Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

While attending a cigar event, a map collector friend informed me that the Walters Museum houses quite an extensive collection of manuscript material. One of the most publicized of their holdings is the Archimedes Palimpsest containing seven separate treatises by Archimedes. Despite all his achievements, Archimedes is probably best known for exclaiming “Eureka!” after realizing a key concept in hydrostatics while sitting in a bathtub. True or not, this scene ranks up there with the assassination of the French Revolutionary Marat as one of the most famous events to occur in the bath. See Wallechinsky and Wallace’s Book of Lists for 13 others. The manuscripts of Archimedes’ work were copied in the 10th Century in Constantinople. They were discovered when the prayer book was laser-imaged to see what was underneath. The treatises were written over by the work of later scribes, as is not uncommon with old parchment. The book contains the only surviving copy of Archimedes’ On Floating Bodies. Eureka, for sure.

Although I was not in the bathtub, I had a “Eureka!” moment about a week ago. After a search of over three years, I finally tracked down a copy of the elusive Locus Solus V to complete my set. (So long as we are speaking of French Revolutionaries, Georges Danton’s severed head features in Raymond Roussel’s proto-surrealist classic that was the source for the name of the little mag.) In fact, during those three years, only one copy presented itself. It was on eBay, and I lost out in the bidding even after making what I thought was a very aggressive bid. Of course, copies are available as parts of a complete set, but stand alone copies of Locus Solus V, like Insect Trust Gazette 2 or Floating Bear 24, are just hard to come by.

The other three volumes of Locus Solus (note: Issue III-IV was a double issue) are just not that difficult to get a hold of. For Burroughs collectors, the key issue is Locus Solus II: The Collaboration Issue and for reasons I discussed elsewhere it is a very interesting, if brief, appearance for Burroughs. As Daniel Kane points out in All Poets Welcome, Locus Solus is interesting for the inclusion of Ted Berrigan. In his diary for December 4, 1962, Berrigan writes, “Locus Solus V came out yesterday, and to my complete surprise and delight it had a poem by me in it. How good that my first major publication was in the magazine edited by Koch + Ashberry (sic), with poems by them + O’Hara.” For a magazine that was edited in France, published in Switzerland, and infused with European sensibility, the mag’s influence on the Lower East Side was far-reaching. The five issues of Locus Solus were revered by the Second Generation New York School, and the content and appearance of mimeo productions of Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and others could be viewed as a response to the “squat and plain” issues of Locus Solus. In Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Clay and Phillips describe Locus Solus as “definitely ‘no-nonsense’ from the beginning, presenting no manifestos or editorial statements, just high-quality literature — simply and elegantly presented with care and respect.” C Press would definitely add an element of nonsense as well as a more comic and grungy look to the publications of the Second Generation.

In many cases, the early issues of a little magazine are the toughest to find due to the fact of small, less ambitious print runs and a smaller reading audience for a new publication. Interested readers, if they could get a copy, probably read them and disposed of them thinking the magazine was just another one-shot destined for the dustbin of history. In some cases, it takes a few issues for a little mag to gather together its stable of authors and establish its personality and reputation. This is certainly true for magazines like Yugen, My Own Mag and Floating Bear. Finding copies of the early issues of these magazines, particularly My Own Mag, are extremely difficult.

This is not true of Locus Solus (or Kulchur for that matter). Locus Solus, like Athena from Zeus, emerged from the heads of the first generation New York Poets (John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch as well as Oulipo member, Harry Mathews) fully formed in format and content. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman’s account of the genesis of the New York School Poets, Lehman writes, “Perhaps no better introduction to the poetry of the New York School Poets exists than [the first two] issues of Locus Solus.” The early issues are the most commonly collectible, particularly issue 2, but it is the last issue that is the toughest to find. The reason for this is the simple result of a small print run. For most issues of Locus Solus, the print run of the magazine was rather large: 1000-2000 copies, but Harry Mathews and James Schulyer, the publisher / patron and editor, respectively, of the final issue, only contracted for a print run of 500. I would suspect that libraries got a hold of a fair number of these issues given the academic cachet of the New York School poets (Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Harry Mathews) who edited it. Of all the New America Poets in the Allen Anthology, the New York School received the most attention from the establishment.

Take John Ashbery’s other magazine effort: Art and Literature (1964-1967). Like Locus Solus, Art and Literature was deemed important by establishment institutions and academies who would gather them for collections. The mag was described as “very high style, intense and European.” The establishment more quickly acknowledges what is perceived as serious and intellectual art. It also attempts to incorporate it much more readily than seemingly low-brow art (read as the Beats). For example, Art and Literature received a standalone review in the New York Times. Very unusual treatment for a little magazine, a format generally outside of the mainstream media and created in reaction to mainstream publishing. Beat dominated mags escaped notice or received passing (and largely negative) treatment. Art and Literature ran for twelve issues. Again very usual given the short life of many little mags. Interestingly, a complete run of Art and Literature just sold on eBay. Despite the condition problems (age toning, a detached cover, none of the extremely fragile tissue paper jackets present), I thought the run was a deal at $152. It is a fantastic magazine and Burroughs appears in Issue 2. Further proof of Burroughs’ place in the 1960s avant garde both New York and European in origin. The transformation of Burroughs from a “Know Nothing Bohemian” to an international intellectual was in motion.

Despite all my pieces about the personal touch and the joys of the book fair and catalog, I found Locus Solus V through the internet search engines. Generally, I search every day on eBay, Addall, and Abebooks for new Burroughs titles, and I perform more detailed searches for must-have items like Locus Solus V at least once a week. A good number of the books and magazines in my collection were located on the internet. This is especially true of the less interesting but essential parts of my collection. Almost all the Grove and Calder titles in my collection were acquired through internet searching. While these titles, particularly signed, are becoming harder to come by, they are almost always available online.

Not much of my collection has been acquired through want lists, but the most special pieces of my collection have been acquired through the type of personal relationships that I have been describing for the past year. Catalogs, book fairs, brick-and-mortar stores, auctions and the building of personal relationships. In some cases, like the complete run of Fuck You Magazine or the Digit Junkie, building a line of communication over time proved absolutely essential. The real interesting stuff rarely gets on Abebooks or eBay at all. Collections are built much the same way they have been for decades if not centuries: through the means I listed above.

In fact, what makes a special book collection is a lot like what makes Burroughs’ most successful cut-ups so fascinating. Building a collection solely through the internet reminds me of some of the less noteworthy passages in the cut-up trilogy. In both there is a lack of a personal touch and personality. The enterprise has a sense of monotony and repetition, a lack of passionate involvement. No spark. Yet the finest cut-ups are full of personal touches despite critics’ attempts to state that the technique is a weapon in the assault on personality and on the control of the author. Burroughs always stressed that not everyone could create a successful cut-up, and he expressed the importance of editorial selection and control. Take a Berrigan cut-up from The Sonnets, an Ashbery from The Tennis Court Oath, Gysin’s work from The Exterminator or Minutes to Go or Corso or Sinclair Beiles work for that matter. Throw in Carl Weissner’s cut-ups as well as Claude Pelieu’s work with the technique. They are all vastly different, and the personality and passions of the respective authors show through. Time, APO-33, The Dead Star or the newspaper cut-ups are hardly one-trick ponies of cut and paste. In these works, Burroughs experiments with different sources (medical journals, newspapers, magazines, book reviews, a gangster’s dying words), different formats (three column both newspaper and magazine, grids, broadside, free verse poetry) different media (photographs, typewritten text, handwriting, tape recording, film, the novel, the magazine, comic strip), different subject matters, different literary styles and techniques (composition by field, enjambment, concrete poetry, academic article, letter to the editor, advice column). In addition, Burroughs personal obsessions and quirks show through. The number 23, gangsters, apomorphine, William Randolph Hearst and his word / image empire. The cut-up was never intended to be a stagnant, impersonal or one-dimensional process. They threaten to become just that in the low points of the cut-up trilogy.

Similarly, gathering books from the internet threatens to become a stagnant, impersonal, or one-dimensional process. Catalogs, book fairs, brick and mortar stores, want lists, and auctions make a collection multi-faceted. The establishment of friendships and the joining of communities are an important aspect of book collecting that point and click sales do not fully recreate, although as I have written that is in the process of changing. Like Burroughs with the cut-up, there should be a kitchen-sink mentality in building a book collection. The internet is only one option among many. In my opinion a collector should be focused in his choice of subject matter or author, but diversified in obtaining material in that area. Don’t dabble in everything. Do collect obsessively in your microcosm and, as Sartre and Malcolm X advised, by any means necessary. The guidelines for determining the source of a book for your collection, be it Abebooks, auction, catalog et al, should be in what some take to be the the immortal words of Hassan i Sabbah despite Burroughs’ spin on the maxim: Nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The history and contents of the magazine Locus Solus provide insight into the type of progressive poetry circles and ideas Burroughs started tapping into with his small scale, textual cut-up works of the early 1960s. A testament to refined taste, Locus Solus was impeccably edited by John Ashbery (Issue 3/4), Kenneth Koch (Issue 2), and James Schuyler (Issue 1 and 5). Harry Matthews published the magazine in France. One issue was done in Switzerland. Matthews was the only American member of an intriguing group of writers: OULIPO. OULIPO was a largely French writing society that specialized in complex word games and the surreal. Ashbery, Koch and Schuyler, along with the charismatic and talented Frank O’Hara, formed the core of the First Generation New York School. The New York School, like the Beat Generation (the Beats also had a four-person core — Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso), went through two or three generations beyond the initial core group.

Locus Solus took its name from Raymond Roussel’s classic, which betrays the editors’ affinity for the avant garde, the European, and the highly intellectual. The Collaboration issue (Locus Solus II) opens with a quote by Roussel and is then followed by a quote from Lautréamont (both untranslated). The table of contents to the magazine features classic Chinese and Japanese poets, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, John Donne, André Breton, Dwight Eisenhower, Sir John Suckling: in short a wide selection of the history of Western and Eastern culture. The poets were intensely interested in modern art and music. Influenced and inspired by Abstract Expressionists like Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, the New York School poets lived and worked with Second Generation New York painters, like Grace Hartigan, Mike Goldberg, and Jane Franchlier. The magazine’s squat, plain appearance mimics the style of French publications from Gallimard. The Special Collaboration issue features a few Burroughs cut-ups of Rimbaud with Gregory Corso from Minutes to Go. The Exterminator also published in 1960 offered further examples of the textual cut-up. The New York poets all experimented with cut-up techniques (as well as other surrealist techniques of automatic writing and composition) in the early 1960s. Many of these creations are in the pages of Locus Solus. First and foremost, the magazine served as a vehicle for the New York School poets to express and to spread their artistic aesthetic.

In 1962 around the time of Locus Solus II, John Asbery published his breakthrough collection, The Tennis Court Oath. Still a highspot of contemporary avant garde poetry, the collection explores the same ground that Burroughs covered in his early cut-up experiments. Ashbery mixes surrealism, concrete poetry, the yet-to-be established Language poetry, and cut-up techniques to form a radically new art. Ashbery’s comments on these poems are similar to Burroughs’ own ideas and practice. Ashbery states, “And I was also rather interested in trying something new, [and] having difficulty in doing this, living in a country where the language spoken was not my own. And I began a lot of experiments, using collage techniques, especially from American and/or English books and magazines, perhaps to feel that I had a toehold in the English language.” He continues, “My intention was to be after… kind of… taking language apart so I could look at the pieces that made it up. I would eventually get around to putting them back together again, and would then have more of a knowledge of how they worked, together.”

Although I am shaky at best regarding their literary theories, it seems clear to me that Ashbery and Burroughs are using similar techniques and have a similar preoccupation with language and the nature of written communication. Ashbery believed language should ultimately depend on references to meanings generated outside language. Burroughs has no interest in putting words back together in order to learn more about how words worked, like Ashbery. Instead, he seeks to blow apart language in order to reach a higher, more advanced knowledge. Burroughs yearns for silence or a pictorial system of communication like hieroglyphics that merge word and image. I have always been somewhat baffled by discussions of this type and a more informed opinions would be appreciated. What is interesting to me is how Burroughs fits into a larger, international discussion of the time. I think this is symbolized by Burroughs’ move from the isolation of Tangier or Mexico City to the central location of Paris. Although Burroughs still works at the artistic margins in comparison to mainstream literature, his work of this period situates itself squarely in the tradition of the literary and artistic avant garde which often found a home base in Paris.

In poems like “The Skaters,” readers of Ashbery encounter “an intractable flux of verbal ‘found objects,’ shifting styles and registers, teasing literary allusions and echoes, fragmentary narrative episodes and descriptive scenes.” Such a statement could be describing Naked Lunch or the true cut-up novels. I am not suggesting that Burroughs influenced Ashbery or vice versa, but I am stating that Burroughs with the cut-up moved from largely a drug novelist who dabbled in more literary aspects, as witnessed in Junkie, the then unpublished Yage Letters and “Letter from a Master Addict,” to an avant garde writer fully experimenting with literary theory. Not surprisingly, Ashbery supported Burroughs’ inclusion in the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. In literary magazines like Locus Solus, Burroughs appeared prominently in an international avant garde circle. Clearly, the poets of the New York School saw at an early date that Burroughs was a fellow traveler along newly laid paths in the postmodern literary landscape.

Locus Solus Cover Archive

Locus Solus I

Locus Solus II

Locus Solus III-IV

Locus Solus V