and scholar; he authored several books on the medium including one on Imogen Cunningham. He purchased the WSB items from a New York photography dealer named Sol Lowinsky, who we gather purchased them directly from WSB. They came to Ken Lopez and me through a photography dealer representing the Lorenz estate.

Given that so much of Burroughs’ archives are already in institutions, how rare is it that Burroughs material of this magnitude is still in private hands?

Material like this is certainly scarce. How much remains in private hands, however, can be tough to gauge. For example, Burroughs sold this material probably in the late 1980s to early 1990s. How often he partook of similar “extra-archival” sales to dealers and collectors is unclear. He was certainly not a rich man and it wouldn’t surprise me if he occasionally (if not regularly) raised money by divesting himself of stray pieces of his archive. Also unclear is what remains in the hands of friends, editors (particularly, to my mind, of small magazines), and other acquaintances who had contact with Burroughs.

I think there’s an image of WSB as sort of remote and distant — both intellectually and physically (Kansas, Tangier) — but in fact he maintained an extensive correspondence, had numerous warm and close friendships, hosted many visitors (even in his later years in Lawrence) and was — esp. during his him time in NYC — very much “of the scene,” hanging out with Warhol, Lou Reed, various punk rockers, etc. It seems likely that many of these people over the years retained Burroughs material — whether it be letters, art, etc. — that will find its way to market someday. So one must be careful to differentiate between absolute rarity and market rarity. My guess is in absolute terms there’s probably substantial WSB material yet to worm its way into the public eye (indeed just this past year I’ve purchased a small typescript and a pair of early letters). But from the perspective of the market right now, good primary material from Burroughs remains uncommon.

That said, early and substantive examples such as this archive are exceptional.

What were your first impressions going through the material?

My first impression came via images emailed to me. I was certainly excited about the material and recognized its importance, but the full impact of the work wasn’t clear until I saw them in person for the first time. The collages in particular are smaller than the online catalog probably suggests. As such, they have a strange and awkward delicacy that is difficult to convey in reproduction. Coupled with the wonderful materiality of the aging scotch tape and the aggressive and disjointed nature of collage, the overall effect is quite powerful. They’re extraordinarily effective at conveying both a sense of place and time while simultaneously suggesting the mindset of Burroughs. There’s an immediacy and significance about them that goes beyond their being — perhaps to some eyes — a simple Beat relic.

Are these items mere curiosities or do you see scholarly value in them? Do they provide a port of entry into Burroughs as a writer or person?

Building off what I said in the previous answer, I think the material is of supreme importance to WSB. As I say in my description, the work most obviously echoes his collage experiments (I’m thinking in particular of the C Press Time) and his career-long cut-up work. That said, what I think is far more fascinating (and again, I’m not saying anything my cataloging doesn’t) is how Burroughs seems to be doing in these collages what he was doing in his writing of Naked Lunch and the other Interzone books: remaking in visual form the melding of time, place, and person he was attempting via verbal methods in those novels. In other words, we see the beginnings of the conflict that would occupy the remainder of Burroughs’ career: the tension between word and image.

I am particularly struck by the image of Burroughs in the distance on the beach in Tangier. Was there an image that stuck with you from the collection?

I’m partial to the collage that incorporates Ginsberg’s portrait of Peter Orlovsky from their trip to Yosemite in 1950s. What I like about this is how Burroughs took his friend’s (Ginsberg’s) picture of his (again, Ginsberg) lover in an American landscape and married it to his own image of Tangier. For me at least, I think this reveals a lot about Burroughs’ feelings toward the country and his time there.

I also really care for the images of Billy Burroughs. These would have been his father’s pictures of him from his own scrapbook. And given what happened not only to Billy, but also obviously his mother, I find them quite poignant and a little sad. Doubly so when you consider WSB then subsequently sold them. I think Billy was a part of his life he was never able to fully incorporate or resolve. And I may be reading too much into them, but I think you can see something of their relationship in the rather stern faces Billy reveals in these images.

What are the comparables with an archive of this nature? Do you value these with Burroughs’ scrapbooks in mind or with original photographs by literary figures like Ginsberg or the recently passed Jonathan Williams?

Hmmm. Well, there aren’t any good ones. The most obvious though would be later Burroughs artwork, which in my mind at least created a floor for how these might be priced. Ginsberg’s photos were a useful benchmark in thinking about the loose photos. But when it came to the collages, it was less about finding similar material and much more about understanding their context and importance. For unique items such as these, determining value can be much more art than science. Which is not to say it’s not entirely rational, just difficult to describe. To prove the (science) point: When Ken Lopez and I were considering the purchase, we both came up with prices — both for the archive as a whole as well as the individual pieces — independently of each other and our numbers were nearly identical.

But to further prove the point (i.e. art): the buyer of the archive was another dealer, who — unless he has an immediate buyer — obviously wouldn’t have purchased it if he didn’t think he could market the items at a higher price.

I know the collection was offered to a few institutions. What is the state of affairs of the institutional market?

I’m not sure that the financial situation for institutions is substantially different now than it was a year or two ago. You will hear older dealers lamenting the fact that library budgets are not what they were twenty or thirty years ago. And that does seem to be the case. You don’t see much of the vacuum approach anymore that places like the Ransom took during the Texas oil boom, for example. But I never experienced that first-hand; my timeline is much shorter and from where I stand, special collections are still a strong, necessary and important market. In other words, there are absolutely libraries actively buying. In the last sixth months, I’ve placed everything from a small Henry Miller archive to a collection of papers from a prominent 19th century historian with various large institutions. Of particular interest to Bunker readers: for more than two years I’ve been working with a major library that actually has an endowed fund dedicated exclusively to the acquisitions of the magazines from the mimeo revolution. It’s shaping up to be a great collection.

In your opinion, what is the future role of the individual collector? For example, I see that in a New Yorker article philanthropists have taken over some aspects of journalistic research for the struggling newspaper industry. Are we going to see an increase in private individuals filling the role of archivists with the goal being preservation and not financial speculation?

In the same way that Burroughs — as the avant-garde of his day — prefigured much of the work that was to come after him, private, individual collectors are very much the avant-garde (read: advance guard) of special collections. The best collectors will almost always be way ahead of most libraries simply because they are accountable to no one else and so have no one to whom they need justify their acquisitions.

As for “private individuals filling the role of archivists with the goal being preservation and not financial speculation,” I guess I reject the premise of the question as I don’t see a dichotomy between preservation and long-term financial value. Though the age-old advice to book collectors — “Collect what you love; don’t do it for the money” — still remains very sound, at the levels you’re talking about (important / rare / unique primary material), there’s little reason to believe the rare book market should behave much differently than the art market. And indeed, some recent sales (I’m thinking of the Kerouac On the Road scroll, the WSB archive sale to the Berg, Don Delillo’s recent seven-figure sale of his archive to Texas) suggest that the we may see appreciations in the rare book world similar to those seen over the last fifteen years in the world of art, where prices for the very best and rarest of materials completely out-paces the rest of the market.

But even outside of those dizzying financial realms, a good collection is always worth more than the sum of its parts — which is and will continue to be good news for the small collector. Or to put it another way: history suggests that the pendulum is constantly swinging between the power of the individual and the institutional collector. Due to a number of factors, at the moment, I suspect the pendulum is swinging in favor of the individual — both well-healed and thrifty.

What do you see as the future of literary archives? Will an institution or collector ever pay big money for an electronic file of archived email, drafts, or images? How will electronic files be collected — or will they be collected at all?

To be honest, I have trouble imagining an entirely electronic archive. I suspect that authors will continue to interact with the physical draft for some time. This will, however, increasingly and obviously be in conjunction with more and more electronic media (word processors, email, etc.), and this poses several problems. First is the ease of infinite duplication (thereby eliminating the exclusivity of the physical object) which can make determining monetary value more difficult. Second is the danger of corruption (i.e. unintended changes) to the electronic data — something that is not an issue with information in a physical archive. And finally and perhaps most importantly, electronic documents are in many ways even more ephemeral than paper ones. (Can you still open the documents on that floppy disk from your college years?) My guess is that writers, dealers, and libraries will begin to work more closely with each other and at earlier points in authors’ careers to address these issues and ensure that important information is preserved. At least, that’s my hope.

Is the rare book industry prepared to deal with digital collecting or archiving of this nature? For example, Ralph Ellison’s last novel was cobbled together from drafts on computer disks (as well as other sources). Is the rare book field prepared to assess and market this type of material?

No. Generally speaking, I don’t think the rare book world is ready for digital collecting or archiving. But I think this has much more to do with the fact that there haven’t been any real test cases rather than any kind of professional blindness or bias. Indeed, I don’t think most institutions or authors are ready for these changes either.

The problem with an example like Ellison is that it calls into question the very idea of primacy and authenticity upon which the rare book market is built. What is a real draft or a real letter in the age of email and .doc files? What is a “first edition” of an e-book? Now, these questions have been around at least since the development of photography, and have been far better addressed by the likes of Walter Benjamin, but I think you’re right to sense that these questions will be coming to a head in the near future. How it all will shake out, I’m just not sure.

Can you name an author who will be collected electronically?

Perhaps Mark Z. Danielewski, whose House of Leaves was originally published and distributed on the internet.