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

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Brian Cassidy, a bookseller just beginning his journey in the book world, and about his offering of a high-end Burroughs letter. At the other end of the spectrum is British bookseller Simon Finch who stands at the top of the mountain. Simon Finch has been in operation since the mid-1980s and is as high-end as it gets. Their catalogs are reference materials of the highest order and they deal in a full range of items from the beginnings of print to modern firsts. The books for sale are in many cases the most important and enduring examples of human thought and achievement. Case in point was their acquisition of a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio published in 1623 at auction in 2006-2007. This was the Dr. Williams Library copy held by the Library since the 1720s. The price paid was in excess of $5 million making it the highest-priced book acquired that auction season. The Library opted to sell this National treasure (46 of the roughly 230 copies of the First Folio actually remain in England) in order to finance the rest of the Library’s operations. As Nicolson Baker’s Double Fold and Nicholas Basbanes’ trilogy of books on all thing biblio make clear, this is something of an epidemic for libraries big and small.

A look at Simon Finch’s recent offerings on Abebooks shows that Burroughs collectibles find a place in the stacks of this most elite of booksellers. Up for sale is a first edition of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch inscribed by Burroughs and publisher Maurice Girodias to Beat patron, bookseller and collector Roger Richards. The price tag is a “mere” $31,160 (depending on the exchange rate), making it one of the highest-priced Burroughs items on Abebooks. In my piece on the Groff and Ronan auction, I mentioned a worn-out copy of the Olympia Soft Machine inscribed by Burroughs and Girodias that I purchased for $500. The book is inscribed to Brian Bailey. Interestingly, Bailey was a “cherished friend” of Roger Richards and the two men ran a book shop together for a time. Quite possibly, Burroughs and Girodias signed the Soft Machine at the same time as the Naked Lunch. Maybe in the early 70s when Girodias was in New York City with the US branch of Olympia Press and Burroughs was either visiting or living in the city. I will have to research my chronology. Given its condition, I wondered if I had made a mistake. Proably not. Burroughs’ books with the signatures of both men are highly unusual. There is even a minor association. I have only seen these two in my experience. Someone who saw the Finch Naked Lunch at a book fair in London told me that the condition is of high quality for an unsigned copy let alone one with this type of association.

The question remains: is it worth over $30,000. There are a handful of comparisons that are currently or recently available. The ones that jump to mind are a couple of offerings by Nudel Books, a New York City bookseller. Harry Nudel has a copy of Minutes to Go signed by Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin to de facto publisher Gait Froge for $32,500. He describes it as a museum piece and the dedication copy. I have discussed this book in my piece on Burroughs and bookstores. Nudel also has a copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch signed by Burroughs to Froge for $17,500, roughly half the price of the Simon Finch copy. The Nudel copies provide a very interesting association from a period in Burroughs’ creative life that I am particularly fascinated with. But again is the Minutes to Go a $30,000 book? Has a Burroughs first edition signed or even with a stellar association ever fetched this type of price and who would pay this type of money?

Nudel suggests in his description (“a museum piece”) that an institution would. I wonder. Reading the recent New Yorker article on the acquisition practices at the University of Texas, the focus of big money spending is currently on manuscripts and archives. Texas paid $500,000 for several boxes of Don DeLillo’s papers and manuscripts. For $2.5 million, the university received a tractor trailer of Norman Mailer’s papers. More in the neighborhood of the Naked Lunch and Minutes to Go currently on sale, Staley, the head of acquisitions at Texas, paid only $40,000 for a nice sampling of Graham Greene letters. Institutions want quantity as well as quality. Is a single Burroughs title even with the association and its accompanying significance going to merit $30,000? I am completely out of my depth here but I doubt it. How would they justify the cost? The Finch Naked Lunch and Nudel Minutes to Go are wonderful books, but they are more likely to serve as curiosities at an institution. Their research and reprint value is limited at best. There are no annotations or marginalia for further study. It should be noted that the Dr. Williams’ copy contained marginalia of an early 18th and 19th Century reader making the book valuable as a resource to discover Shakespeare’s reception and study in an earlier era. This is not an issue with letters and manuscripts which are in high demand by researchers and scholars and provide opportunities for reprinting as a scholarly volume at a university press.

In addition, most institutions do not have the deep pockets and aggressive policies of the U of T. The sale of Shakespeare’s First Folio highlights the financial woes of museums and libraries around the world. Libraries cannot afford to care for the treasures they do have, let alone spend big money on new prizes. I do not think the NYPL or Ohio State would shell out that type of money for what is basically a first edition which would not have the research and republication value of manuscripts or letters.

That would leave a wealthy collector like those paying record prices for all the Warhols and Rothkos. Is a $30,000 Naked Lunch or Minutes to Go a good investment? Can they possibly go any higher in value than that? Do these titles belong in the class of market tested signed first editions like Hemingways, Joyces, or Eliots to speak only of early 20th Century masters? The Modernists possess an established track record at these prices. Burroughs has no consistent performance here, and only signed and inscribed Kerouacs of any of the Beats reside on this level on a regular basis. What about high end speculation? Does a $30,000 Naked Lunch have the growth potential of a Harry Potter first for example? The first of the Philosopher’s Stone has tremendous upside given its awesome popularity with what amounts to a developing new generation of collectors coupled with its legendary rarity (only 200 copies were not placed in libraries. How many of those survived in collectible condition?). In my opinion, the Burroughs titles in question lack the track record as well as the growth potential. It is true that the associations make these books one of a kind, but purchasing Burroughs at these prices would make the buyer something of a pioneer in this rarefied air of five-figure first editions. I would not want to make the first leap into this area. No doubt the prices of other high-end Burroughs titles would feel the effects of this precedent. Such a purchase would hasten the process of placing association copies of Burroughs as well as an unsigned Olympia Naked Lunch out of reach of 99.9% of Burroughs collectors, if they are not already. Then again the clients of Simon Finch make these types of purchases on a regular basis and Simon Finch, much more than I, knows his clients and the book market. Establishing records and setting precedents is the business of Simon Finch.

As I mentioned earlier, the Nudel copy of Naked Lunch interests me much more than Finch’s copy. The association has more punch to me. The wow quality of the Finch Naked Lunch is the dual presence of Girodias and Burroughs and not the inscription to Roger Richards. Unlike Froge, Richards does not have the same significance to Burroughs’ writing career nor as meaningful a link to Burroughs’ personal history during the Naked Lunch period. I do not want to downplay Richards’ importance to the Beats. For example, he is of monumental importance to Gregory Corso as a friend and patron, but for Burroughs he is largely a fringe figure. That said I cherish my copy of the C Press Time signed by Burroughs and Gysin, but what makes it truly special is the inscription by Ted Berrigan to Roger Richards. Richards through his generosity and friendship embodied what community is all about. Such inscriptions provide tangible evidence of his presence on and valuable role in the Beat Scene. Show me a copy of Naked Lunch inscribed by Burroughs and Girodias to Sinclair Beiles, Gysin or another figure of the Beat Hotel years like Froge, and I would be more amenable to a $30,000 price tag, as hard as that would be to swallow. That said; try finding those copies on the open market. Like letters and manuscripts, truly remarkable Burroughs associations from the early period of his career are just plain unavailable. As a result, the Froge association copies, and even the Richards, are without doubt special books — but are they worth the price of a very nice car?

These copies of Naked Lunch offered by Nudel and Finch got me thinking of another copy of Naked Lunch with a truly remarkable ownership history offered a little while back by Skyline Books. James Musser offered Timothy Leary’s copy of Burroughs’ drug classic for $7500, a fraction of $30,000. There was no inscription by Burroughs and, if I remember correctly, no annotations by Leary, but dip into Ted Morgan’s biography of Burroughs and you begin to see the value of this copy. There is a chapter on Burroughs meeting Leary detailing the aftershocks for these men and the world at large. The relationship of Burroughs and Leary runs deep. The importance of these two men in post-WWII Western history let alone literary history and drug culture is immense. Even though I do not have that kind of money, I thought that $7500 was not outrageous, but I have a skewed view of things that places incredible importance on books. If you go on Abebooks right now that book is no longer available. I suspect it sold. The Nudel copies of Minutes to Go and Naked Lunch have been on Abebooks seemingly forever.

In my experience, Skyline Books, while a high-end dealer to be sure, prices books to move and with wiggle room for growth as an investment. Case in point is a copy of the Olympia Ticket That Exploded inscribed by Burroughs to Gait Froge. Clearly this is not as desirable a book as Nudel’s Naked Lunch or Minutes to Go, but at $2500 you might get back your money and then some down the road. Currently signed copies of Ticket sell for over $1000 without the wonderful association. As a comparison, the Olympia Ticket inscribed by Burroughs to Ted Berrigan that blew me away a several months ago carried a price tag of $2250. If you noticed, it did not last on Abebooks long. I could be wrong, but I suspect it sold quickly

The Olympia Ticket is not as desirable as Naked Lunch, but to my mind the associations, particularly the Berrigan one, stack up. The sticker shock on these titles lacks the wow quality of the Richards and Froge copies. Maybe shocking me is the point. Many people get satisfaction from buying the most expensive item on the menu at the most exclusive restaurant. In addition, looking at a $30,000 copy of Naked Lunch makes me think that the $5000 copy of Ticket That Exploded inscribed to Simon Vinkenoog also offered by Finch is, well, cheap, to say nothing of the other offerings of that bookseller. This Ticket with all the much appreciated extras, like the letter to Vinkenoog, the Dutch translator and writer, appeals to me strongly and given the price of early Burroughs letters, the price tag does not bother me like the copy of Naked Lunch. Again in my own skewed sense of values, I can see where Finch is coming from.

Bottom line: having the most expensive Burroughs item on Abebooks is good advertising and gets the curious and deranged like me to reassess my values, loosen my purse strings, and look more closely into the other items up for sale. With dealers like Simon Finch, we are talking Robb Report and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous territory. The price tag is part of the appeal. Like I said, Simon Finch is at the top of the mountain and the bookseller did not get there by accident. Quite simply, he sells books. As much as it shocks me, this copy of Naked Lunch, good investment or not, will probably be no exception.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It seems everything I come across of late ties into the saga I’ve been documenting in the Bunker.

The terminology involved in book collecting can be quite slippery. Even terms as basic as first edition prove hard to get a firm grasp on. The category of ephemera is another one. I feel that I know it when I see it (like on ebay). Ephemera are generally outside the core categories of my William Burroughs collection; that is books, magazines, and vinyl. Ephemera are the paper stuff that falls between the cracks of many book collections. In an article for AB Bookman’s Weekly, John Dann wrote, “There is no exact catalogue of ephemera’s subject matter, but included under the broad umbrella are trade cards, letterheads, die cuts, postcards, broadsides, tickets, menus, timetables, posters, advertising materials of all sorts, rewards of merit, labels, political buttons, and programs. Much of ‘ephemera’ was originally a by-product of exuberant capitalism-largely advertising material made possible by advances in printing technology.” Yet thousands of collectors scour the nooks and crannies for just this “stuff.” Not surprisingly, they have formed several organizations. The Ephemera Society of America is one.

I have touched on the joys of ephemera in the Bunker. Broadsides are major pieces of collectible paper. Over the years, I have come in contact with the more disposable elements of paper culture. In acquiring my Fuck You Archive, the bookseller threw in a few pieces of ephemera to sweeten the deal. That they were throw-ins highlights the fact that many booksellers and collectors think of ephemera as a collecting third world. Yet this material is often very interesting, very informative, and a pleasure to own. The checks from the Phoenix Bookshop and the Herbert Huncke 80th birthday card are just plain cool. These items tell a story. The News Flash printed on the Fuck You Press mimeo is another great example. This handbill provides a look into the events of the Lower East Side scene announcing the opening of Peace Eye Bookstore and the first gig of the Fugs. These addresses, dates and descriptions are valuable primary material.

After some confusion with addresses and billing, I received a copy of the 1960 Olympia Press Catalog. It is disposable and published for commercial / advertising purposes: the epitome of ephemera. Pieces like this fall through the cracks. I had never seen an Olympia Press Catalog before, let alone one with such a relation to William Burroughs and Naked Lunch. The Catalog features several photographs of Burroughs and reprints the dust jacket blurb to the Olympia Press version of Naked Lunch.

The catalog blurb straddles the fence between high art and pornography in describing its contents. On one level, the text makes clear that Naked Lunch is different from the normal fare of Olympia Press. The catalog quotes extensively from John Ciardi, a noted critic and poet of the 1950s who wrote on Naked Lunch in the Saturday Review in an essay titled “The Book Burners and Sweet Sixteen.” Quoting Ciardi, the catalog states, “As in Kerouac’s blurb, the writing does, to be sure, contain a number of four-letter words, but the simple fact is that such obscenities — if obscenities they are — are inseparable from the total fabric and effect of the moral message. No less a writer than Dante made it a principle of harmonious style deliberately to coarsen the writing when dealing with debased characters as his subject matter.” The book is described as “a masterpiece of its own genre” and continues that “Burroughs is not only serious in his intent, but he is a writer of great power and artistic integrity engaged in a profoundly meaningful search for true values.” Dante? Artistic integrity? Moral message? True values? Clearly, such descriptions would not appeal to the core audience of Olympia Press.

Instead, Girodias was banking on the hype surrounding the Big Table trial to sell the book to a crossover audience of readers interested in daring, frank, and explicit literature, like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer. In fact, Ciardi’s article was occasioned by the Big Table trial. Ciardi would be one of the primary witnesses for the defense in the Boston Naked Lunch trial. The catalog refers to the Chicago controversy highlighting the obscenity issues surrounding the book as well as its forbidden nature. The blurb states, “The Naked Lunch generally considered to be the great ‘secret’ novel of the self-styled Beat Generation, has not been published as a whole until now: some extracts which were to appear in The Chicago Review have caused the University of Chicago to suppress this quarterly. These same extracts, reprinted in the first issue of Big Table, have resulted in the U.S. Post Office Department banning the new Chicago quarterly.” Even at the beginning when Burroughs was a largely unknown author, there was a buzz around Naked Lunch. The Olympia Press edition was desirable from the start to a whole group of readers who did not normally purchase the press’s more fleshy wares.

Girodias did not want to alienate his hardcore audience as well as other less literary thrill seekers. The dust jacket quotes a particularly sensationalistic section of Naked Lunch that Ciardi felt compelled to explain: “She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound.” The jacket also mentions “the lust for drugs,” “sixteen year old girls,” and “green ooze.” These lines conjure up appropriate images of sex and drugs. This scene appeared in the Autumn 1958 Chicago Review and was reprinted as “Episode 5″ in the first issue of Big Table. Clearly, this scene struck a chord with readers, publishers and critics. The young girl in trouble was a theme familiar to Olympia Press readers and drug addiction always fascinated the square public with its scenes of lawlessness and squalor. Girodias knew that many readers would seek out Naked Lunch looking for more descriptions of women, sex, and drugs.

As I have shown elsewhere, this mixture of high and low art pervaded Burroughs’ publication history throughout the 1950s and continued to a lesser degree throughout his career. The description of the women and the safety pin in the catalog relates directly to the marketing of Burroughs’s previous novel Junkie. The cover of the Ace Junkie featured a young woman wrestling with a man over a loaded hypodermic needle. The 1957 Digit edition of Junkie displayed a young woman in a short skirt about to inject into her exposed thigh.

Clearly, Burroughs was the new, hot property of Olympia Press in 1960. His photograph is on the front and back cover. The back cover refers again to the “great secret novel of the Beat Generation.” The photograph of Burroughs proves very interesting as it depicts his obsession with cut-ups that began after the publication of Naked Lunch. I think the image of Burroughs peering at scraps of newsprint is an iconic picture for the 1960s trajectory of his literary career: the cut-up novels, like the soon-to-be-published Soft Machine; the three-column format; Time; APO-33; the little magazine experiments.

Norman Rubington’s Fuzz Against Junk has ties to Burroughs and Naked Lunch. Many people believed that Burroughs was Akbar del Piombo, the pseudonymous writer of the collage novel. In fact, William Reese Booksellers felt compelled to dispel this rumor in their 1993 catalog that featured a library of Olympia Press titles for sale. The book is a parody of 1950s Beat and Drug literature, particularly of the Beatnik phenomenon. The drug culture of Burroughs becomes the fodder for laughs. The book’s use of photomontage harkens back to the Dadaists and Surrealists, particularly the work of Max Ernst, but Fuzz also conjures up images of Burroughs’s textual / visual work in his 1950s notebooks and onward into the 1960s.

On the whole, the catalog presents the more literary, high-minded side of Olympia Press. The catalog features literary giants like Nabokov, Sade, Beckett, Apollinaire, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Lawrence Durrell. The catalog states, “The Olympia Press, recognized throughout the world as pioneer publishers of outlaw writers, have pleasure in presenting their 1960s catalogue, another move forward in their battle against literary censorship.” The censorship laws of France were not the only target. The United Kingdom and the United States were also under assault. This battle is illustrated by the “fragments from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the invasion of England by William the Conqueror” that appear throughout the catalog. Like the Normans in 1066, Maurice Girodias invaded England’s borders from Parisian bookshops, as thousands of his dirty books slipped through customs in the suitcases of British tourists.

See also part 2: Naked Lunch Prospectus.

Olympia Press Catalog 1960

	Cover Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Francis Pollini Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Phillip O’Connor and Jean Genet Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Lawrence Durrell and Raymond Queneau Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	William S. Burroughs Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Fuzz Against Junk Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Henri Ford, and Parker Tyler Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade Olympia Press Catalog 1960
	Reading List Olympia Press Catalog 1960

Olympia Press Catalog 1959

	Cover Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Lawrence Durrell Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Raymond Queneau Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	William S. Burroughs Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	The Black Diaries Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	The Black Diaries 2 Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Aubrey Beardsley Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Jean Genet Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Jean Cocteau, Frank Harris, et al Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Marquis de Sade Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Henry Miller Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Henry Miller 2 Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Wu Wu Meng Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Samuel Beckett Olympia Press Catalog 1959
	Price List Olympia Press Catalog 1959

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I received an email asking about advice in purchasing an Olympia Press Naked Lunch. It is pretty safe to say that the Olympia Naked Lunch will remain a desirable collectible and appreciate nicely for some time to come. This book appeals to far more than William Burroughs collectors. Fans of 20th Century literature highspots, American Literature, the counterculture, drug culture, the Beats, small presses with added points from Olympia, collectible paperbacks, banned books, and erotica will all find something desirable in this title.

Collectors can choose unwisely in purchasing this book. Seemingly, everybody has a copy. Rare book and auction catalogs, rare book websites and eBay make Naked Lunch easy to find, despite the fact that only 5,000 copies were initially published in 1959. The big issue with Naked Lunch is the nagging urge to pinch pennies and save a considerable amount of money purchasing a middle of the road copy. I would advise fighting this desire. To me, condition is much more of an issue here than with other high end Burroughs rarities. I would buy a lesser copy or a true rarity, the Digit Junkie, for example, because just having the opportunity to buy one is rare. Naked Lunch, like the Ace Junkie, must be bought with a very discerning eye. In the case of Junkie, I think I sacrificed brightness and was more lenient on creasing and wear, because I felt I had to get one right away and not break the bank. The wiser choice might have been to save and wait for a truly lustrous, special copy without the common wear and tear. I have a soft spot for signed copies. I am often willing to sacrifice some condition in order to have the signature. I purchased a very poor copy of the Olympia Soft Machine, because it was signed by Burroughs and Maurice Girodias, the publisher. As an investment, I made an error. In the case of Soft Machine and, particularly, Naked Lunch, the fine, unsigned copy can be even more special than a signed, but worn copy. Like On the Road, these books were used, read, carried in backpacks, sprinkled with Tokay wine or coffee. These books have lived in the world of everyday readers.

Many claim to possess a one of a kind copy of Naked Lunch. No tears or creases to the bright purple and white dust jacket; crisp, bright green wrappers; no bumps to the corners; the book itself is tight and unread. Few deliver. This brings me to a true controversy in the collecting of Naked Lunch and all the Olympia Press titles. In January 1960 scarcely six months after the publication of Naked Lunch, the French government revalued the currency. The green rear wrapper of Naked Lunch possesses a price of 1500 Francs. Many copies are stamped in blue with 18 NF over the original price. What this means is that unsold copies of Naked Lunch were re-priced according to the new currency. There was no change to the content or format of the novel. Many dealers will list this book as a first edition, second state in order to indicate the alteration to the integrity of the book. They will also assure you that the stamp makes no difference. To me this is strictly a personal decision. I firmly believe that the stamp makes a big difference. I think the stamp compromises the beauty of the book. The wrapper does not look as clean to me. I would be willing to pay more for such a copy and I think many collectors agree.

The question is always how much. As I stated, copies are always on the market. Average copies average $1500-2000, possibly less on eBay. Recently, I saw an unsigned copy, described as a spectacular copy, for $7500. With Naked Lunch, the truly beautiful copies are once-in-a-lifetime type occurrences and rarely hold up under close scrutiny. Similarly, described copies, some of them second issue, can usually be found in the $4000-7500 range. In my case, I was offered what I considered the most spectacular copy of Naked Lunch I had ever seen at a discount from an asking price of $5000. The copy coupled with the discount forced me to dip into my pockets at a time I did not expect to buy. Every time I place the book in my hands I feel happy with my choice.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There were a couple of interesting signed books for sale on eBay last week that gets to the heart of what makes a particular book collectible. A 1963 John Calder Dead Fingers Talk sold for about $160 (ebay, PDF) and a Grove Ticket That Exploded sold for $202 (ebay, PDF). Both books attracted double digit bids. My gut reaction was that I was very surprised by these prices. Dead Fingers Talk is definitely the rarer book especially signed. In 2001, this exact copy of Dead Fingers Talk sold at auction in California for $316. From rare book dealers, signed copies can run $300-$450. A few years ago one could find a signed Grove Ticket That Exploded for $150-200 with $250 being top dollar. That has changed recently as signed Groves are now up to $400 and more on abebooks. What can explain the decline of the Dead Fingers Talk at this eBay auction?

The high price on the Grove and the low price on the Dead Fingers Talk on eBay may relate back to the signatures on each book. The Grove has what looks to be a tight, contemporary signature possibly from the late 1960′s although it is undated. The Dead Fingers Talk has a very loose, late signature dated from March 1997. Early Burroughs signatures are more highly prized than the looser, late signature. As Burroughs got older and more famous, he signed much more often, thus making the later signatures more common and less desirable. It was not uncommon for book collectors and dealers to make the pilgrimage to Lawrence in the 1990′s with arms full of rare or not so rare edition for Burroughs to sign.

For example, the signatures of the Nelson Lyon collection that sold in 1999 (widely considered one of the major Burroughs auctions of the last 20 years) was full of late signatures. The appeal of the Lyon collection was that any of these incredibly rare magazines were signed at all. Apparently given the numbers of late signatures out there, Burroughs willingly signed in his later years. For me, the later signatures are not as visually pleasing as well as more common. As Burroughs got older, he began dating his signatures; many of the signatures from the 1960′s and 1970′s are undated. I have never seen a signature from the 1950′s although I have heard of signed copies of the “Letter from a Master Addict” offprint from 1957 being for sale. I own a signed copy of the 1960 Minutes to Go that was in all probability signed at a book signing party in 1960. That signature is very different from the later signatures that I own. In my opinion, the Grove Ticket did very well on eBay due to the quality of the signature. The Dead Fingers Talk underperformed due to the shaky, late signature. I would expect the values to change dramatically if the signatures were switched.

The Dead Fingers Talk is the more desirable book. Dead Fingers Talk is the coolest first edition hardcover available to the Burroughs collector. In a publishing history dominated by incredible paperback editions like the Olympia Press titles, the Ace and Digit Junkies, Time, Minutes to Go, APO-33 and The Exterminator, Burroughs’ Dead Fingers Talk holds its own on a visual level. This may be because the Dead Fingers Talk dust jacket refers back to all the great Olympia Press dust jackets. The title of the book refers to the line “Only dead fingers talk in Braille” from Naked Lunch. The imprint of the mangled hand over the front cover also adds to the dust jacket’s appeal. The cover slyly references Burroughs’ Van Gogh act of his youth, when he cut off his finger to impress a crush. The icing on the cake is the fantastic photo of Burroughs on the back of the dust jacket where he looks particularly spectral and menacing: a fitting mug shot for a literary outlaw.

Besides looking good, Dead Fingers Talk is pretty hard to find. Many people do not even know the book existed. The book was published in late 1963 in an edition of 4,000 copies. Although the book was issued in paperback throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, it has been out of print for quite awhile, so not many people have actually read it. That includes me. Horrible to say, but my hardcover copy is too nice to actually read. This is one of the downfalls of being an obsessive book collector. It is difficult to fully enjoy all one’s books. Over the years, I have never happened upon a readable paperback copy. I would be interested in hearing from anybody about what Dead Fingers Talk is like. I have heard differing opinions. Some describe it as a mere cut and paste of the Olympia titles and other proclaim it a totally different novel altogether. In any case, the Naked Lunch material appeared in a different order than the Olympia Press edition thus adding to the legend that Naked Lunch was collated on the fly by Burroughs, Gysin and Sinclair Beiles.

Dead Fingers Talk is interesting on a historical level as well. (See wikipedia on Dead Fingers Talk. John Calder, the avant garde British publisher, issued Dead Fingers Talk as a Burroughs reader to prepare and introduce the British public to the shocking nature of Naked Lunch which had yet to be published in Great Britain. The book capitalized on the recent international fame of Burroughs generated by the 1962 International Writers Conference held in Edinburgh. The book contains pieces of all the Olympia Press titles: Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, as well as new material. Needless to say, Dead Fingers Talk created a stir. For an astounding 13 weeks, letters both praising and damning the novel appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. John Willett got the ball rolling with a negative review of Burroughs’ work simply titled “Ugh!” Edith Sitwell, Michael Moorcock, Victor Gollancz, Anthony Burgess, and Eric Mottram all got into the act on both sides of the argument. The book generated just the right kind of controversy, i.e. not the legal kind associated with obscenity or censorship, for John Calder to issue Naked Lunch in 1964. By 1964, Naked Lunch swept the Western world and began to redefine the boundaries of literary art. In 1982, Calder reissued Naked Lunch with all 56 pages of the Ugh Correspondence.

The Grove Press edition of The Ticket That Exploded does not have the same historical importance or aesthetic appeal. In addition, this edition was issued in a run of 10,000 copies making it far more common. I do not want to downplay the Grove Ticket That Exploded too much. It is heavily revised from the Olympia Press edition and includes the major statement “The Invisible Generation” taken from Burroughs’ contributions to the British underground newspaper The International Times. Clearly, the Grove Ticket is a monumental text in its own right, but as a collector I would much prefer to have a signed Dead Fingers Talk in my library. That said, I would, like many eBay buyers, shy away from a late Burroughs signature. The mystery remains why a desirable collectible like Dead Fingers Talk would fail to hold its value a mere five years after a documented sale. One would tend to worry about the Burroughs market if it was not for the strong showing by the Grove Ticket That Exploded. Possibly the lesson to be learned here is that just having a signed book is not enough. It also matters when that book was signed.