Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

When the topic of Burroughs and apomorphine arises in drug histories and biographies, it most commonly deals with the fact that in 1956 Burroughs took the apomorphine cure under the supervision of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and emerged a man reborn. The story goes that only after Burroughs overcame his addiction could he begin in earnest the work of transforming his Word Horde into Naked Lunch. The accepted tale about Burroughs and apomorphine ignores the fact that Naked Lunch had a form before the cure (“The real novel is the letters to [Ginsberg]“) and that major sections of Naked Lunch like The Talking Asshole routine were written a full year before the cure. After 1956 the apomorphine experience provided Burroughs with an overarching framework for Naked Lunch, but this would be a road not taken. In addition the road to recovery, if Burroughs truly ever walked that path, was a long and winding road. In fact, as the Deposition makes clear but as critics have ignored, Burroughs took the cure more than once between 1956 and July 1959, the date of Naked Lunch‘s publication. By 1958, he was nearly, if not completely, hooked on paregoric and shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch he would be implicated in a drug ring. The actual cure was a difficult experience (“The cure itself was awful” Letter to Ginsberg May 8, 1956) with side effects that lingered over a year later despite Burroughs’ assurances in retrospect that the apomorphine cure was quick and non-invasive. Yet the myth that the apomorphine cure effectively ended Burroughs’ struggle with drugs and jumpstarted Naked Lunch persists. Burroughs encouraged the development of just such a cover story in interviews and elsewhere, most famously in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” published as a preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

So what role did apomorphine play in this crucial period of development for Burroughs as a writer and individual? Why did Burroughs distort the facts regarding his experience with apomorphine, and why has that story remained unexamined for decades? Why has the “cure” in 1956 become the pivot on which Burroughs turned his life around? Why, however falsely, does the story of Naked Lunch begin at this point?

On one level, the development of this myth begins with Burroughs’ 1959 arrest on drug trafficking charges. Shortly after his arrest, Burroughs began work on the Deposition essay. In his letters of the period, Burroughs assured Ginsberg that the Deposition was sincere and represented his current beliefs on drugs and drug addiction.

“I am writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and in the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap. I am off junk in sickness or in health so long as we both shall live.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1959)

The Deposition contains an account of the cure and describes the role of apomorphine as an antidote to the “Sickness.” Ginsberg felt the Deposition went too far and wrapped up Naked Lunch too neatly. He also doubted the Deposition’s sincerity. Reading the letters of the period, one gets the sense that Burroughs protested too much in defending the Deposition as an accurate, honest account of his true feelings. By 1991, Burroughs retracted his statement that he did not remember writing the notes that became Naked Lunch. The con appears to be on, but as Oliver Harris demonstrates in The Secret of Fascination, generations of critics have been willing marks parroting the Deposition into the critical record verbatim. In some cases, they have even misrepresented the Deposition, in which Burroughs admits to backsliding into addiction after the cure. Apomorphine was far from the miracle drug that Burroughs made it out to be — and, as we will see, he also left out a key component of the history of its use. It all suggests that Burroughs’ championing of apomorphine as an effective cure may have stemmed, at least on one level, from a desire to portray himself as drug-free and thereby stay out of jail.

But there is more to the story of apomorphine and to Burroughs’ insistence of being clean than simple legal expedience. Burroughs felt the need to be drug-free before his trouble with the law in late 1959. As the letters demonstrate, Burroughs realized he was on the road to terminal addiction by late 1955. The depths of Burroughs’ despair and desperation were no con. The trip to London to seek treatment with Dr. Dent was necessary on the level of survival.

Yet the need to be clean was also closely tied to Burroughs’ strong desire to be a successful author published by the Establishment, i.e. corporate publishers. The letters from the mid-1950s are full of references to Burroughs’ desire to gain mainstream acceptance as a writer. At this time, Burroughs associated writing with respectability and social acceptance. By becoming a writer, Burroughs could redeem himself (for the death of Joan, for being a poor father, for not supporting himself financially) and give himself a place in society. Writing was a means to conform, and Burroughs felt the need to fit in strongly. The image of the opium-addicted writer held an allure for Burroughs from an early age. As he struggled with the form and content of Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs’ drug addiction not only hampered his ability to write, it also symbolized his sick creativity and his inability to write straight narrative and commercially viable material. Apomorphine, as a means of curing his drug addiction, was thus a way for Burroughs to free himself to write. In a sense, kicking drugs was a way of going mainstream and being respectable. First, the cure would facilitate the act of writing and then possibly open the door to writing of a less sick and more popular nature.

Apomorphine tied into getting straight in another, less obvious manner. In the early days of the 20th century, apomorphine was used by doctors as part of a treatment to cure patients of their homosexuality. In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell mentions this fact in passing and suggests that Burroughs would have been aware of this aspect of apomorphine’s history. Burroughs never discussed it. In the Deposition, Burroughs states that historically the only use for apomorphine was as an emetic for poisoning. Not true, and given the fact that Burroughs was briefly a medical student and that he was intensely interested in medical history, the assumption that Burroughs knew apomorphine’s full history is not far-fetched. Currently, apomorphine is being used to combat erectile dysfunction (Uprima). Clearly, there is a strong sexual aspect to apomorphine’s history and its side effects. Apomorphine’s sexual component coupled with withdrawal symptoms must be an intense shock to the system. Burroughs ignored these elements of apomorphine in his published writing on the subject, but not in his letters.

Immediately following the apomorphine cure in London in 1956, there are several references in Burroughs’ letters to changes in his sex drive. In his first letter after the cure, Burroughs writes, “The thought of sex with anyone gives me the horrors… Last night went to a ghastly queer party where I was pawed and propositioned by a 50-year-old Liberal MP. I told him, ‘I couldn’t sleep with Ganymede now, let alone you.’” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 8, 1956) A week later Burroughs reports to Ginsberg, “Still no interest in sex.” I am unaware if apomorphine was used by doctors as an aversion technique to combat homosexual impulses, but in Burroughs’ case the apomorphine experience did lead to a type of sexual conditioning. In the months after the cure, Burroughs’ sex drive returned as did his sexual activities with “boys.” However, as the letters show, a heterosexual element in his sexual make-up surfaced at this point. Burroughs writes, “Still no interest in sex. I am physically able you dig, just not innarested. When I look at a boy nothing happens. Ratty lot of boys they got here anyhoo. Maybe when I come around to it, I want women.” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 15, 1956)

Over the next year, Burroughs underwent a period of intense sexual questioning. For example:

So suddenly a wave of sex come over me and I have a spontaneous orgasm strap my vitals. Now a spontaneous, walking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made in Texas. And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It”s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old character find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out in the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “who you think you’re kidding with the queer act. I know you, baby.” What it is as Allah wills… (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 15, 1956).

One might assume that this quote is another Burroughsian routine full of irony and black humor, but the references to heterosexual impulses in the letters are too numerous to discount as mere joking. Clearly just after his apomorphine experience, Burroughs experienced a crisis of sexual identity. It may not be possible to say whether this can be directly attributed to apomorphine, but apomorphine, sexual identity, and the form of Naked Lunch will all be interrelated by late 1957. Burroughs’ sexual questioning strikes me as very similar to the crisis Ginsberg experienced just before the breakthrough of Howl in 1955. Famously, Ginsberg met with his analyst and openly discussed his desire to live as a poet and more importantly as a gay poet despite his attempts to play it straight. Ginsberg’s analyst stated that nothing was stopping him. This advice encouraged Ginsberg on the path to sexual freedom and the poetic vision of Howl occurred shortly thereafter.

Similarly the feverish development of Naked Lunch occurred during a period of uncertainty regarding sexual identity. As Burroughs questioned his sexuality, Naked Lunch poured forth “like dictation.” In addition the desire to go straight sexually paralleled a desire to once and for all straitjacket Naked Lunch into the form and themes of the conventional novel. In early 1957, Burroughs was seriously examining his homosexuality. Burroughs writes,

All the etiology of my homosex and practically everything spill right out of me. Quotes from last night majoun high: “So what’s holding him up? — homosex orientation — Some old tired synapse pattern won’t go to its home like it’s supposed. There must be an answer, I need the answering device. I think I can arrange but it will be expensive. Modern Oedipus.” This give me an out already, I can put down the old whore and hump some young Crete gash heat my toga like the dry goods of Nexus, you might say Nexus had the rag on.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Jan. 31, 1957)

In late 1957, Burroughs examined Naked Lunch‘s form and determined to make yet another effort to conform and contain Naked Lunch. As a result, Burroughs developed The General Theory of Addiction. He writes, “At present I am working on Benway and Scandinavia angles, also developing a theory of morphine addiction… Incidentally, this theory resulted from necessities of the novel. That is scientific theories and novel are inseparable. What I am evolving is a general theory of addiction which expands into a world picture with concepts of good and evil.” (Letter to Ginsberg Sept. 20, 1957). The answer to Burroughs’ sexual and literary questioning was the General Theory of Addiction. This theory was tied to Burroughs’ sexual crisis and the form of Naked Lunch. Burroughs writes, “Briefly, the novel concerns addiction and an addicting virus that is passed from one person to another in sexual contacts. The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on an assembly-line basis.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Aug. 27, 1957)

The General Theory of Addiction derived directly from Burroughs’ apomorphine experience and related to the pioneering work of Dr. Dent, Anxiety and Its Treatment. “The Theory of Addiction is, incidentally, correct, in essentials. I received a letter from Wolberg, quote… ‘Particularly interesting is your theory about cancer and schizophrenia. I have made no study of this, but telephoned a friend who works for a large mental institution. He said the incidence of cancer among schizophrenics is appreciably lower than among non-schizophrenics.’ The importance of this one fact is immeasurable. My theory contains the key to addiction, cancer, and schizophrenia. I have not yet heard from Doctor Dent.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 19, 1957) Keep in mind this theory developed from “the necessities of the novel.” Even at this late date, Burroughs strongly felt the need to subject Naked Lunch to the restraints of the novel. The desire for literary form was also related to his desire to conform sexually.

In a key letter written on October 8, 1957, Burroughs sent along a copy of his General Theory of Addiction to Ginsberg. Burroughs writes:

I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in a dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say. ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo, I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.

The concept and linking together of sickness and queerness related directly to Burroughs’ apomorphine experience. As this letter demonstrates, the emergence of his heterosexual personality started just after the cure in London. Soon after Burroughs felt himself cured of the Sickness, i.e. drug addiction, he sought to cure himself of his queerness. The time was ripe for Burroughs to conform, to get his life together, and to play it straight. Sickness and illness also refer to the sick, obscene nature of Naked Lunch and its failure to conform to the traditional novel form as well as Naked Lunch‘s troubling (for Burroughs) link to homosexual desire and obsession. The phrase “strait-jacket of flesh” creates a wealth of associations between madness, sickness, homosexuality / heterosexuality, and literary form. As Harris demonstrates, Naked Lunch germinated in Queer (Burroughs’ account of his obsession with Lewis Marker) and his letters to Ginsberg. Burroughs strongly felt the need to cover up those personal elements in Naked Lunch. According to Harris, the junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction did just that. It not only provided a form to the novel, it shifted the focus from homosexual obsession to drug addiction. In a sense, apomorphine provided a means to cure Naked Lunch of its queerness.

By April 1958, Burroughs instructed Ginsberg to include the Benway section and to exclude the theoretical material. In final publication, Burroughs abandoned the General Theory of Addiction framework for Naked Lunch but traces remain in the Benway section. As Harris demonstrates, the General Theory and the related “The Conspiracy” were Burroughs’ last attempts to straitjacket Naked Lunch into the traditional form of the novel. By late 1958, Burroughs realized that his desire to be a writer did not depend on toning down his radical experimentation in literary style and drug use. In fact, those elements were what made Naked Lunch a profoundly obscene masterpiece. Burroughs’ change of heart cannot be separated from his tentative success in getting selections of Naked Lunch published to wide acclaim in little magazines beginning in 1957 and onwards into early 1959. Yet the decision to tone down the elements of homosexual desire remained. On one level, this was achieved by eliminating references to the epistolatory origins of the novel. That said, the novel as published by Burroughs in 1959 was a radical one, as much anti-novel as novel.

Yet Burroughs’ troubles with obscenity laws in 1959, in addition to his problems with drug laws (discussed above), would lead to a reassessment of Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ re-insertion of apomorphine into the text. Burroughs strongly desired the publication of the complete Naked Lunch in the United States. Concessions had to be made to render Naked Lunch palatable to American courts and the reading public. The Deposition and to a lesser extent the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” serve this purpose. In a sense, Burroughs reintroduced the General Theory of Addiction into the novel. According to Harris, this paradigm completely overshadows the other more transgressive aspects of Naked Lunch, in essence de-radicalizing it, de-sexualizing it, and de-toxifying it. First, the Deposition de-radicalizes the text by providing a means to analyze and to interpret the book. Burroughs provides a blueprint (whether con or not) for critics and readers to approach the novel. In addition, the Deposition de-sexualizes the book by taking the focus off of the homosexual obsession that formed the basis for the novel. A framework based on drug addiction replaces the sexuality of the letter economy. In the various obscenity trials surrounding Naked Lunch, doctors testified that the novel presented an accurate portrayal of the junk / drug problem. With the introduction of apomorphine, Burroughs could not be accused of immorality since he provided a solution to the problem he presented. The book was no longer obscene but instead was a public service message on a major problem facing contemporary society. The account of apomorphine effectively cures the novel of its Sickness (queerness, obscurity, immorality, and drug abuse). In essence the novel itself undergoes Dr. Dent’s cure and emerges reborn.

As the opening pages of APO-33 Bulletin: a Metabolic Regulator make clear, the Deposition and other writings on apomorphine of the Naked Lunch era left a bad taste in Burroughs’ mouth. The accepted reason is that Burroughs did not make the case for apomorphine strongly enough, since he did not implicate law enforcement and the medical community in the blackballing of his miracle drug. That may be true, but I cannot help sensing that Burroughs also felt that these writings came on much too strong and revealed too much. In APO-33, Burroughs explains his failure regarding apomorphine as an overestimation of his popularity potential. In essence, Burroughs tried to be respectable and mainstream. He played to the audience, so he watered down his beliefs about apomorphine. Yet he also pandered to “popularity” in another manner. Burroughs altered and molded the popular perception of himself and his troublesome novel for the benefit of the legal system in drug and obscenity trials. Burroughs may have realized that these pieces discussing apomorphine attached to Naked Lunch diminished the diabolical power of his novel.

By 1965, the time to kow-tow to popular and legal opinion was over. By being the most notorious author in the world, Burroughs had paradoxically achieved an element of respectability. He was a financial and critical success. The legal battles were basically over. Maybe Burroughs felt apomorphine had to be rescued from the squares and injected with the radical spirit. In the work of the 1960s, apomorphine no longer just embodied and played a role in a junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction. It represented a new theory, but a theory grounded in process: the cut-up technique. As I demonstrated in my earlier column on apomorphine, the drug became symbolic of this experimental technique. Works like APO-33 returned to the radical nature of Naked Lunch. Radical in form and in process of composition. The apomorphine experience was no longer utilized as a straitjacket. Given its non-commercial and disorienting nature, Burroughs’ work of this period was once again considered unreadable and beyond the forces of readerly control. And for Burroughs, apomorphine once again became a cure, this time for the sickness of Language and the Word.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There are times in your reading life when you dabble in a book, dip into it periodically, put it down, and come back to it. Your experience with the book is leisurely, casual. You are chipping. The book does not have a strong hold on you. Then one day you turn to the book again, and next thing you know, you are hooked. The book has become essential, an obsession, a part of your daily thoughts and life.

This series of events just occurred to me with William Burroughs’ neglected cut-up APO-33 Bulletin, A Metabolic Regulator. I wrote about APO-33 before, but I focused on its printing history, especially the aborted Fuck You Press edition (entitled Health Bulletin: APO-33, a Metabolic Regulator). I see the book in a different light now, and I see why Ed Sanders and Fuck You Press had to have a crack at it. I have read it much more closely and examined it in light of Burroughs’ publishing activity in the mid-1960s, the period of his most sustained relationship with the mimeo revolution. As a result, APO-33 and the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period are now key Burroughs texts for me. I believe they are pivotal for understanding Burroughs as a writer.

So what changed? Why did APO-33 suddenly rush into my head with all the force of a crashing wave? In a word: speed. Yup, amphetamine. Not taking it, but reading about the history of it. A few months ago I picked up two books on drug history. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine by Nicolas Rasmussen. Shroom is the more reader-friendly book. It is written for the casual reader in an engaging, welcoming style. Timothy Leary is in there. Allen Ginsberg is featured. Aldous Huxley plays a role, as does Robert Graves who wrote The White Goddess. There are a few minor mentions of Burroughs.

Letcher briefly discusses Yage as another example of a natural psychedelic, but no Burroughs, Ginsberg, or The Yage Letters in this context. Letcher talks of the influence of Carlos Castaneda, Graves, and Huxley in bringing natural psychedelics to the masses. But surely the 1963 City Lights edition of The Yage Letters was another bible for the burgeoning psychedelic generation. Not to mention the fact that Burroughs was exploring this terrain, geographic and psycho-pharmacological, in the early 1950s along with, and in some cases alongside, the pioneers in the field: Richard Evans Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson. Ginsberg and Leary captured a lot of the headlines in the 1960s and dominate much of the cultural history of the psychedelic era, but Burroughs, despite his dismissal and distrust of drugs like LSD, and maybe because of his critical eye on hallucinogens, must be at least the equal of Leary and Ginsberg in cultural importance. No doubt he was their superior in theorizing about the significance of psychedelics.

On Speed also mentions Burroughs only in passing, but reading this book helped further my appreciation of Burroughs and turned APO-33 into a key text for me. Most people do not associate Burroughs with speed. His son Billy Jr. wrote the book on amphetamine, but, as with psychedelics, Burroughs was at the beginning of speed culture in the United States. The proto-Beat group of Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker, and Herbert Huncke were early users and abusers of speed in the mid-1940s. Vollmer was the first woman with a reported case of speed psychosis in New York State in 1945. Much has been written on the importance of speed in Kerouac’s writing in terms of style and process, but it was Huncke who played a key role in speed culture in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s that involved writers such as Alex Trocchi, Peter Orlovsky, and Janine Pommy Vega. This circle probably helped spawn more creatively productive scenes, like Warhol’s Factory and the Second Generation New York writers who gathered around Ted Berrigan.

I have always found these amphetamine scenes to be extremely important, and the key role of speed on the creative output and thinking of these groups ought to be examined. Can the writing that we know as distinctly Kerouacian be separated from Kerouac’s use of speed? The same goes for Warhol. For example, the movie Sleep becomes much more complex when viewed in light of amphetamine use. These topics are treated in Rasmussen’s book, but his focus is really on speed’s relationship to the history of the pharmaceutical and medical industry. It was this discussion that seemed truly Burroughsian.

Amphetamine was one of the first drugs developed and marketed by the modern pharmaceutical industry. At its beginnings, speed had no true medical value. Early on, companies tried to market it as an anti-asthma drug (Benzedrine inhalers). Speed never really worked in that capacity, however, and the inhalers were abused to get high. For decades the drug companies and doctors knew of amphetamine’s addicting qualities and its dangers for abuse. But the drug was patented, and the patent was purchased cheaply. As a result, speed was very profitable for the manufacturers, who colluded with the medical industry to champion speed’s benefits and to downplay its dark side. Speed became the first anti-depressant, a weight-loss drug, and a potential cure for addiction.

From Speed to Apomorphine

Clearly, this is right in Burroughs’ wheelhouse, and Rasmussen’s discussion of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession applies directly to apomorphine. In The Job, a series of interviews with Burroughs conducted by Daniel Odier, Burroughs bluntly states why he believes apomorphine is not being used as an anti-addiction medication.

Q: What is the opinion of pharmaceutical researchers on the merits of apomorphine?

A: Pharmaceutical researchers are told what research to pursue by vested interest, which gives orders to the American Narcotics Department. Billions for variations on the Benzedrine formula, for tranquilizers of dubious value, not ten cents for a drug that has unlimited potentials not only in treating addiction but in handling the whole problem of anxiety.

Burroughs also states why the companies that produce apomorphine fail to promote and market it on a large scale: “They can sell all the products they produce in any case. Remember, these pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in illness. Drugs that strike at the very root of illness are dangerous.” These two statements get to the heart of the history described in Rasmussen’s book. After finishing the book, I returned to APO-33 in earnest and started to dig into the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period.

Burroughs contributed two cut-ups to Aram Saroyan’s mimeo mag, Lines, in 1965. Issue 5 features “Chlorhydrate d’apomorphine chabre” and “Rex Morgan M.D.” The latter presents two scrapbook pages that contain the fragment of a short story. (This prose piece does not appear in Maynard & Miles or Shoaf.) In the scrapbook Burroughs includes a single frame from a Rex Morgan comic that deals with the topic of addiction, namely alcoholism. Not coincidentally, Dr. John Yerbury Dent, who treated Burroughs with apomorphine in 1956, first used the drug to treat alcoholics. Burroughs portrays Morgan as forward-thinking and searching for better drug solutions. When he receives a new tranquilizer, Dr. Morgan dismisses it as not treating the problem and as having “doubtful value.” Along with a sample of apomorphine comes a “circular… in blue print with some passages in red for emphasis.” The packaging for the apomorphine describes its uses and its benefits as an anti-anxiety medication and a metabolic regulator. As Dr. Morgan settles in his office, he becomes aware that a beatnik suffered a bad trip on LSD. Dr. Morgan gathers his things and leaves to treat the patient. He takes the apomorphine with him. The story abruptly ends there but one suspects that Dr. Morgan used the apomorphine to successfully regulate the beatnik metabolism. Burroughs provides a feel-good story here, but Rasmussen describes how the pharmaceutical industry flooded doctors with drugs samples of “doubtful value” and encouraged doctors to push them on patients. Similarly, the literature that accompanied the samples was often inaccurate and hyperbolic. APO-33 combats what Burroughs saw as the false information spread by the pharmaceutical companies.

A progressive doctor such as Rex Morgan is opposed by the most famous fictional character in the Burroughsian universe, Dr. Benway. In Naked Lunch Dr. Benway pontificates on drugs, addiction, and anxiety. Also interesting in light of apomorphine is Dr. “Fingers” Schafer the Lobotomy Kid. In Naked Lunch, Dr. Schafer creates the “All-American De-Anxietized Man” with disastrous results. Dr. Dent, the model doctor, wrote a book on the use of apomorphine to combat anxiety: Anxiety and its Treatment. As the promotional literature received by Dr. Morgan makes clear, Burroughs (and Dent) felt apomorphine was a more progressive cure for anxiety-related illnesses than other treatments such as tranquilizers or lobotomy. The promotional literature recommended apomorphine for “grief, anguish, anxiety states, acute drug intoxications and chronic addiction.”

On one level, APO-33 is Burroughs’ enlightened rewriting of the promotional literature of the pharmaceutical companies. In addition, APO-33 provides what Burroughs felt was the real story that the medical industry would publish if it did not need to perpetuate addiction, illness, and anxiety. The back cover and first page of text features the name Chabre, a French pharmaceutical company that produced apomorphine. The front cover posits APO-33 as a report (“A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula”) and a bulletin. Like Time, published by C Press in 1965, the covers of APO-33 reproduce the look and feel of a “circular” that Burroughs believed would be issued by enlightened pharmaceutical companies.

With its incorporation of handwriting and its illegibility, APO-33 also serves as a prescription pad of sorts, prescribing apomorphine as a cure for society’s ills. The various meanings of script would not have been lost on Burroughs. He realized that doctors were pressured to overprescribe dubious medications and in a sense were legal pushers. In addition, he was aware of the power of written language to perpetuate order and rationality — Control.

A Treatment That Cancels Addiction

The opening of APO-33 as published by Beach Books refers to a lost text that served as an appendix to the Italian edition of Junkie published in 1962 (the edition was translated as La scimmia sulla schiena or Monkey on the Back). According to Maynard and Miles, the text was the original version of an essay titled “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.” Burroughs declares in APO-33 that the manuscript was lost and that the text can only be found in La scimmia sulla schiena. Ultimately Burroughs rewrote the essay to publish it in the Fuck You version of APO-33. The entire APO-33 Health Bulletin section of the Fuck You edition was reprinted in the Beach Books version. However, the Beach Books edition excluded “Locked Out of Time” and “Apomorphine Statement 2″, both of which had appeared in the Fuck You edition. (For a complete discussion of the differences between the various editions of APO-33 see Maynard & Miles.) The final version of “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” appeared in the New Statesman (March 4, 1966) and was eventually reprinted in the British edition of The Soft Machine published by Calder in 1968.

Burroughs felt this article was a compromise and a failure. In APO-33 he writes, “I geared [the Italian appendix] to popular appeal being younger you understand I over estimated my ‘popularity potential.’ I did not criticize the American Narcotics Department officials nor the Public Health center at Lexington.” Burroughs laments the fact that his beliefs regarding the corruption of the medical profession were not stated more forcefully and aggressively. Burroughs writes, “My attempt to attribute good will where it patently does not exist proved ill-advised. I see no reason at this point to pull punches in the expectation of popularity.”

Few readers of the various editions of APO-33 would be aware of the original “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” essay. Yet readers of APO-33 might be aware of some other appendices that discuss apomorphine: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” and “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” both of which appeared in the 1962 Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs believed these articles also failed to present the case for apomorphine strongly enough. Burroughs writes, “Feeling that the articles I had written on apomorphine treatment (British Journal of Addiction January 1957 vol. 53 no. 2 page 119, Evergreen Review 1959 reprinted in the American edition of Naked Lunch) were not adequate… ” These failures prompted him to write “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.”

In all these pieces, Burroughs toned down his views and presented his arguments straight. He played nice — nowhere more so than in the British Journal of Addiction. In that venue Burroughs did not expose what he saw as the conspiracy — in which academic journals played a role — against apomorphine. In addition, deliberately or not, the British Journal of Addiction effectively pigeonholed Burroughs as an addict and outsider and thus not truly trustworthy. The requirements of academic writing made Burroughs water down his views and his style, although as Carol Loranger points out, Burroughs’ hip and radical attitude towards drugs and literature comes out.

In spite of the fact that the British Journal had published his views, Burroughs felt that academic journals continued to censor the facts about apomorphine. As On Speed makes clear, articles on amphetamine were in many cases written by doctors and researchers sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. Those companies only released reports that supported their agenda. By the mid-1960s, Burroughs understood that the medical industry was not going to share his and Dr. Dent’s optimistic view of apomorphine. A drug-free, anxiety-free society was unthinkable in the present system. According to Burroughs, the financial and political stakes were too high.

For Burroughs, the academic medical journal was just one more weapon in the hands of the drug establishment. As such, the power of these publications had to be subverted and diminished. Critics have mentioned that Burroughs cut-up his letter from the British Journal of Addiction and incorporated it into APO-33. Burroughs more likely incorporated “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” to greater effect than the letter, but the medical journal, as represented by the British Journal, was very much on Burroughs’ mind in APO-33. This becomes even clearer in the fifth issue of Lines. “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” contains the citation for the issue of the British Journal of Addiction in which Burroughs appeared: Volume 53, No. 2, along with the date of its publication, January 1957. The manuscript page of “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” was printed by offset, so in a sense the text in Lines served as an alternative to the fifty offprints of the “Letter from a Master Addict” that Burroughs received in 1957.

The Dream Police of Poetry

Given the debacle that ensued with the aborted publication of APO-33 by Fuck You Press in 1965, one wonders why Burroughs entrusted Ed Sanders with such a difficult project that tested the capabilities of mimeo as a medium. Clearly the mimeograph was poorly suited to recreate the intricate scrapbook nature of the APO-33 manuscript. Burroughs published another scrapbook piece, Time, with C Press, also in 1965. Ted Berrigan was more successful in pulling off Time by resorting to offset printing, but again Burroughs submitted the manuscript to a mimeo press. Interestingly, much of Burroughs’ writing on apomorphine also appeared as mimeo (usually offprinted copies of original mansucripts). His texts were printed by Fuck You Press, My Own Mag, and Lines. Fellow travelers in the mimeo revolution, like Beach Books run by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, also published apomorphine-related texts. Burroughs’ understanding of the importance of apomorphine cannot be separated from the publications, culture, and spirit of the mimeo revolution in several key respects.

For Burroughs, the suppression of apomorphine was not just the fault of censorship and corruption in pharmaceutical literature and academic journals. He believed the mainstream press was in collusion with the government and medical community in censoring information on apomorphine. In The Job Burroughs states, “The press is working with the Narcotics Department to publicize and spread the drug problem. It is not in their interest to stop this source of copy and circulation by advocating measures that would control addiction and reduce it to a minor health problem. What is the press selling? Violence, sex, and drugs. These items are sure copy. That is to say, effective measures to eliminate criminality or drug-taking are not good copy.” I have discussed elsewhere how the C Press Time represents Burroughs’ attack on the Time-Life media empire and how it was his rewrite of Time magazine, particularly the November 30, 1962 issue that savagely reviewed Naked Lunch. Burroughs saw the suppression of apomorphine as another of the evils perpetuated by corporate media.

The mimeo revolution arose in the post-WWII era in opposition to the consolidation and bureaucratization of print media. Large, corporate, mainstream publishers stifled innovation and radical thought in creative writing in much the same way the medical establishment controlled information about addiction and apomorphine. The mimeograph, as well as the letterpress and cheaper offset printing, allowed writers to take control of their own work and its distribution. Clearly, Burroughs saw the mimeograph and the publications of the mimeo revolution as ideally suited to present the anti-authority and anti-establishment message of APO-33. According to Maynard & Miles, the Fuck You edition features, “a drawing by Sanders built on the Egyptian hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus; at the top is an ankh, the hieroglyph for life, at the bottom a mimeo machine, a hookah, and an ejaculating movie camera.” This was Sanders’ “TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE.” The mimeo press subverted and provided an end-around the corporate media that Burroughs felt was suppressing apomorphine.

Yet the relationship between apomorphine and the mimeo revolution goes deeper than that. In Burroughs’ mind, apomorphine was ideologically similar to mimeo. In The Apomorphine Times, a newspaper supplement edited by Burroughs and included in My Own Mag Issue Twelve, Burroughs writes of apomorphine: “Like a good policeman, apo-morphine does its work and goes.” APO-33 contains a picture of Burroughs with the caption “in a policeman’s bed sitter.” The “Rex Morgan, M.D.” cut-up also contains a reference to the good policeman as well as the phrase “So he takes over newsmagazine… The way we like to see.” The concept of the good policeman deserves a little explanation. To those familiar with Burroughs’ distaste for the law, his belief in a good policeman can be confusing. On one level, the phrase refers to an effective policeman. In that sense, like a policeman, apomorphine would rid society of addicts and pushers and help wipe out the junk paradigm. But Burroughs realized that the police (as force of control, as bureaucracy) were also part of the problem. In this light, the good policeman refers to the ideal or beneficial policeman in the Burroughsian universe. The ideal policeman is not intrusive; he does what business he has to do and goes. He does not attempt to increase or perpetuate the power of an established entity. Ideally, society and its members would mind their own business and tend to it without a bureaucratic police force. That Burroughsian ideal may be impossible. “The police are a necessary evil,” as Gregory Corso writes in his poem “Police.”

Apomorphine was a drug that steadied the system and then left no trace. It was not addictive. Burroughs went to great pains to state that apomorphine was not an aversion therapy and was non-invasive. The key term is metabolic regulator. Like the ideal policeman, apomorphine regulated without attempting to exert control or to extend its power or influence. Methadone was addictive and thus not a good policeman. Likewise, LSD altered the consciousness and thus left a trace on the system. Burroughs makes clear apomorphine’s role as ideal regulator in APO-33. He writes, “Like a good policeman apomorphine does its work and goes. Yes we of the Nova Police do our work and go.”

Burroughs links the “policeman” concept to mimeo productions. This becomes clear in a magazine like The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs edited this magazine-within-a-magazine that appeared in issue 12 of My Own Mag. The Apomorphine Times includes a four-square fold-in text. Burroughs writes, “(sexless providence supported by the rich. Policemen jumped out on them.) From Afternoon Ticker Tape My Magazine published by J. Nuttall of London Not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues after which it sank under the dead grey sludge of its own prose. The cadaver was has been however resuscitated in New York under the name I believe of The National Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Buckley…”

Therefore a close reading of The Apomorphine Times reveals that Burroughs viewed the products of the mimeo revolution, be it a little magazine or a scrapbook like Time, as “good policemen,” a print version of apomorphine. Like apomorphine, mimeo mags did their job and disappeared. Mimeo is generally a guerilla strike on the literary, social and political landscape. They only last a handful of issues (two in the case of “The Burrough”) and they fade away. In addition their ephemeral, fragile nature ensures that they will not last although their effect lingers on. For Burroughs, the alternative press of the mimeo revolution was a good policeman that combats the Time-Life machine.

For quite some time Burroughs had seen a strange relationship between law and the little magazine. In 1958, Burroughs dreamed of starting his own little magazine with Gregory Corso. They were going to call it Interpol after the international police organization. In a letter of September 28, 1958 cowritten by Corso and Burroughs, Corso writes that “‘the poet is becoming a policeman.’” This idea is clearly Burroughs’ own as Corso places this phrase in quotes and attributes the policeman / poet idea to Burroughs later on (“like Bill says we’re policemen”). Burroughs writes, “When the Human Image is threatened, The Poet dictates the forms of survival. Dream police of poetry protect us from The Human Virus. The human virus can now be isolated and treated. This is the work of The New POLICE-POET.”

What we see here is Burroughs and Corso subverting and complicating terms and organizations like the police and Interpol through a creation of and takeover of media. This is a process known as détournement. This idea was the most used weapon of the Situationists. In the mid-1960s Burroughs was on the fringes of this group with his work with Alexander Trocchi and The Sigma Project. Works like Time and APO-33 are textbook examples of détournement.

This technique was particularly productive for Gregory Corso at the time. This is the period of poems like “Power,” “Army,” “Marriage,” “Hair,” “Bomb” and, particularly interesting for this discussion, “Police.” Corso explored the fascination / repulsion of these charged concepts and attempted to turn them to his advantage and make them hip. In APO-33, Burroughs similarly examined the word fix. Burroughs was clearly ambivalent about the police. He attempted to join the OSS and he was intrigued / repulsed by agents and operatives. He wrote in a private eye style in Junkie. In addition he examined the role of the police as part of the junk paradigm and as agent of control throughout his writing life. Possibly like Corso, Burroughs realized that the “police are a necessary evil.” But an enlightened / ideal / hip police, i.e. a good policeman. Thus the concept “Police-Poet. Given Corso’s reverence for Shelley, we can see links to Shelley’s concept of the poet as the Legislator of the World which itself is an old concept that dates back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. Interpol as magazine would be the publishing outlet for “Police-Poets”, i.e. hip policemen.

In “Police” Corso writes, “My father’s indifference, Rosalind Russell’s stardom / the great, big circulation of the News, the Mirror / I praised the police their backing, their fame —” Corso here acknowledges that the police derive their power and authority from patriarchy, apathy, and the mass media. Poems like “Police” and a projected magazine such as Interpol would explore and “detourne” those relationships. Burroughs took the idea of Interpol into the 1960s. He titled his newspaper supplement to My Own Mag, “The Burrough.” The title suggests the FBI or the Bureau, another reference to a policing organization. Little magazines enacted the concept of the good policeman, an ideal regulator that monitored the cultural, political, and spiritual aspects of society as a whole from a position outside the existing system. Mimeo and the little mag helped keep society honest and straight. Burroughs saw that the little mag and apomorphine served the same function.

Cut-Ups: The Complete Picture

It seems obvious to me that a full understanding of Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique is in the infant stage. With almost all the focus on the cut-up trilogy as published by Grove Press and with nearly a blind eye to any cut-up published in little mags, the picture of Burroughs’ experiments cannot be completed. Oliver Harris has started to dig into Minutes to Go (as well as some of the little mags), but The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, and the material in the more obscure little mags, particularly the mimeos (ones not included in White Subway, The Burroughs File, or Ports of Entry) are largely unexplored territory. Even a collector runs into seemingly insurmountable obstacles in attempting to tell the cut-up story. The Fuck You edition of APO-33 apparently differs substantially from the Beach Books version. But copies of the Fuck You edition are so rare that they are as good as lost. The Burroughs scholar must be an archeologist of sorts. Library holdings need to be opened up and utilized. The completely untouched manuscripts of and letters on the cut-up in the New York Public Library and elsewhere must be made available to interested readers.

Previous scholarship, such as that by Christopher Land and Timothy Murphy, would greatly benefit from taking these under-studied cut-ups into account. In “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control,” Christopher Land outlines Burroughs’ theory of language and the role of the cut-up in subverting the control of the Word. Other critics, such as Timothy Murphy, have done the same. For Burroughs, the cut-up subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened up the potential of space. The cut-up was an attempt to break down the apparent coherence of language. The experiments published in little mags best represent this aspect of the cut-up and best demonstrate the cut-up in practice. The cut-up trilogy straightjackets the cut-up into the form of the novel. The block paragraphs force the reader to approach the cut-up from left to right onward down the page and forward through the codex. This is precisely “the trap of linear, narrative time” that Burroughs hoped to explode with the cut-up. APO-33 provides much more freedom for the reader. The three-column format can be read across columns or from top to bottom. In addition, columns on a page connect within the page or across to other pages thus introducing several options of approaching the text. “Rex Morgan, MD” can be read like a painting or a projective verse poem. APO-33 and the Apomorphine Times present cut-ups in a grid format. The reader can process these texts “any which way” or even take the scissors to them and reenact the process of the cut-up. Such texts challenge the format of the book in ways the cut-up trilogy does not. It can be argued whether the cut-up as practiced by Burroughs successfully enacted his theories (as Oliver Harris does in “Cutting Up Politics,” published in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization). Yet the final judgment on the cut-ups cannot be handed down without moving away from the novels and digging into the magazines and, even more importantly, the manuscripts and letters.

I want to closely examine a single page of the Beach Books edition of APO-33 to highlight the critical potential of this unexplored material. The back cover of APO-33 contains the phrase “pellets sublinguaux chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine.” This refers to a tablet of apomorphine to be taken orally, dissolved under the tongue. The suggestion of dropping APO-33 highlights a link to LSD. In Lines 5, Burroughs also draws parallels between LSD and apomorphine. Like LSD-25, APO-33 is a consciousness-expanding drug of sorts, but according to Burroughs, apomorphine is the more beneficial drug and does not contain LSD’s baggage. Burroughs distrusted psychedelics. As demonstrated in The Job, Burroughs viewed LSD as physically dangerous. It was engulfed in vague theorization and lulled users into a sense of peace, love, and complacency. In contrast, apomorphine is to Burroughs a “good policeman” and a metabolic regulator. It reduces anxiety, clears the mind, induces sanity, and is non-addictive. It does its job and goes. No flashbacks.

More importantly the word “sublinguaux” suggests Burroughs’ theories of the sub-vocal and sub-language. Land writes, “At one level, Burroughs focuses on our everyday subvocalizations, the internal monologue that provides a narrative sense of personal, subjective continuity which we think of as ‘our self.’ These subvocalizations simultaneously come from outside, hence the notion that they are a viral infection and constitute an inside: the subject ‘I’.” The French word allows Burroughs to get across these ideas in a creative manner. In addition “sublinguaux” conjures up the idea of subverting language. Burroughs viewed the apomorphine as the cut-up in drug form. In “Rex Morgan M.D.” in Lines 5, there is a picture of Burroughs with the caption Dr. Zeit. Zeit is German for Time. The picture and caption in a cut-up about apomorphine highlights Burroughs’ belief that the drug subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened the potential of space. For Burroughs, apomorphine regulated the human body just as the cut-up regulated the power of the word. Land writes, “[A]pomorphine was the perfect way of regulating the addict’s metabolism and silencing the screams of his inner demons. Within the context of Burroughs’ concerns with control and language, the idea of ‘apomorphine silence’ seems suggestive of a balanced state of self-governance without a governed self that is itself the product of control.” The miracle drug cured the addiction to subvocalization. Apomorphine provided silence. Therefore Burroughs felt apomorphine acted in a similar manner to that of the cut-up technique. It was the cut-up in the form of a pill.

According to Burroughs, mimeo was another metabolic regulator. APO-33, as radical anti-establishment text, was ideologically compatible with mimeo. The back cover of APO-33 by Beach Books captures this dynamic. The page triangulates Chabre, Beach Books, and City Lights Books. Chabre is a French pharmaceutical company that manufactured and distributed apomorphine (in pellets sublinguaux) for the European market. It should be noted that “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine chabre” in Lines 5 has been mistitled “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine cham bre” in Maynard & Miles. The mistake is crucial and covers up some of the associations that can be made from this valuable and unstudied cut-up. The reference to Chabre provides Burroughs with a realistic touch to make APO-33 look like establishment medical literature. It functions like the cover of Time that takes the image of the November 30, 1962 edition and cuts it up. The presence of Beach Books and City Lights as distributors of APO-33 twists and subverts the corporate associations of Chabre. APO-33 is truly anti-establishment, a product of the alternative press. For Burroughs, the presses of the mimeo revolution serve as alternative sources of information and correctives to the establishment.

I hope both casual readers and critics will come around to experiencing the power of Burroughs’ cut-ups outside of the cut-up trilogy. In my opinion, much of the negative reception of the cut-up is due to the fact that most readers have only experienced the technique in the form of a novel. The cut-up is used to best effect in short pieces, particularly the offprints of scrapbook pages, like those published in the presses of the mimeo revolution. In addition, the ideology of the cut-up as Burroughs saw it is more in line with the ideology and spirit of the mimeo revolution than that of corporate publishing and the form of the novel that it promotes. Readers need to explore beyond the cut-up novels published by Grove. In support of that goal, APO-33, as published by Beach Books in 1968, is reproduced here in its entirety. I also encourage readers to go to digital archive run by Craig Dworkin, Eclipse, to view the apomorphine texts in Lines. (Lines 5 | Rex Morgan | Chlorhydrate d’Apormphine Chabre) Of course, the complete My Own Mag is available on RealityStudio. These resources will provide enjoyment for the casual reader, valuable information for the scholar, and encouragement for libraries and institutions.

Postscript: Wouldn’t You

Just after finishing this piece, I stopped by the Baltimore Book Fair. You never know what might turn up. By and large it was a wash for Burroughs material but I talked to Tom Congalton of Between the Covers for a bit and browsed through his booth. As usual he had the best books in the finest condition. He had a signed Grove Naked Lunch, but a lesser known Burroughs item caught my attention. Tom had a slightly beat up copy of LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug. The book was edited by David Solomon and published by G.P. Putnam in 1964. Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Humphry Osmond contributed essays. Clearly, the book had some problems: some rubbing, a large chip, some creasing — but the timing was dead on. This anthology contains Burroughs’ text “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs.” The essay was later reprinted in Evergreen Review 34. In this article, Burroughs mentions apomorphine as a means to increase the psychedelic experience and decrease anxiety. It was Burroughs in “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” mode. Yet another go-around with the straight press before Burroughs turned to the mimeo press in 1965 for his apomorphine crusade. For me, it was the perfect book at the perfect moment.

One of the benefits of a book fair or a bookstore is that you can see the book for yourself. You are not dependent on the bookseller’s descriptions. In this case, handling the book was key. The book had an ownership inscription by Jack Ward, MD. That sold the book for me. The signature captured the culture that I was describing in my apomorphine piece. A doctor’s copy of an anthology of academic articles by progressive medical researchers and literary explorers — it was Rex Morgan, MD in real life. The idea that practicing doctors were aware of Burroughs’ work on drugs (be it Naked Lunch or more academic pieces), and particularly apomorphine, was fascinating to me.

And then it got better. I googled Dr. Ward and LSD, and lo and behold, it turns out Dr. Ward was the American equivalent of Dr. John Yerbery Dent. Dr. Ward practiced at the Carrier Clinic in New Jersey. Founded in 1910, this clinic treated mental disorders and drug addiction in a private setting. While I found no connection between Dr. Ward and apomorphine, he was at the forefront of experimenting with LSD for medical uses such as curing alcoholism. Dr. Ward personally met with Humphry Osmond, a pioneer in LSD research in a medical setting (Osmond contributed the article “Psychopharmacology: The Manipulation of the Mind” to the anthology). Ward himself contributed “A Case of Change and Partial Regression Following One LSD 25 Treatment” to The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, an anthology like Solomon’s published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1967.

So the book was chipped and creased. On that level it was far from the ideal collector’s copy, but like all great collectibles, this book captured a moment and told a story beyond its pages and dust jacket. I could not have had a better ending to my research into Burroughs, apomorphine and APO-33. I had to buy it despite the condition. Wouldn’t you?

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Published by Auerhahn Press in 1960, The Exterminator is one of the forgotten texts of Burroughs’ bibliography. Roughly 1000 copies were printed in the first edition, and I would gather that few of even the most dedicated Burroughs fans have ever read it. Many people get this slim volume confused with the more common Exterminator! Readers who go beyond Naked Lunch and Junkie are probably familiar with Exterminator! as the book is currently in print and often turns up at chain stores such as Borders. This makes sense as Exterminator! heralded Burroughs’ tentative steps into the world of mainstream publishing. The book was issued by Viking in 1973. Not surprisingly, this title is rather conservative in form, content, and packaging when compared to the radical experimentation in independent publishing venues of the preceding decade. It is basically a short story collection.

If The Exterminator is a forgotten text, Dave Haselwood is something of a forgotten publisher. His Auerhahn Press aspired to join high-quality printing with experimental writing. Building on the solid foundations of Circle, Ark and the printing work of the refugees from the Waldport Camp, like William Everson, printing in San Francisco exploded after the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the mid-1950s. Joe Dunn and later Graham Mackintosh ran White Rabbit Press. Robert Hawley began Oyez Press in 1963. A year later, Donald Allen started the Four Seasons Foundation. Little magazines, like Semina, Open Space and J Magazine flourished. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Haselwood’s press was a shining light in this vibrant San Francisco publishing scene. His books were beautifully done and according to some expensive. Andrew Hoyem cut his teeth working with Haselwood on Auerhahn Press titles in 1961. Yet time has dimmed the glimmer of Auerhahn Press. Somehow printers, like Hoyem and Mackintosh, have become household names in printing circles, and the legacy of Haselwood gets relegated to the shadows, rarely to be seen or heard from, like the bird from which the press takes its name.

How can this be possible when you take into consideration the titles and authors Haselwood published? Auerhahn began with John Wieners’ The Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958. Right off the bat the press printed a landmark work in post-WWII avant poetry. In addition, from the beginning Auerhahn had a signature look and feel. I love the cover photograph by Jerry Burchard. It reminds me of Charles Rotmil‘s cover of Bob Thompson for Kulchur 2. In fact, Haselwood had a way of publishing what became iconic cover images. This might be because Haselwood had the good sense to utilize the talents of Wallace Berman, Robert LaVigne and Bruce Conner. The covers of Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras and Philip Lamantia’s Narcotica are amazing. These are some of the most recognizable photos by Berman. If you didn’t get it for Christmas, get Wallace Berman’s Photographs. It came out late last year on the heels of the excellent Wallace Berman and his Circle. Do yourself a favor and get both. They are fantastic.

In addition to multiple works by McClure and Lamantia, Haselwood also published books by Philip Whalen, Charles Olson, Lew Welch, Jack Spicer, and William Everson. After Auerhahn folded, Haselwood continued to publish wonderful titles under his own imprint, Dave Haselwood Books, including Apocalypse Rose by Charles Plymell and Indian Journals by Allen Ginsberg.

Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press has singlehandedly attempted to keep Haselwood and his incredible backlist in the spotlight. Johnston published a bibliography of Auerhahn Press in a beautiful edition. The look of the volume really does Haselwood and Johnston proud. The accompanying text is a treasure trove of information on Auerhahn. Go out and get a copy. While you are at it, pick up Poltroon’s White Rabbit Bibliography and the Zephyrus Image Bibliography as well. These are essential reference works on the San Francisco small press scene in the post-WWII era. If you can dig up a copy, get a hold of Ampersand Volume 16 Number 1 as well. In this issue entitled Beat: A Dead Horse, Johnston interviews the reclusive Haselwood. The quotes from interviews and letters that follow come from the bibliography and Ampersand.

Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up volume was the eighth book published by Auerhahn Press. Haselwood put a little extra into it. The Exterminator can be considered Burroughs’ first fine press edition. In fact a limited edition of the book contained original artwork by Gysin. Roughly octavo-size but thin (only 51 pages) the book has a slight, ethereal quality. This is highlighted by the beautiful wrappers inscribed with Brion Gysin calligraphy in light green on front and back. The white and green covers are delicate, subject to staining and fading. Finding a copy in fine condition is a challenge.

As an object, I feel that The Exterminator is one of Burroughs’ most beautiful publications. Johnston remarks on the book’s typography: “Artistically a minor production Wobbly Rock… was followed by a typographic lapsus: The Exterminator by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose innovations in prose have seldom been paralleled in the typography of their books. Haselwood does approach the coranto immediacy of the later Brion Gysin Let the Mice In… though Exterminator strikes out towards an oversize Olympia paperback. The running commentary in Grotesque points up the blackness of the text, however the unletter spaced Cloister capitals detract from the appearance; the murky Venetians indicate Haselwood’s Kelmscott tendency.” I find the book to be visually arresting. I am reminded of Kyle Schlesinger’s essay on Creeley’s Typography. A similar essay on Burroughs might be in order, particularly about the mimeo publications of the 1960s, despite Johnston’s downplaying of the importance of typography in Burroughs’ work. Not all agree on the beauty of The Exterminator. Haselwood has some reservations about the typography. He states, “The little headlines at the top are all handset but the rest of it was set on a Linotype machine. But you can’t keep track of what is going on anywhere, it just keeps… like diarrhea.” But in his interview, Haselwood draws special attention to the Gysin drawings at the back of the book and admits “it’s worth getting for this part.”

Like many, Haselwood was quite fascinated by Burroughs. Unfortunately, this interest did not extend to the manuscript he received from Burroughs and Gysin. He states, “To tell you the truth I was pissed off that he sent me this manuscript, because I was a great admirer, and wrote to him — because I’d seen Naked Lunch in manuscript — I wrote to him and said I’m a great admirer, I’d met him many years before, and I thought I was going to get something really wonderful, and I got this and I’m afraid I don’t think it’s wonderful, even to this day.”

On the other hand, Burroughs and Gysin were giddy with excitement about the possibilities of the cut-up. The collaborators saw nothing but opportunity and even dollar signs. Haselwood states, “[T]hey thought they would be very rich and famous. Can you imagine, from a cut-up book. God, he must have really been out on smack somewhere at that point. These are almost impossible to read. It was impossible to typeset.” I always find it funny that Burroughs thought his least commercial writing was a potential moneymaker. Burroughs believed The Exterminator would “catch on commercially” and wondered if Auerhahn could handle it. Burroughs writes, “Do you have any connections with recording? Brion and I have both made tape recordings of material in Exterminator I and II. In fact, the repetitive poems could be jukebox sensation.” He thought they would be great on the radio.

As evidenced from the collected letters, Burroughs early on desired to be a bestselling author. He craved acceptance from an audience, be it the general public or, as Oliver Harris demonstrated, Ginsberg or Lewis Marker. This early need for affirmation and the desire to make it big never left Burroughs. These attitudes make Burroughs’ decision to do a Nike ad in 1994 perfectly understandable to me. From the beginning, Burroughs sought to sell out. On one level he never had the opportunity early on. On another level, no matter how hard he tried (and the letters show he tried repeatedly); he just could not write bestseller material. The Ugly Spirit kept getting in the way, as did his faith in the cut-ups. But like his grandfather, Burroughs was an entrepreneur. He wanted to make a buck. It was in his blood. Exterminator fever did not sweep the country although Burroughs received a small royalty check from Haselwood in 1961.

Yet the book must have been something of a success, because Haselwood reissued it in 1967 with much less beautiful wrappers. Missing are the white and green, replaced by a dark blue and red. In my opinion, the color change makes all the difference. Like the 1960 edition, there were 1000 copies in the second edition.

So what does this forgotten text tell us? The Exterminator presents Burroughs at the dawn of his most radically experimental period. The idea of Burroughs as a poet has largely gone unnoticed. This may be due to the rarity of the two key texts in question: Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. But in the time between the Olympia Naked Lunch and the Olympia Soft Machine (late 1959 to mid 1961), Burroughs appeared before the public as much as a poet then as a novelist. Remember Naked Lunch was unavailable in the United States as a complete novel. It remained in essence a short story published in little magazines like Big Table. In fact, The Exterminator was Burroughs’ first book in the United States since the 1953 Ace edition of Junkie. In the little magazine scene, Burroughs the poet is most obviously present in Semina IV, Locus Solus II, and Floating Bear 24. These publications had few readers, but those who received them were probably writers and artists. The Burroughs they would be familiar with would be as much a poet as a novelist. This may helps explain his appeal to, and presence in the publications by, First and Second Generation New Yorkers such as John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. Of course, the poetic elements of Burroughs are beautifully apparent in Naked Lunch, and Burroughs’ interest and mastery of poetry continues into the visual (scrapbooks, three columns) and textual (the novels and shorter prose poems) cut-ups of the mid-1960s.

The Exterminator is a mixture of fiction, essay and poetry. Burroughs described it as a “cosmic opera. Like Gotterdamerung” with themes of junk, viruses and Caryl Chessman. To put a spin on Haselwood’s view, it is a glorious mess of several genres. The Exterminator serves as a transitional work from the poetic experiments of Minutes to Go to the form of the novel in the Soft Machine. It is also the foundation for the more ambitious cut-up works like APO-33, Time, The Third Mind, and The Dead Star. I feel that Burroughs and Gysin’s contributions really mesh well together in The Exterminator. I am reminded of the tagline to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch — “Exterminate all rational thought.” This thin book seeks to shatter the control of the Word. The book opens, “The Human Being are strung lines of word associates that control ‘thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions.’ Quote from Encephalographic Research Chicago Written in TIME. See Page 156 Naked Lunch Burroughs. See and hear what They expect to see and hear because The Word Lines keep Thee in Slots..” Gysin’s permutation poems “Rub Out the Words” and “In the Beginning was the Word” fit in beautifully here as do his drawings that close the book. Burroughs’ interest in the possibilities of glyphs and hieroglyphics (like Pound’s with ideograms or Olson with the Mayans) as alternative forms of communication and representation becomes apparent here. Burroughs would return to this effect at the end of Olympia Press edition of The Ticket That Exploded where that book ends in silence represented by Gysin’s poem morphing into calligraphy (“Silence to say Goodbye”).

From the instant of its rediscovery by Gysin in September 1959, the cut-up technique was in a state of constant flux and rapid development. The work of Minutes to Go quickly overflowed and morphed into the work collected in The Exterminator. Like mercury, the material in The Exterminator refused to remain under Burroughs’ authorial control. The material kept coming and spilled into a possible second volume. Despite Burroughs’ optimism, The Exterminator was destined to be a one-shot deal.

Burroughs described The Exterminator as “Pure abstract literature.” Reading it now, the book feels remarkably current and fresh, like some of the experimental writing published today in the small press scene. Not surprisingly the cut-up technique is a major tool in the avant poet’s toolbox. Oliver Harris points out or suggests much of this in an article in Edinburgh Review Issue 114: “Burroughs is a poet too, really’: The Poetics of Minutes to Go. “ The quote on Burroughs as a poet comes from the 1966 Paris Review interview with Allen Ginsberg. Interestingly, Harris barely mentions The Exterminator. Not too surprising given the confusingly hybrid nature of the book and the more traditionally “poetic” sources, form, and content of Minutes to Go. Clearly, The Exterminator is in danger of becoming a lost work. Too bad in my opinion.

1962 Auerhahn Press Catalog

Auerhahn Press Catalog
Front
1962

Auerhahn Press Catalog
The Exterminator
1962

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Much has been made of the imperiled state of the print publishing industry. Just this weekend I read a review of a large format art book entitled The Last Magazine. Everywhere you look there is an article on the future of the ebook or the death of print. The mainstream publishers are on life support. The small press lacks adequate distribution systems. Meanwhile, fledgling writers cannot get their books into print, mid-list writers are getting squeezed out of the shelves, and the blockbuster authors hold the fate of the large publishers in their hands as they put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). Countless literary blogs bemoan the closing of another independent bookshop. As an email from Robert Bank, subject headed “Disaster!,” informed me, there is another potential nail in the coffin.

The legendary John Calder is in danger of completely shutting up shop. In fact for years, he has curtailed his publishing activities, and his backlist and business operations are in a state of disorganization. Like so many mavericks — I am thinking of Maurice Girodias here, but there are several others — the sense of taste, the desire to upset the status quo, the daring in the face of censorship, the love of fine and experimental literature that make a great publisher do not translate into a financially successful businessman.

Rare is the publisher like John Martin of Black Sparrow who combines sound business acumen with exceptional literary sensibility. But even Martin could not run Black Sparrow forever and larger publishing entities (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins) stepped in to take over the Bukowski, Bowles and Fante titles. This sale allowed Martin to structure a deal to keep the backlist of Black Sparrow available as well.

Has the Black Sparrow arrangement been valuable for all involved (publisher, writer and reader)? I do not know, but Calder, like Martin, has gathered together a stable of writers to which the reading public should demand access. Calder should be rewarded for the foresight and bravery of getting these writers into print. Like Barney Rosset at Grove and Girodias at Olympia Press, Calder opened British borders and Britons’ minds with publications that challenged the censors and the intellect. Some eighty percent of Samuel Beckett’s output is on the Calder list. Like the Bukowski line at Black Sparrow, it looks like a larger publisher, in this case Faber, will come in and make this work available. What about the other writers published by Calder? Could the proceeds of this sale allow Calder to continue his business or make arrangements like John Martin? Calder published and in some cases holds copyright to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Eugene Ionesco, and Henrich Boll. Of additional interest to readers of RealityStudio, Calder brought William Burroughs to British shores, published Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, and holds the rights to various works of Jeff Nuttall.

In the Times article, Calder states, “I am a great believer in chance… Something might come up, to keep us going.” Hopefully so. Calder also states, “I don’t think there’s ever been such a philistine era.” Maybe so. Clearly, there is a crisis in print culture at every level. Print is in a time of remarkable flux and change, maybe as sweeping as that of its birth in the mid-1400s with Gutenberg. I do not know what is going to happen and given all that I have read in books, magazines, and the Web or have heard in conversation at bookstores, libraries, and lectures, I do not think anybody else does either. Clearly, the history of Calder as a publisher and the current precarious position of his titles and his store are a major part of the story at every level.

I would like to celebrate the legacy of Calder in the only way I know how by writing a little about my favorite Burroughs titles published by his company. In previous columns and on another page, I have written about Calder’s immense importance to Burroughs as well as the pleasures of the British firsts. So bear with me if I cover some of the same ground and at the same time fail to provide a more complete look at Calder’s relationship with Burroughs or the history of Calder as a publisher.

As a matter of personal taste, I much prefer the paperback firsts of Burroughs over the hardcovers. I return again and again to the Ace and Digit Junkies, the Two Cities Minutes to Go, Auerhahn’s The Exterminator. Give me the Olympia Press titles over the Grove counterparts. The Calder editions of Burroughs’ work are in some cases an exception to that rule. Calder’s hardcover of Soft Machine is not one of those efforts unfortunately. Quite possibly, this edition is my least favorite Burroughs hardcover. It is the most boring design-wise. But don’t judge a book by its cover, because as the discussion forum makes clear, Burroughs heavily revised Soft Machine from Olympia Press to Grove to Calder. As a result, the British edition is invaluable and a must-have.

Much more interesting on a visual level is the Calder Ticket That Exploded hardcover. This is a very pleasing title and the fact that my copy is inscribed by Burroughs to his British agent at the time makes it more so. Unlike Soft Machine, the British Ticket reprints the Grove edition without further edits. So what lies between the covers proves less interesting to those who possess the American edition. Even so, the cover art that hints in basic design to the Grove dust jacket makes the British first a desirable object.

Dead Fingers Talk published by Calder in boards in 1963 is one of my favorite books soft or hardcover. I find the dust jacket to be stunning. The front reproduces the Olympia Press covers in a montage by Ian Somerville. The manipulation of images by Somerville (reproduction and reduction of the jacket covers into a mosaic of a larger image) parallels the tape experiments of the Beat Hotel period and beyond. The photo of Burroughs on the back cover is haunting, the very representation of el Hombre Invisible. I love the disembodied hand across the cover that bring to my mind Burroughs’s Van Gogh act of the early 1940s when he cut off his finger in an act of desperation and passion.

To my understanding, Dead Fingers Talk is an assemblage of the Olympia Press titles under one cover. Calder issued the book after the international coming-out party of the Edinburgh Writers Conference of 1962 in order to capitalize on Burroughs’ celebrity and to prepare the way for Naked Lunch. Contrary to popular belief, the UGH correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement developed in response to the publication of Dead Fingers Talk, not Naked Lunch. To my great embarrassment, I have never read Dead Fingers Talk since even the 1970s reprint I have is not a true reading copy. Why has this largely unknown title by Burroughs fallen out of print for so long and to my knowledge never been made available in the United States? Hopefully, Calder or another entity will reissue it again in an affordable paperback in Britain and abroad. Secondhand, I have heard that Dead Fingers Talk differs from its original sources, but others have told me that it is a simple cut and paste job. I would like to experience it for myself.

Dead Fingers Talk bears the Calder and Olympia Press imprint. Throughout the fifties and sixties, Olympia Press introduced numerous authors of the Calder and Grove stables first. Olympia Press pornography encompassed some of the best outlaw writing on sex, drugs, and the emerging counterculture. Grove repeatedly reissued the Olympia Press list and Calder did too, most notably with Beckett and Burroughs. As I mentioned above, Girodias, Calder, and Rosset are the three amigos of independent publishing to me. Not only their publications overlap, their personal histories possess many similarities as well.

Every book collection has gaping holes: the empty spaces in the bookshelf waiting for the presently unobtainable, but desperately desired, book. A signed British first of Naked Lunch (1964) is one such title. It is possibly the most obvious gap in my collection. Like Dead Fingers Talk, the Calder (again in association with Olympia Press) Naked Lunch is a visually arresting title, due to the spectral visage of Burroughs on the front cover. The cut-out of Burroughs refers to the cut-up and the red eyes present Burroughs as demonic. The eyes remind me of the Norman Mailer quote that Burroughs was the only American author possessed by genius. The idea of demonic possession threads through Burroughs’ work and his literary theories, most notably and tragically in the introduction to Queer involving the Ugly Spirit.

I love the look of this book even if its white dust jacket makes getting a crisp, bright copy a tough order. I haven’t lacked the opportunity although signed copies hover at the $1000 mark and in some distressing cases double that amount. Unsigned copies are much more common and lately a copy with a wraparound band popped up on eBay. I was unaware of the band, but such added touches are not unheard-of in Burroughs’ publishing history. The Two Cities edition of Minutes to Go should have a wraparound band. Some copies of the Grove Naked Lunch possessed bands as well stating “Recommended for Sale to Adults Only.” These ephemeral pieces are usually torn or even worse missing altogether, ripped apart and thrown in the trash in the process of reading the book.

For much of Calder’s fifty years in publishing, Burroughs has been a defining presence on the maverick publisher’s catalog. Yet this should never be considered a one-sided relationship. Calder was instrumental in introducing Burroughs to a larger audience that extended beyond Great Britain. The Edinburgh Writers’ Conference made Burroughs an international celebrity and Calder continued to champion Burroughs’s work on the world stage from that point on. At one point, Calder nominated Burroughs for the Nobel Prize. If Burroughs would have won such an honor or if he was even seriously considered, the faith and dedication of the fearless Scotsman would have been one of the major reasons why.

by Bill Reed

This is an expanded version of a chapter from Bill Reed’s memoir, Early Plastic. It concerns the Eighth Street Bookshop, an independent Manhattan bookstore that served as a focal point for the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. For more on the bookshop, see Jed Birmingham’s essay Eighth Street Bookshop. For more on Mr. Reed, you can buy his memoir Early Plastic at Amazon.

Staggering through the aisles of today’s giant bookstores, it’s hard not to imagine that most of the merchandise won’t eventually find its way to the nearest Jersey landfill rather than a reader’s night table. Ever since these behemoth-sized emporiums took root in the 1980s, trafficking in assorted lamps, T-shirts, gewgaws, Simone de Beauvoir coffee mugs, Samuel Beckett tote bags, and — oh yes — books, the importance of the printed has become almost a consumerist afterthought. It’s the effect of the literature that these stores sell — a perfume of culture. So omnipresent has this book sales surround become, it almost seems as if — even to those forty and beyond — it has always been with us. But bookstores used to just sell books. And just as importantly, they offered useful information, something nearly impossible to glean from today’s post-literate, cradle-to-grave-minimum-wage chain store clerk. In fact such bookstores of yore, most of which were a quarter of the size of today’s overstuffed bazaars, were often social and cultural gathering-places where literature took precedence over lattes.

Until the early 1970s, nearly all of the large and small bookstores in the U.S. were individually owned and operated. By the end of that decade, however, nearly a seventh of these 7000 independents in the U.S. had shut their doors for good. How could these vertiginously multiplying outfits like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks offer the likes of The Olivia DeHavilland Macrame Cookbook at a price even BELOW wholesale? The answer is simple: volume Volume VOLUME. Then in the ’80s came more chains such as Crown and, in addition, mega-retailers like Walmart and Costco; and in the 1990s, chain SUPER stores the likes of Barnes & Noble and Borders. And, mostly as a direct result of this influx, a few thousand more independent bookstores folded. By the year 2000 the total number of independents had fallen from 5,132 in 1991 to just around 3,200.

As recently as 1991, independent bookstores still managed to account for the largest amount of book sales (32 percent). But today, thanks to the insult added to injury of “Shop Naked” cyber sites like amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, the number of independents has dropped below the 3,000 mark, with a significant portion of those remaining stalwarts only barely managing to hang on. The independents are fighting back in a myriad of ways, including, in at least one notable book distributor / store chain merger, seeking the intervention of the Federal Trade Commission. But the ground has shifted underneath them in ways that would appear to be irrevocable.

With today’s computerized inventory systems, the chances are better than good that you’ll find what you’re looking for in the “average” book superstore — if you know what you’re looking for. Still one can’t help but wonder if such consumer certitude is an adequate trade-off for what the independent book retailer had to offer in the way of bibliophilia, knowledge, literacy, familiarity with stock, trust, experience, readerly advice, etc. To underscore what the ABA and its members are trying to preserve, it might be instructive to recall a bookstore that was not only the largest independent (or otherwise) in the U.S. at one time, but one that also exemplified some of its best attributes and traditions — New York’s Eighth Street Bookshop.

When I lived there in the 1960s, Greenwich Village was still known far-and-wide as the antidote for “Cleveland blues” — the place to go to kick over the traces and let your hair down. Whether this still holds true or not is debatable, but the (just plain) Village of my teens and early twenties continued to be a haven for — among other unconventional sorts — pinkos, an-ar-kists, and long-haired men and short-haired women; as was still being noted with forthright amusement by guides on the tourist buses snaking their way past me through the Village’s narrow streets. This image of the Village was nothing new, of course, but stretched back to before WWI, as Warren Beatty’s invaluable Reds attests.

In the mid-1940s, at the southeast corner of Eighth and MacDougal, stood a branch of the very un-Village-like Womrath’s franchise (a precursor of the chains to come), specializing in greeting cards and the latest bestsellers. But when two young proprietors, the Wilentz brothers, Ted and Eli, took over in 1947, all that changed: OUT went the froufrou calendars, gift box ribbons, children’s toys, etc. and IN came an inventory consisting almost entirely of real books.

Under its new name, the Eighth Street Bookshop rapidly became a literary gathering-spot reflecting and in turn influencing the latest local, national and international vogues in everything from poetry to astrophysics. Over the next few decades Eighth Street would become as fine a book emporium as any in the U.S., and a worthy rival to Blackwell’s in London.

A big factor in the store’s success was its willingness to embrace the new paperback phenomenon of the 1940s. While other retailers, clinging to the concept of the hardcover book, tended to eschew those 35 cent editions of the sort featuring Madame Bovary heaving out of her bodice or Captain Ahab ravishing a scantily clad native woman, Eighth Street presciently embraced them. As more trends developed (existentialism, the Beats, etc.), the categorical demarcations on the shelves became more dizzyingly Jesuitical by the hour. The dernier cri in taxonomy was reached in the early 1960s the day a magic-markered sign went up for a new section featuring Astral Projection, all the rage that season. Relegating most best sellers to its lower shelves, Eighth Street filled its display window with the latest Ezra Pound, new translations of Kafka and the like. As if to say, “No Jacqueline Susann sold. Our customers don’t read her.”

By the time I came on board as an employee in 1963, in-store sales, coupled with phone and mail orders meant the operation had no choice but to secure larger quarters. However, so associated was the store with the street’s numerical name by ’63 that “Ninth Street Bookshop,” “Tenth Street…,” etc., “formerly Eighth Street Bookshop” just wouldn’t do. Finally in 1967 there became available, slightly eastward at 17 West Eighth Street, a five story townhouse where Texas Guinan, of “Hello, Sucker!” prohibition fame, once lived. The Wilentzes purchased it, and the gutting of the interior began (they never did find Guinan’s legendary gold bathtub when they excavated the place). Once renovation was completed, the new location possessed little of the hamische atmosphere of the old place. “All the warmth of an airline terminal,” as one employee put it. But the opportunity to play Library at Alexandria was a fair exchange. Even larger than most of today’s Borders outlets, the three sales floors of Eighth Street Bookshop at 17 West prided itself on stocking over 60,000 neatly arranged titles. By its own estimate “Greenwich Village’s Famous Bookshop,” the United States’s Famous Bookshop was more like it.

Long after most other Greenwich Village retailers had gone the way of high-tech security systems to snare shoplifters, Eighth Street did not require one to “Please check all bags, etc. at the front counter.” So lax was overall security that one employee who worked there was able to steal many thousands of dollars from the till before getting caught. A self-styled struggling artist, even though the Wilentzes paid wages nearly twice as high as any other bookstore in the city, he most likely felt his actions justified. But emblematic of the fluffy white cloud of paradox hanging over the place, when this not-so-petty thief was finally uncovered and sent packing he was given generous severance pay. Just what you might expect from a couple of only partially reconstructed lefties like Ted and Eli. The aforementioned pilferer notwithstanding, working at Eighth Street was considered a sinecure by most who toiled there. Another time, an employee, known for his hangovers, mistakenly ordered a mammoth number of non-refundable books: “Just give me one of everything,” he had told a salesman. Typically, he was allowed to stay on.

Wilentz senior had been a furrier, but his youngest son Eli, instead of following in dad’s footsteps, harbored ambitions of being a sculptor. There was an exquisite rumor among Eighth Street’s employees, probably begun by some droll clerk, that Eli had been a Martha Graham dancer in his youth, thus summoning up far-fetched images of the stolid and rather dour Eli leaping about the stage of Town Hall clad in tights. Whatever his personal designs on being an artist might have been, the store certainly provided a wealth of artistic atmosphere.

Eighth Street’s regular clientele included Edward Albee, Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, the curmudgeonly Joseph Campbell, essayist-novelist Albert Murray (every day), author-activist Michael Harrington, cartoonist William Steig, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, poet-translator (later, MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient) Richard Howard, and Alger Hiss, also the store’s stationary supplier. One time I received a note from Hiss praising me for my courtesy and friendliness. In all likelihood, this convicted commie spy, and one of the most vilified men of the century, wrote encomia like that to anyone who didn’t punch him in the face.

Nearly every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing literary stardust out of your eyes. As poet Jonathan Williams wrote in his 2001 Eulogy for Ted Wilentz, “One minute: Pee Wee Russell, the next Geraldine Page, the next Edward Dahlberg, the next e.e. cummings. Ted would be on cue, like Toscanini– absolutely poised.” Veteran photographer Fred McDarrah in his book, The Beat Generation, recalled, “Ted and his family lived in an apartment above the store, and there he threw his informal book parties, which were the closest thing to a literary salon in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s.”

“This is Shelley Winters, 225 Riverside Drive,” the party on the other end of the line said. “Perhaps you recognize the voice. (Who wouldn’t?) Do you know who this Emma Goldman person is? I’m auditioning to play her in a movie but I’ve never even heard of her.” I would have sworn that left-leaning Winters had not only heard of Goldman, but somewhere in the heart of her Riverside Drive co-op had a shrine dedicated to the legendary feminist / communist / anarchist. The call came in at Eighth Street one evening just before midnight closing time. Winters wanted to know if we had any books on Goldman. We did; practically an entire section. That night the store stayed open past its usual closing time, just long enough for a driver to arrive and pick up “one of everything” on Red Emma.

A measure of the enormous degree of clout once possessed by book reviewers happened in 1963 when Avon Books reissued the obscure Depression era novel, Call it Sleep, by the long forgotten Henry Roth. In an act practically unheard of, this mass market 95 cent Avon paperback reissue was the subject of a front page write-up in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, in which it was deemed perhaps the Great (albeit lost) American novel. Minutes after Eighth Street opened that day, the store was overrun with customers in search of a copy of the undeservedly forgotten work. All that were on hand went flying out the door in minutes, Ted made a weekend emergency call to the publisher, and bright and early the next morning we had received enough stock to supply the demand for this belated “overnight sensation.”

It seems as if every literary lion in the Village (and beyond) was a habitué of the place. The one notable exception being Djuna Barnes, author of the 1934 novel Nightwood, which wielded as much if not more influence on a newer generation of women writers in the 1960s as when it was first published. Even though, since the 1940s, Barnes had lived in a one-room apartment at number 5 Patchen Place, just off of nearby Sixth Avenue, she was not only curiously absent from Eighth Street Bookshop, but from the streets of the Village as well, though there is one candid street photo of her, caught unawares, trudging along Greenwich Avenue in McDarrah’s aforementioned book. Word was that the unexpected success of Nightwood so freaked Barnes she was barely able to write anything after that.

Then one winter’s day in 1974 store clerk Tom Farley spotted a very aged crone, stooped and barely able to make it to the top of the second landing. I saw him move from behind the counter to help her up the last couple of steps, and as he reached out, I overheard him say: “Welcome to Eight Street Bookshop Miss Barnes.”

Here at last was one of the locale’s most famous literary lights making her long overdue debut at Greenwich Village’s famous Bookshop. I flinched; I thought maybe this Garbo of avant lettres might, upon being recognized, turn around and walk right back down the stairs and out the front door. Instead, she looked up and said to Tom:

“However on earth did you recognize me?”

“Why from your photo on the back of Nightwood,” he explained, referring to the famed Stieglitz portrait that adorned the paperback edition.

“Do you realize that picture was taken long before you were even born?” Barnes said in amazement. It had been taken more than forty years before.

“Well, you haven’t changed a bit,” he replied.

At that, Barnes blushed just like a young school girl.

As far as I knew at the time, one of the store’s regulars wasn’t a writer at all. Instead, the main claim to fame of Samuel Loveman — a very sweet old man looking like a cross between W.C. Fields and the latter-day William Burroughs — was that he had once been the lover of a certain very famous writer. But in his 1976 obit, I learned that Sam had not only been, as the newspaper tastefully couched it in the language of the time / Times, “a youthful protégé and lifelong friend [itals. mine] of Hart Crane,” but in the 1920s, a poet and critic of some renown himself. Loveman more or less lived at Eighth Street in the 1960s, with its employees constituting a sort of surrogate family, especially Conrad Brenner, the night manager, whose main claim to literary fame was that in 1947 he had written the first-ever English language essay on Vladimir Nabokov (so famous that it has been affixed to the standard edition of Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.) As Sam shambled about the premises, poetry and / or Hart Crane groupies would point discretely at him and whisper with the fervor of film fans spotting Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany’s.

As late as the 1960s, the tradition of publishers specializing in experimental prose and poetry was still a way of life in the Village. Too avant-garde or obscure for most other book houses to bother with you? In the 1960s, one had to look no further than Eighth Street’s own Corinth / Totem Press, which trafficked in first or early works by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Diane DiPrima, et al. Perhaps the most important of the Corinth volumes was Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, in which the New England writer laid down many principles that still hold sway in American poetry. Especially vital to the continuance of the small press aesthetic were the acolytes of poet Frank O’Hara. Run down and killed by a taxi on Fire Island in 1966 at age forty (an accident nearly as freakish as the one that claimed another of America’s great artists of the advance guard, dancer Isadora Duncan), O’Hara, long after his death, is now far more widely known than he was in life. Among those who satellited around him back then were Larry Rivers, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Kenward Elmslie, Alfred Leslie, Bill Berkson and sui generis writer-painter Joe Brainard, all Eighth Street habitués. And nearly all of these artists and many more were given encouragement through-publication by Corinth / Totem Press. It comes as no surprise that, today, a slim, stapled volume (more like a pamphlet) of O’Hara’s, Second Avenue, published by the press in 1960, fetches upwards of two hundred dollars on the collectors’ market.

The press also dabbled in reprinting works by too-good-to-let-go-out-of-print writers like poet Delmore Schwartz, and publishing The Beat Scene, a poetry anthology that was the first of its kind. Beat Scene was edited by Eli, but it was brother Ted who was the real literary groupie, which is the best kind to be if one is going to aspire to that sort of thing. Corinth’s forays into the “experimental” also included the publication of Mrs. Aphra Behn, 17th century figure who is now widely considered to be the first feminist writer.

Much like San Francisco’s City Lights Bookshop / Books, also an important small press publisher, Eighth Street functioned as a mail drop, social club, post office, loan department and employment agency for much of New York’s literary avant garde. Whenever a Marianne Moore or W.H. Auden came by the store, it was invariably Ted and not the somewhat introverted Eli, who tripped all over himself bowing and scraping. It was entirely in keeping with the older Wilentz’s almost groupie-like avidity for such eminent personages that one day he came rushing up the steps to the mezzanine, snagged me by the collar, and breathlessly confided as he dragged me down the steps that there was someone on hand that I just had to meet. Rounding a corner, I came face to face with Neal Cassady. A decade and a half after his and Jack Kerouac’s peregrinations for the ages had been chronicled in the latter’s On the Road, he was the Beat Generation’s eminence grise. Like a golden retriever laying a dead bird at his master’s feet offering him first chew, he proffered merely the briefest of intros: “Neal Cassady… Bill Reed” etc. Then hyper-kinetic Ted (were there ever any two brothers less alike than he and Eli?) was off like a “Flash” (the employees’ secret name for him). This was a classic awkward social situation. Cassady was not so much a writer, as a character in a roman à clef. What could I say? “I sure did enjoy you in On the Road,” like it was some dumb road movie. We shook hands, then mutually bid “Goodbye.” Thanks, Ted! Despite the awkwardness, I’m glad I had the chance to meet the real “Dean Moriarty.” I also remember Lenny Bruce, around the time of his Lower East Side Loew’s Theatre concert, coming into Eighth Street wearing the brightest, most dazzling white-on-white linen suit since Sidney Greenstreet.

Over the years, a surprising number of store employees were able to move beyond book clerking into various degrees of public recognition: LeRoi Jones worked there at one time; so did Allen Ginsberg’s soul mate, Peter Orlovsky (as janitor), along with poet A.B. Spellman, the author of the seminal jazz book, Four Lives in the Be-Bop Business and drama critic / editor Jan Herman. At the height of his public notoriety, David Mitchell, notorious “draft dodger,” was part of the crew. My friend, Ken Weaver, was briefly employed as the store’s janitor just prior to or after — I no longer remember which — Peter Orlovsky. Then Ken quit, when the Fugs, the shock-rock group he founded along with poet-peace activists Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, became an overnight sensation and the three found themselves off on a round of, at first, national, then international touring. This isn’t to say that all the clerks became famous — though many were already “famous in their own mind.” In fact a friend once took note of the “Mandarin-like demeanor” of some of them, as a mark of what we’d now call “attitude.” But in the end, at least they possessed the answers to any question a not-easily-intimidated customer might raise.

In the early 1970s when shopping mall and chain store mania began, not even Greenwich Village was exempt from the blight. Seemingly impervious longtime Village establishments began displaying more and more “Closed for Remodeling” signs, which fooled no one. Miraculously, a few old haunts remained afloat: former speakeasy and watering hole Chumley’s on Bedford Street; to the east on Thompson Street, the literary hangout Grand Ticino; and El Faro, with its exotic mix of Chinese, Spanish and Italian food. Eighth Street also managed to hang on. And well into the 1970s, it looked as if the place might roll on forever… even when a branch of a new large discount bookstore chain opened nearby, with more of its kind on the way. But even success was no guarantee of staying power. Vertiginously escalating rents were hitting nearly everyone: Bleecker Street’s still-popular Café Figaro, where Jack Kerouac had once worked as a dishwasher, closed up. Almost overnight the place became a Blimpie’s hoagie shop. My Eighth Street co-worker Andre Codrescu (now NPR commentator and author) said it looked like someone had stood at the door of the Figaro and blown up a giant balloon containing the franchised interior of a Blimpies.

Around 1969, the Wilentz brothers had some sort of breakup and Ted unceremoniously departed Eighth Street; now Eli was the sole owner. Most working there felt like kids caught up in custody battle, and no one could tell any of us what the “divorce” was all about. Otherwise it was business as usual for the next few years, then around ’75 the door the door to Eli’s office began to remain closed most of the time while he held meetings with various people who tended to shout a great deal. Something was wrong after all; it appeared that Eighth Street Bookshop, too, was falling victim to the changes taking place in the Village. Eli, who had previously been only phlegmatic and sometimes hard to read, now became downright uncivil, especially to his employees, an almost straw boss who even refused to discuss with me the matter of my long overdue vacation. Tough shouldering the responsibility of such a large outfit on his lone shoulders, I guess. So one spring afternoon in 1976, when my lunch hour came round, I made a B-line for the nearest employment office where I filed a grievance. I never set foot in Eighth Street again, but not because of the recent unpleasantness. The following morning I received a phone call from Joe Bitowf, an Eighth Street co-worker and a notorious practical joker:

“Where were you early this morning at around five o’clock?”

The opening conversational gambit was par for the course with the notoriously elliptical Joe.

“Asleep in my bed,” I answered. The Truth. “Why?”

“Eighth Street Bookshop burned almost to the ground last night; and since disgruntled ex-employees are the first ones they usually question, you should be ready with an alibi when the fire inspector comes around.”

I didn’t quite believe Joe, even when I rang off, but later that day in the New York Post, under the headline “Blaze at Eighth Street Bookshop,” I learned he hadn’t been joking after all. Curiously, no Fire Inspector Bill ever came calling. I’m sure Eli — a basically good AND assertive man — convinced them to leave me alone. Not long afterward, the neighborhood newspaper, the Village Voice, reported there were a number of witnesses to the fire being arson-related. But nothing ever came of it.

In Dan Wakefield’s memoir, New York in the Fifties, poet Harvey Shapiro recalls a gathering of artists and writers held shortly after the blaze “to honor the store and the owner, to give him the desire to go on after the fire… you know, the Eighth Street Bookshop was the place for poets — I met other poets there, some poets even got their mail there, it was a real center for us. What I remember about the evening was that Allen [Ginsberg] improvised a poem, “The Burning of the Eighth Street Bookstore.” It was really good… He thought it was good too, and after reading he ran around the audience to see if anyone had a tape recorder so he could save it.”

Later that year Eighth Street reopened its doors with a kickoff party covered in the October 4, 1976 issue of The New Yorker. By this time I had departed New York City for good to live in Los Angeles.

“Familiar faces,” the publication reported, “included Joe Lash, Margo and Nat Hentoff, Michael Harrington (the writer, not the congressman), the poet Richard Howard, and Imamu Amiri Baraka [Leroi Jones], who arrived with his wife and some free copies of Unity and Struggle, the political organ of the Revolutionary Communist League.”

But the Eighth Street Bookshop that opened some six months after the disastrous fire, “name” first night guests notwithstanding, was not the Eighth Street of yore. The large third floor social studies section, which had drawn heavy business, was gone. Jacqueline Susann was so longer relegated to plain brown wrapper status, which I noticed to my shocked amazement one day when I was back in the city for a visit and walked past the store, but was dutifully displayed in window, along with a lot of other current discounted bestsellers. I also learned from friends who still worked there that the place was now as realistically security conscious as any other run-of-the-mill retailer in the Village. No longer was Eighth Street a bookstore where, the Village Voice once reported, “on the front shelves you found Walter Benjamin chock against Charles Bukowski, and inevitably some ragged edition of Nightwood…”

In my picaresque 1960s, I left Eighth Street Bookshop employment at least a half-dozen times, usually to hit the hippie highway. But coming back off the road and finding myself beached on the shores of Manhattan, I was always welcomed back by Ted and Eli to its staff of 40 or so. With its unusually high and fair wages, the place seemed to offer cradle-to-grave security. I once believed that Eighth Street would last forever, then in the 70s revised that downward to… hanging on for a while. The rebuilding after the fire seemed to indicate that. But I was wrong. Under a headline reading, “Great Moments in Labor History,” the October 1, 1979 issue of the Village Voice reported that the store’s personnel had shown up for work earlier that week to find, without prior notification, the locks on the door changed. The Voice implied that Eli Wilentz, rather than give in to unionizing his operation, as the majority of his employees were now pushing for, decided to close up his store for good (although Eli later denied that was the reason). A sign in the window read:

“To customers and friends — After thirty-two years of running the bookshop, I have decided to retire. I appreciate your friendship over the years. Long live Greenwich Village and its poets, writers and readers.” — Eli Wilentz

There was no mention of the store’s staff of would-be union men and women, who must have stood around for a brief while scratching their heads and shuffling their feet, then straggled off into that great good Village morning heading for the nearest unemployment office.

Stores, theaters and restaurants, so reflective of the character of the Village from an earlier day were now dropping like soldiers in battle, including: the Cafe Cino, stomping grounds for a generation of New American Playwrights; gone too were: Sutter’s Bakery, which had been in the Village for a long as anyone could remember and still seemed to be going great guns when it unexpectedly closed its doors forever; the nearby Women’s House of Detention reduced to a pile of 19th century rubble; the Stag Shop with its stunning line of abbreviated, tight-fitting male clothing creations by Parr of Arizona (the Marie Curie of “Basket”). All — and more — gone and replaced by inauthentic pizzerias, discount clothiers, gay leather shops, newsstands stacked high with the latest issues of Orgy, Eat, and Screw. The Village Barn and Bon Soir nightclubs were also victim of the change. The smell of fresh bread wafting out of dear, departed Sutter’s, gave way to the stomach-churning odor of open air souvlaki clashing head-on with the patchouli oil and incense that came drifting out of head shops.

Now, Eighth Street Bookshop (born 1947 – died 1979), one of the last holdouts of a — some might say — more authentic Greenwich Village, was gone. The “Engulf and Devour” (thank you, Mel Brooks) conglomerates had finally won the first battle of the war. There are still a few bookstores which, on a smaller scale, carry on in the tradition of a store like Eighth Street. Although operating on a much smaller scale, Book Soup in Los Angeles (of all places) caters to the serious reader quite successfully. The secret of the success that Soup and other independent stores have discovered, is not in supplying an overwhelming amount of stock, or trying to match the megastores in discount pricing, but through providing impeccable service. If you have a question about a book or an author you can be assured of getting a useful and polite — and, most likely, Un-Mandarin-like — reply. The literary salon atmosphere Eighth Street epitomized — and centralized — may be gone with the era that nurtured it, but many of the things it provided still persist in other forms — from sundry cozy independent book nooks to the pixilated realms of cyberspace. But the center that was Eighth Street no longer holds.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

It was in 2006 that Jed Birmingham wrote the following text about the relationship between William S. Burroughs and Jan Herman, publisher, writer, artist, and connoisseur of the cut-up. It is with tremendous pleasure that RealityStudio now uses that text as the introduction to an entire archive of Herman’s important work.

In the Burroughs Forum, there are currently discussions about Jan Herman’s blog as well as a post providing a picture of his cut-up collaboration with Jürgen Ploog and Carl Weissner Cut up or Shut Up published in Paris in 1972. A “tickertape” introduction by Burroughs runs across the tops of the pages just as Burroughs’ “The Last Words of Hassan-i-Sabbah” runs across the top of the 1981 Am Here Catalog Five.

This is not the first time the work of Jan Herman has been mentioned on RealityStudio. Herman was the editor of the Nova Broadcast Press and published William Burroughs’ The Dead Star as Nova Broadcast Number 5. (See the article on broadsides.) Nova Broadcast Press was based in San Francisco and was associated with City Lights. Herman issued six Nova Broadcast pamphlets in total: Nova Broadcast One: Drive Suite by Ray Bremser; Nova Broadcast Two: Miss Vietnam by Wolf Vostell; Nova Broadcast Three: A Book About Love and War and Death by Dick Higgins; Nova Broadcast Four: Planet Noise by Liam O’Gallagher; Nova Broadcast Five by Burroughs; and Nova Broadcast Six: Twinpak by Norman O. Mustill. In his blog, Herman has written on Twinpak and provided images.

The Dead Star is a wonderful publication that is part broadside / part chapbook / part pamphlet. All the publications from Nova Broadcast Press (there were more than the six Nova Broadcasts) experiment with form and explore new ways of presenting printed material. These publications are examples of artists’ books which is largely a late 20th Century phenomenon that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. “An artist’s book is a book created as an original work of art, rather than a reproduction of a pre-existing work. And also, that it is a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues.” Johanna Drucker is one of the foremost experts on the subject. For example, Jan Herman’s “General Municipal Election” is another great publication from Nova Broadcast Press that can be considered an artist’s book. Published in 1971, the publication is a foldout poster of a cut-up collage ballot complete with a 7″ lp. Journal of the Identical Lunch (Alison Knowles), The Braille Film (Carl Weissner with a counterscript by William Burroughs), The Louis Project (Carl Weissner and Jan Herman), Mess Kit (Norman Ogue Mustill) are some other titles from Nova Broadcast Press. These publications, like The Dead Star, play with the pamphlet, poster, broadside, and folder form as well as with elements of cut ups and collage. They are available on abebooks.com from a variety of booksellers with signatures and associations in some cases. They are all affordable and provide an inexpensive entry into alternative press bookmaking of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jan Herman also published a magazine with co-editors Mary Beach, Claude Pélieu, Norman Ogue Mustill, and Gail Dusenbery (with much additional help from Carl Weissner, who was not on the masthead). Like Nova Broadcast Press, San Francisco Earthquake was associated with City Lights. The magazine published Ferlinghetti, Carl Solomon, William Burroughs, and Bob Kaufman from the Beat circle. The magazine ran for five issues from 1967-1969. (Jan Herman’s blog contains some inside info on the Earthquake.) Burroughs appeared in several issues of the magazine. In issue one, Burroughs submitted “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin.” The Earthquake also reprinted Burroughs pieces previously published in other magazines like “The Coldspring News” (The Spero), “Salt Chunk Mary,” “Last Awning Flaps on the Pier” (both in Intrepid).

Herman published VDRSVP in the summer of 1969. It was designed by Mustill, who also came up with the VDRSVP headline that ran across the top of the broadsheets. (There were three of them — 22-1/2″ x 29-1/2″ — printed front and back in a 7-column format. Two were vertical layouts and one was horizontal.) The broadsheets included Burroughs’ “The Moving Times,” Vostell’s “Four Instant Happenings,” contributions by Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, Alan Ansen, and Sinclair Beiles, and collage art by Norman Ogue Mustill and Jan Herman. The three VDRSVPs were folded up and included in a folder as San Francisco Earthquake 5. The publication’s newspaper format resembled many of Burroughs’ works of the period. Again, San Francisco Earthquake is very affordable and provides some high quality Burroughs material as well as a fascinating snapshot into the art and literary avant-garde in the late 1960s. I highly recommend Issue 5 as an example of how the little magazine can further the boundaries of the magazine format and introduce other mediums into its creation.

Jan Herman also edited Brion Gysin Let the Mice In published by Something Else Press in 1973. (Jan Herman’s blog has more on this book.) The book presents cut-ups by Brion Gysin, Burroughs, and Ian Sommerville, but according to Beat Books, “consists mainly of material by Gysin from the late 1950s and early ’60s, including written pieces, drawings, and accounts and photographs of performances, experiments, and personalities.” Burroughs contributes “The Invisible Generation,” “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin,” and “Parenthetically 7 Hertz.” All these pieces previously appeared elsewhere. Something Else Press printed 500 hardcovers simultaneously with 1000 softcovers in February 1973.

Something Else Press deserves a special mention. Dick Higgins founded Something Else in 1964 in order to publish avant-garde writing in many cases related to the Fluxus Movement. According to Steve Clay, “Artists’ books, critical theory, conceptual art, amusement, back to the land hippie culture — through the use of conventional production and marketing strategies, Dick Higgins was able to place unconventional works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.” From 1964-1974, Higgins published over 60 books plus additional “pamphlets, newsletters, cards, posters, and other ephemera” from writers and artists as diverse as Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson and Emmett Williams. (Williams was brought in as editor of the press in the mid-’60s; Herman succeeded him in 1971.) Dick Higgins’ credo for the press was: “When asked what one is doing, one can only explain it as ‘something else.’ Now one does something big, now one does something small, now another big thing, now another little thing. Always it is something else.”

Like Dick Higgins, Jan Herman seeks to do something else as a writer, editor, and publisher. Nova Broadcast Press and The San Francisco Earthquake are superlative examples of the power and beauty of the alternative press and little magazine. His work is highly prized by institutions and collectors such as at Northwestern University and I highly recommend the pieces I mentioned above. The Dead Star was the first Burroughs collectible I ever bought and I find that my thoughts and appreciation of this publication have changed and grown as my knowledge of Burroughs and alternative publishing has increased. For now I see The Dead Star as an example of an artist’s book that pushes the envelope of what can be done with print. But the publication is probably so much more and I can not wait to discover more about it.

Jan Herman Archive

• Jed Birmingham, “Jan Herman and the Fold“
• Jan Herman as Artist
• Jan Herman as Journalist
• Jan Herman as Publisher
• Jan Herman as Publisher of Nova Broadcast Press
• Jan Herman as Writer

Jan Herman on RealityStudio

• Burroughs / Balch / Herman Video Experiment
• Jan Herman, “Roundup at the O.P. Corral: Thoughts on Brion Gysin and Wyndham Lewis“
• Everything on RealityStudio tagged Jan Herman

Jan Herman Elsewhere

• Jan Herman’s Blog on Artsjournal.com
• Finding aid for the Jan Herman archive at Northwestern University

Jan Herman
Holding The San Francisco Earthquake, at the City Lights Editorial Office
1969

Listen to A Reading by Jan Herman
KPFA (April, 6, 1970)

Radio recording of texts from VDRSVP by Weissner, Herman, Sinclair Beiles, Carl Solomon etc.

Jan Herman
at City Lights Bookstore, circa 1967

Udo Breger
Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
Basel, Switzerland, 1988-1989

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
27 March 1970

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
15 Dec 1971
Describes visit to Burroughs in London

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
11 Dec 1978, Page 1
Describes attendance at the Nova Convention

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
11 Dec 1978, Page 2
Describes attendance at the Nova Convention

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
28 August 1979, Page 1

Jan Herman
Letter to Carl Weissner
28 August 1979, Page 2

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In the aftermath of my Floating Bear column, RealityStudio informed me that Jan Herman worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop and might have some facts about Corinth Press and the mysterious Bill Wilentz. According to Jan, Eli and Ted ran the bookstore and the press as I mentioned. No scoop on Bill Wilentz. Jan suggested I contact Bill Reed who also worked at the store and wrote a memoir entitled Early Plastic.

The name sounded familiar as did the book. Turns out I bought the book a few years ago, because it featured material on the Lower East Side in the early and mid 1960s. I had yet to read it. Quickly returning to the book, I was happy to see information on Eighth Street, the Fugs, the fringes of the Warhol circle, and New York City speed culture. What I did not expect was the book’s depiction of growing up searching for a gay community in 1950s West Virginia. The descriptions of small pockets of a gay circle at that time and that place proved to be very informative and a real eye-opener. As Bill shows, the influence of African Americans and their culture extended throughout Middle America, not just the big cities on the coasts. Bill’s interest in jazz continues to the present. He works as a jazz record producer for the Japanese market. On December 10th 2006, he will give a talk before the Tokyo Vocal Jazz Appreciation Society on “One Shot Wonders” (singers who only recorded one LP in the Fifties). In addition he is co-producing a “live” in Japan recording by singer Pinky Winters. Early Plastic showed how the silent decade sowed the seeds of the flower power and decadence decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

After reading Early Plastic, Bill agreed to allow RealityStudio to print an extended verison of his memories of the Eighth Street Bookshop: its history and its daily goings-on. It makes for fascinating reading. I asked Bill about some of my other obsessions of that era: William Burroughs and Fuck You Magazine. He had this to say:

I remember Burroughs in the store a fair amount. I recall once going to eavesdrop to see what he was reading in the poetry section and it was Bukowski, long before Bukowski WAS Bukowski. Some funky (maybe even) mimeographed stuff. Had I but glommed onto a few copies of each I’d probably be living in Gstaad in baronial splendor instead of near penury in crummy old L.A., where the future comes to die. Attached are some of those envelopes I mentioned. Do with ‘em what you will.

As for Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver of the Fugs was my best friend long before the Fugs, so I was around for the forming of that group. Ken always thought the phrase “slum goddess” was mine and always gave me credit for it, but it was in fact ripped off by me from LeRoi Jones who used to work at 8th Street.

Had a copy of Ed’s issue of Auden’s Platonic Blow with a lock of Auden’s pubic hair, but don’t know whatever happened to it. Used to sell Fuck You from under the counter… even at 8th Street.

Burroughs reading Bukowski is quite an image. One master of the little magazine and small press scene reading quite possibly the brightest star upon that literary landscape. As I look over my collection and write about what I see there, it seems that the paths of these two underground giants cross pretty often. Nice to see that fact reinforced by Bill’s story.

I crossed paths with the Eighth Street Bookshop, Corinth Books and Ted Wilentz briefly years ago. Working in a bookstore in Bethesda, MD, I admired a copy of Al Young’s Dancing, a yellow chapbook published by Corinth Books in 1969. A copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity passed through the store as well. I remember the purple cover that served as the telling point, letting collectors know it was a first edition. One day as I was looking over Dancing, an older woman stood beside me and told me she and her husband had published it. The woman was none other than Joan Wilentz, wife of Ted Wilentz (they married in 1965). Joan and Ted teamed up after their marriage to publish several books under the Corinth imprint including material by Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, and Lewis Warsh. Their books had a decidedly New York School feel (both First and Second Generation), but they also published numerous books by African American authors, like Clarence Major, Tom Weatherly, Jay Wright, and the previously mentioned Al Young.

Joan spoke to me briefly. This was around the time of Ted Wilentz’s passing and much must have been on her mind. Yet she expressed great amusement in my interest in the work of Corinth Press and promised to speak with me again the next time she stopped by the store. Unfortunately, I left shortly thereafter, and I never got the chance.

Corinth Press, with its partner Totem Press (formed by Leroi Jones) and later as a husband and wife team, proved to be one of the leading lights in small press publishing. In the early 1960s, Ted and Eli’s roster included all the major players of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg (Empty Mirror), Gary Snyder (Myths and Texts), Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity), Leroi Jones (Preface of a Twenty Volume Suicide Note), Philip Whalen (Like I Say), Diane Di Prima (Dinners and Nightmares), and Ted Joans (The Hipsters). They also published The Beat Scene, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara. By the way, the books listed were all published in just two years: 1960 and 1961. Not a bad list for any publishing house let alone the side project of a bookstore. All the Beats are represented but Burroughs it seems. Burroughs later appeared in the influential anthology The Moderns (1963) edited by Leroi Jones.

Corinth also issued a lesser known but very important American Experience Series that published work on exploration, the black experience, Native Americans, the New World, and other topics that served as the cornerstone of the developing realm of American Studies. In my opinion, the backlist of Corinth ranks with any of the post-WWII era presses chronicled in Steven Clay’s Secret Location on the Lower East Side.

Bill Reed’s account of the Eighth Street Bookshop provides a fascinating glimpse into the community of writers and readers out of which all this great literature was created. As Bill’s collection of envelopes mailed to the bookshop shows, the members and fellow travelers of this community would surprise you. Clearly, the Eighth Street Bookshop was a magic place that goes beyond the selection of books in its shelves. With Corinth Press, Ted and Eli took that one step beyond bookseller to become publishers joining a long, distinguished tradition including Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. The store was a halfway house, a message board, a meeting place, a lightning rod. Bill Reed’s search for a nourishing community happily stopped at this store in Greenwich Village. Many famous and not so famous people also rested, learned, talked, and created there. Places like this still exist today in brick and mortar and cyberspace, but without a doubt something special was happening at Eighth Street, in the United States and in the entire world at the time Bill chronicles. Maybe the works published by Corinth tell the story best, but Bill’s memoir does a nice job as well. By the way, Bill had no idea who Bill Wilentz was either.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Edwin Blair sale is over and the results highlight issues raised in posts to RealityStudio. Manuscripts, the Olympia Press Naked Lunch, vinyl and even the Olympia Ticket That Exploded are all headline stories in the Burroughs items up for sale.

Without a doubt, manuscript and holograph material by almost any Beat author performed well. This is especially true of Burroughs. The carbon transcript to “Goat God Out of Site,” an early draft of a piece that appeared in Oui in July 1973 possessed a high estimate of $900. It sold for $3450 (this and all prices quoted include a 15% buyers premium). The typescript contains corrections in Burroughs’ hand and substantially differs from the published version. The typescript for a chapter of Soft Machine, “The Mayan Caper,” also performed well. Estimated at $1500-2500, the chapter sold for $5175. This was one of the high prices at the auction. The typescript is signed and dated by Burroughs and contains holograph corrections. Maybe the price ($530) reached by the one line item on eBay might not be so crazy after all. The “Mayan Caper” typescript comes from the same period and place as the Intrepid piece. The prices offered by BeatBooks for the Naked Lunch and the Invisible Generation manuscripts are backed up by the fine performance at the Blair auction.

The Beat classics, On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch also performed well. A signed Naked Lunch (a later, looser signature) doubled its high estimate and sold for $4025. The catalog describes the copy as seldom seen in better condition. This might be true for a signed copy. The jacket was definitely not fine. It had the typical splitting and rubbing to the spine, yet it seemed nice and bright and not faded or sunned like many copies. No mention of the price stamp. At the Roger Richards and Nelson Lyon Sales 6-7 years ago, Naked Lunch in lesser condition sold for $1955 and $2750, respectively. This seems like a fairly nice increase in value.

A nice collection of Burroughs vinyl reached its estimate and sold for $288. The records were mint some still in their shrink-wrap. The records included Burroughs and Giorno (1975), The Nova Convention (1979), Sugar, Alcohol, Meat (1980), You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With (1981), and Nothing Here Now But the Recordings (1981). Based on my experience, you can get these records cheaper from a record dealer, if you can find them. I talked to a record dealer about this auction and he felt that the estimates seemed high. Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg vinyl was also available.

Like manuscripts, iconic photographs performed extremely well. The legendary shot of Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs from 1945 chronicling the very beginnings of the Beat Generation sold for $7475. This photograph along with Carolyn Cassady’s shot of Neal and Jack that graces the book cover of On the Road might be neck and neck as “the” Beat Generation image. Several photographs of Bukowski, Henry Miller and Ginsberg were available.

I should have been more assertive in my bidding. Besides the one of a kind items, the action on the Burroughs items was rather slow and probably disappointing for the seller. Surprisingly, a mimeo program from Burroughs’ 1965 St. Valentine’s reading sold for $230. This is under the low estimate and cheaper than a copy that was heavily sought after on eBay in 2005. Burroughs magazine appearances were generally affordable. Black Mountain Review 7, an early Burroughs contribution, sold for $173, far below the estimate and much cheaper than on the rare book market. Big Table 1, one of the most famous and important of Burroughs’ appearances, failed to sell at all. My Own Mag 11 and 12 also sold cheaply for $69. There were exceptions. A copy of Gnaoua magazine signed by Burroughs scholar Eric Mottram sold for $345 far more than a copy signed by Burroughs and Michael McClure at the Nelson Lyon Auction ($95). Yugen 1-3 also priced high ($373).

Several other Burroughs rarities underperformed. An inscribed copy of the Olympia Soft Machine sold for $288. It is impossible to find a poor, unsigned copy for that from booksellers. The Olympia Ticket That Exploded generated no interest at all (low estimate $300). Both these items had some condition issues which reinforce the condition mantra. Time (1 of 886) also failed to sell. For roughly $90 it could have been yours.

Large lots featuring several Burroughs titles at once were also cheap and a great way to start a Burroughs collection. Lots grouping together 5 hardcover titles from the 1960s and early 1970s like Nova Express or Exterminator sold for $150. A similar selection of 7 titles from the 1980s and 1990s sold for $115. A nice grouping of wrapper bound titles, including Ah Pook Is Here, Blade Runner or Doctor Benway, fetched $138.

All in all, the Edwin Blair collection had a little of something for every level of Burroughs collector at a wide and in some cases surprising range of prices.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I spent some more time on Dave Moore’s page of Burroughs covers the other night. An interesting piece could be written on the cover art and external packaging of Burroughs’ work over the past five decades similar to the essays that have been written on the prefaces, introductions and afterwords that comprise the various editions of Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ work always seems to be adapting to changing times and audiences. This is one reason I think his work will last in the reading public’s imagination.

Looking at Dave Moore’s page, I am always drawn to one image in particular: The Fuck You Press edition of APO-33: The Metabolic Regulator. I would love to own one, but I doubt I will ever get the chance. Like Issue 24 of Floating Bear Magazine, the Fuck You APO-33 is a stopper that you just never hear about and never get the opportunity to see. I saw it for the first time years ago in Maynard and Miles. It has a simple production layout on the covers; I would be interested in seeing the contents. Apparently the layout of the contents concerned Burroughs as well. When he received a copy of APO-33 from Ed Sanders, Burroughs expressed nervousness about the print job and Sanders halted production. According to Maynard and Miles, “Since the mimeo would not print the full width of WSB’s columns before it faded, the columns were typed down the page and a new column started at the top again, which resulted in columns changing a bit from WSB’s manuscript. Also the illustrations, done on the electrostencil, did not turn out too well and were glued in the finished text at places different from where they were glued in the original manuscript (one was glued over some text).” In his biography on William Burroughs, Barry Miles writes, “The technology did not exist to reproduce the photographs on the stencils, so they were done separately, and Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg’s lover, was responsible for cutting each one out and sticking them on the finished pages. Unfortunately Peter was on amphetamines at the time and set about his task with furious energy, scattering pictures and glue everywhere.”

Burroughs’ reaction has always mildly surprised me. This concern with the layout seems miles away from the author who wrote and published Naked Lunch in 1959. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs goes to great lengths to diminish himself as an author going so far as to say he had little recollection of writing the book and calling himself “a recording instrument.” In addition, Naked Lunch was by all accounts put together in the most haphazard and rapid fashion calling into question if Burroughs ever had a set form in mind as he wrote the novel. The cut-up experiments of the Beat Hotel years and after also assault the primacy of the author and introduce elements of chance and randomness that seemed to interest and please Burroughs. All this points to the fact that Burroughs would be less iron-fisted with the production of his works than demonstrated with the Fuck You piece. Clearly this is not the case showing that Burroughs took great care in how his work, especially the visually rich work of the mid-1960′s like Time and APO-33, appeared on the page. This concern with the visual aspect of words and the physical act of reading places Burroughs alongside the concrete poets. Not surprisingly, Burroughs’ cut-up work in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator appeared in magazines side by side with several concrete poets. More on that to come.

In any case, a few copies of the Fuck You APO-33 saw the light of day, roughly 10-20 copies which were collated before Burroughs’ reaction. According to Barry Miles, an initial run of 5,000 was planned. I have never seen one of these copies for sale on the open market and prior to Dave’s page I only knew that UCLA’s library had one. I assume that the University of Connecticut possesses a copy as well since that institution houses many of Sanders’ papers and a sizable Fuck You Press archive. Back in 1965, the Phoenix Bookshop received a few copies. According to Maynard and Miles, the Special Collection Department of Northwestern University had a copy as well as Barry Miles. It has been 15 years but sooner or later I will see a copy up for sale. I can only imagine what it would sell for.

If the Fuck You APO-33 is forever out of reach, the Beach Books editions of 1966-1967 and the third edition of 1968 are a fine consolation. All three of these editions were printed in runs of 3,000. It should be noted that the third edition states that it is the second printing “(c) by William Burroughs 1966, 1967, 1968.” Burroughs definitely felt comfortable with the Beach Books editions. These editions are a photo offset of Burroughs’ own manuscript. Mary Beach, publisher of several magazines and books that featured Burroughs as a textual and visual artist, passed on recently in her 80s. Various obituaries and celebrations written about Beach mention her relationship with Burroughs. Beach and her husband Claude Pelieu were heavily influenced by Burroughs’ cut up techniques.

I have never given APO-33 its proper due. Time always seemed more important and more inventive to me. I am not alone; Port of Entry scarcely mentions APO-33. Looking closely at APO-33 again, I have to reassess my prior feelings. The Bulletin proves to be a major statement of Burroughs every bit as interesting as Time and central to Burroughs creative output of the mid-1960s. Like Time, APO-33 highlights Burroughs’ concern with the interplay and presentation of textual and visual experiments. Collage and cu-up techniques are on ful display. Where Time played with the magazine and newspaper format, APO-33 also toyed with the format and content of the academic journal harkening back to Burroughs’ beginnings as a writer in the British Journal of Addiction. APO-33 rewrites his 1957 scholarly article. As APO-33 demonstrates, Burroughs was no longer content to experiment with drugs and chronicle drug addiction in works like Junkie and the British Journal. He increasingly concerned himself with exploring the addicting and controlling aspects of language and image as well.

The various editions of APO-33 appear on eBay every so often and sell for under $100. Several copies are available from booksellers on abebooks. There is no reason to spend much more than $100; $150 for an unusually fine copy. APO-33 is cheaper than Time and every bit as interesting. Both pieces highlight Burroughs during one of his most radical creative periods, if not his most non-commercial. In my opinion, these works will find an audience of art collectors, as much as book collectors, seeking to document the relatively undiscovered period between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art of the early 1960s. In time, these art books of Burroughs will be as prized as the later shotgun art work and the collectible first editions.

Read More about APO-33

• Speed, Apomorphine, Mimeo, and the Cut-Up
• Apomorphine and Naked Lunch
• APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator (Shoaf Checklist)

APO-33 Archive

APO-33 Fuck You Press, 1965	APO-33 Beach Books, 1968
(Missing page 5?)