I bought my first copy of the Olympia Press edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch from eBay. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never seen a copy in person. I knew little about the principles of collecting. But I had the money and the itch so I overpaid for a copy that I wouldn’t consider buying today. The dust jacket is brownish, like somebody used it to prop up a flower pot and dirty water leaked out onto it. Also it doesn’t quite fit the book. It wraps at a slight skew that makes the columns of text in the inner flaps tilt in one direction. The wrapper even has extra scoring lines. For years I prided myself that, yes, indeed, my Burroughs collection contained a true first of Naked Lunch. But really my collection contained a copy so unappealing that it hardly counted. I just didn’t know any better.

Then I stumbled onto the website ParisOlympiaPress.com. The author made a post about the unique copy of Naked Lunch he once possessed:

one day purchased a copy advertised as for sale with an ill fitting dust-wrapper, well surprise surprise, when the book arrived it was not the dust-wrapper that was wrong but the book which was too big, the wrapper fitted comfortably on my other copies, but not fat boy, which was both taller and thicker, with a lighter cover than the other copies, no fucking way was that dust-wrapper or any other I have seen since going to fit on that behemoth of a Naked Lunch

When I read this, two thoughts fired off simultaneously in my brain. First, this book sounded like my copy of Naked Lunch. Second, I recalled the mysterious comment in Maynard & Miles that there was a pirate edition of Naked Lunch, “probably done in Formosa, copying the Traveler’s Companion format.” What if, I thought, Fat Boy was a pirate of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch? What if my copy was a pirate? This thought sent me spiraling down a wormhole of obsessive research. I bought more than half a dozen copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch. I visited several archives. What I learned is that the first edition of William Burroughs’ most famous book still has secrets to tell. I discovered a point of distinction never previously remarked, inaccuracies perpetuated by every bibliographic listing, and the existence of at least one pirate edition.

The Official Story

The publication of The Naked Lunch by Olympia Press is a story we think we know. (The title of the Olympia edition began with the definite article but, for familiarity’s sake, I’ll drop it from here on out.) Maurice Girodias, Olympia’s founder, had previously turned down a chance to publish Burroughs’ masterwork. But the controversy caused by excerpts of Naked Lunch appearing in The Chicago Review and Big Table caused him to reconsider. On June 6, 1959 Girodias sent Burroughs a letter asking for a second look at the manuscript. Girodias tendered Burroughs a contract and gave him two weeks to ready the book for the printer. “I had exactly ten days to prepare the MS,” Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in late July 1959. “Realize that in the last month I have edited the entire MS., corrected the galley-proofs, and the final proofs, and designed a cover, and the book is rolling off the presses right now.” On July 30, 1959 Burroughs wrote to Paul Bowles, “In the past month I have edited the entire manuscript, corrected all the proofs and it rolls off the presses today.” That was a Thursday. Burroughs must have spent the weekend sharing his first copies around the Beat Hotel. On August 1, he was supposed to read from Naked Lunch at George Whitman’s Le Mistral bookshop. Junk-sick, he sent a tape recording in his stead.

The 1978 bibliography by Barry Miles and Joe Maynard is the primary source of information for the publication history of the book. They state that Olympia did three printings. The first consisted of 5,000 copies. The second, “reprinted soon after the original,” consisted of another 5,000. The third printing, done in June 1965, was also 5,000 copies. The first printing has two points of distinction, a green border around the title page and a price of 1.500 francs on the rear wrapper. The very first copies lacked the dust jacket which, according to Miles, was added “after a month or so.” Patrick Kearney’s bibliography of Olympia Press publications repeats this information, adding that the dust jacket was “not issued until some months after the book’s initial release.” Kearney observes that “A number of collectors and dealers have reported that the dust jackets are ill-fitting, suggesting that they were poorly designed.” Finally, Kearney proposes a date of “c. 1962” for the second printing, which lacks the green border on the title page and has a price of 18 francs on the rear wrapper. In their editors’ note to the “restored” edition of Naked Lunch, Miles and James Grauerholz say that Burroughs corrected “about fifty” errors “when the book was reprinted a few weeks” after the initial printing. Later bibliographers add nothing new — but the documentary evidence will tell a more complicated story.

A New Point of Distinction

Once I had accumulated a few copies of the Olympia Press edition of Naked Lunch, I lined them up to see if I could spot any differences between them. Certainly there were the known points of distinction — the green border, the price on the rear — but I was curious if there were any other telltale signs that might indicate whether my own Fat Boy was a pirate edition from Formosa. At first, I didn’t notice anything. The book stands 17.5 cm tall. The width varies a bit, from about 11 cm to 11.4 cm, but it can depend on how beat up the book is. The spine can skew in one direction or it can cave in, which makes it difficult to judge how to line it up with a ruler. The paper stock is consistent across my copies. The color of the green wrapper varies a bit but that can result from how much exposure the book has had to light. I didn’t notice any differences so I tried inspecting the books with a magnifying glass. That’s when I saw it. My Fat Boy copy had a comma in the price on the rear, like this: 1,500. Another copy had a period, like this: 1.500. Once I’d detected it, I could see it clearly with my naked eye. I checked Maynard & Miles — they used a comma in their description. Kearney used a period.

This was a new point of distinction that no one had ever remarked. But what did it mean? The correct punctuation mark, reflecting common usage in France, was the period. In several years of inspecting Olympia Press books and watching them online, I have only spotted one other book which contains a comma in the price. Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnameable, was printed in fall 1959 with prices in both old and new francs on the rear: 1,800 (old francs with a comma) and 18 (new francs). For a while I was strongly tempted to conclude that the comma must be the sign of a pirate edition. Yet there was a copy of Naked Lunch being offered for sale by Pleasures of Past Times in England that had a comma, was signed by Burroughs, dated by the owner April 1960, and contained a card stating “With the compliments of Maurice Girodias.” (Having already spent thousands of dollars accumulating Naked Lunches, I did not purchase this copy or examine it in person. But the pictures are clear.) This copy suggests that Olympia Press did in fact put out some books with commas in the price. So what was the difference between period and comma copies?

“Designed a Cover”

In addition to performing a close physical examination of the printed book, I also went over multiple dust jackets with a magnifying glass. I can’t say I noticed any differences between them. They’re 40 cm long by 17.5 cm high. They have a glossy finish. The ones that don’t fit well have scoring lines in weird places like the middle of the spine, as though they were originally scored for a thinner book. In fact, the best-fitting dust jackets still look like they were designed for a smaller book. On the front of even the most pristine Naked Lunch, the calligraphic symbols cut off and leave a white gap to the right. The designer must have expected the jacket would fold right where those calligraphs cut off. It suggests that the dust jacket was poorly designed or, more likely, that the book was thicker than expected — which wouldn’t be surprising since Burroughs was sending it to the printer in sections. Burroughs was suffering from a rampaging heroin addiction in July 1959 so Sinclair Beiles did most of the editing, along with some help from Brion Gysin. No one could calculate the thickness of the book in advance because no one knew what was or wasn’t in it until the editing was done.

I got to wondering, though, if it was possible that the dust jacket was poorly designed — precisely because Burroughs designed it. He had written to Ginsberg that he “designed a cover.” But how could this be? Heroin addiction aside, Burroughs did not possess the mechanical skills to lay out a dust jacket — not one as sophisticated as the jacket of Naked Lunch. Olympia must have had a talented designer, as can be seen from contemporaneous jackets such as Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy and Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro. Perhaps Burroughs suggested some color or type treatments but his primary contribution lay in creating the calligraphic symbols. In interviews for Literary Outlaw, Brion Gysin explained this to Ted Morgan. “Um, who did the jacket? William did, I guess, with me sort of guiding his hand a bit. Or he sort of imitating what I was doing. It’s his drawing on the cover of the jacket.” (Tape 143 A) As Burroughs’ letters show, he had been doing many such drawings at the time. He included them as a “chapter” of Naked Lunch in the excerpt printed in Big Table and encouraged Irving Rosenthal to include them in the Grove Press edition.

There are further signs of sloppiness evident in the flap copy inside the dust jacket. Curiously, the price is listed as “Francs 1500” using neither a comma nor a period. It was almost as though Olympia was splitting the difference or refusing to commit to one punctuation mark or the other, although the period was clearly correct. It is unknown who wrote the introductory paragraph inside the dust jacket — Beiles? — but there follows a long excerpt from an article published by John Ciardi in the June 27, 1959 issue of the Saturday Review. In comparing the flap copy to the actual Ciardi article, I noted only one minor difference between the two, a missing ellipsis. Ciardi, however, did not draw his Naked Lunch quotes from the volume that Olympia had only just decided to produce. He drew his from the inaugural issue of Big Table, published in March 1959. As a result, the flap copy correctly spells “dowser” (misspelled “dowzer” in the Olympia edition) and adds a line (“These messages from the blood are infallible, literally always right”) not present in the published book. Consequently, anyone with a dust wrapper literally got more of the text of Naked Lunch than those who bought copies without it.

There is another important piece of information which the dust wrapper omits — the photo credit. The picture shows Burroughs staring out over a shelf of books. His face is illumined in a dark room by a light source coming from behind the camera. The photo was taken in fall 1953 by Allen Ginsberg at his apartment on East 7th St in Manhattan. The same photo was used in the summer of 1959 in Big Table 2. In later years, Ginsberg published variants of the photo, including one of Kerouac in the same pose. He also wrote similar but different captions on versions of the photo, generally giving the time, the place, and the fact that Burroughs was staying with him as they worked on Yage Letters and Queer. In some captions he compares Burroughs to Baudelaire. In others Ginsberg describes how he stood on the fire escape to take the picture. An entire essay could be written about the photo — how it ties together Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac; how it connects Naked Lunch to Yage Letters and Queer; how Burroughs addresses Ginsberg in the picture just as he had addressed many of the Naked Lunch letters to him. Suffice to say that the omission of the photo credit left all this in the shadows. Perhaps it was deliberate. Naked Lunch had many collaborators but this was Burroughs’ book.

Is there any way to be more precise than Maynard & Miles in dating when the dust wrapper was added to the book? They suggest “after a month or so.” Presumably this information was provided by Burroughs and/or Gysin. Burroughs must have received his first finished copies of the book on July 31 or August 1, 1959. The jacket is visible in the photographs of Burroughs that Loomis Dean took for Life magazine on October 1, 1959. I have been unable to locate any correspondence or other text referring to the dust jacket in the intervening period. I did, however, discover a copy of the book on eBay whose owner claimed to have bought it in the summer of 1959. A reasonably reliable source, the owner was a retired architect who was a friend of Robert Lowell and acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg. He could not actually remember purchasing the book and he did not have a sales receipt or other documentary evidence. But the book had the correct price on the back, which suggested it was purchased in 1959. It had a dust wrapper. The owner acquired it when he was a sophomore at Harvard. He had spent the summer in Europe and returned for the fall semester on a Harvard charter flight from Paris. It strongly implies he purchased the book right at the end of August or beginning of September. That would coincide with Maynard & Miles’ claim that the wrapper was added “after a month or so.”

The Loomis Dean photos also feature a series of Burroughs signing a copy of Naked Lunch in a bookstore. David Snell’s dispatch to Life magazine, excerpted in Literary Outlaw, says: “Roll two shows Burroughs autographing copies of his book in a Left Bank bookstore near his hotel…” It’s tough to say which bookstore. Gait Frogé gave Naked Lunch a window display at the English Bookshop but both the English and the Mistral were nearby bookshops on the Left Bank. In the image, the book appears to lack the dust jacket — doubtless local bookstores had a supply of the pre-jacket books. Also Burroughs was signing the very first inside page, which was blank. Usually he signed the title page. The inscription was long too. It makes you wonder if that particular copy exists somewhere out there. Perhaps it was in David Snell or Loomis Dean’s collections? I emailed Chris Dean, Loomis’ son, but he was unable to locate his father’s copy of Naked Lunch.

Printings and Print Run

Since I had many unanswered questions, especially about the difference between the period and the comma in the price, I visited the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. I was particularly keen to read through a file of documents related to Olympia Press, whose own archives were lost or destroyed when the press went bankrupt. Letters flew back and forth between Burroughs, Girodias, Barney Rossett, editors, lawyers, literary agents, Swiss intermediaries. Many concerned grievances about rights, royalties, payments not made. On December 6, 1961, Olympia sent Burroughs a royalty statement indicating that “From publication up to the 1st of December 1961,” Olympia had sold 5.865 copies of The Naked Lunch. (A period was used as the thousands separator in this and other documents.) That was 865 books more than Maynard & Miles said were printed, but it’s not uncommon for a publisher to receive an overrun of 10% or so from a printer.

Then I came across another royalty statement from May 31, 1965. “We sold the first edition” of The Naked Lunch, it says:

5.865 copies at 15 NF
4.034 copies at 18 NF

“Of the second edition of the book,” it adds, “we sold”:

6.800 copies at 18 NF

Ok, I thought, that’s about fifteen thousand copies, which per Maynard & Miles was the total of the three Olympia editions of Naked Lunch. The letter referred to two editions of the book instead of three but I figured that was an issue of terminology. Olympia might have distinguished the editions differently than Maynard & Miles did. Then I realized that this royalty statement was created just before the June 1965 release of Olympia’s third and last printing of Naked Lunch. In other words, the royalty statement concerns the first two editions of Naked Lunch. The first edition was therefore almost double what we have always thought — at least 9,899 (5,865 + 4, 034) copies were printed and sold. And the second edition, the one without the green border on the title page and with the 18 NF price printed on the back, was more than 30% larger than given in bibliographies.

The royalty statement raises another question about how Olympia priced the editions. On January 1, 1960, France revalued its currency so that the original 1.500 price in old francs became 15 new francs. There are many copies of the Olympia Naked Lunch around that show the 1.500 (or 1,500) price overstamped with the price in new francs. I have never seen, however, a copy in which the stamp says 15 NF. The stamps, which are remarkably consistent in their appearance, all say 18 NF. Olympia must have begun repricing the book in new francs on January 1, 1960 yet the royalty statements imply that Olympia did not start collecting 18 NF until after December 6, 1961. Does this imply that Olympia did not overstamp the books until late 1961? I think that there is a more likely explanation, which is that Olympia began overstamping books with the 18 NF price in January 1960. The royalty statements, however, neglected to indicate that the publisher had been collecting an extra 3 francs per unit from January 1960 to December 1961. It’s an error in Olympia’s favor — precisely the sort of gamesmanship for which Girodias was known.

None of the royalty statements in the Burroughs archive give a total print run for the third Olympia edition of Naked Lunch — the 1965 one printed by Imprimerie Crouzet. On November 10, 1966, Girodias attested that Olympia had sold 2,471 copies. In a letter to agent Peter Matson on July 17, 1969, Girodias claimed there were about 1,500 copies of the third edition “still in stock in Paris.” Presumably the print run was around 5,000 copies and sales were undermined by the Grove Press and international editions which had appeared by then. Also Olympia Press had been nearly destroyed by legal fights and bankruptcy issues.

While this documentary evidence was revelatory, it still left me with a number of questions. Did the period or the comma correlate to one or the other printing of the first edition? If so, which was which? Were there any other visible differences between the two print runs of the first edition?

Olympia used French printers who introduced a number of errors into the English text of Naked Lunch. In the very last paragraph, for example, “Old-time, veteran Schmeckers” is printed as “Old time, veteran Scmeeckers.” On page 95 there is also a text decoration consisting of three dots — the only such separator in the book. Why is it there? In the “restored” edition of Naked Lunch, Miles and Grauerholz assert that “Burroughs corrected about fifty [errors] when the book was reprinted a few weeks” after the first printing. On July 20, 1960, Burroughs told Irving Rosenthal that he “corrected the book for second printing and found as I remember not more than fifty actual errors.” But I compared the text in every edition of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch I have. The same errors are in the same places in every book. “Old time, veteran Scmeeckers” is in the first, second, and third Olympia printings. On page 11 the phrase “Now right again” looks like it was accidentally set in bold type. The same mistake occurs in every Olympia edition. If Burroughs really did make corrections — when it came time to go over The Soft Machine, he didn’t want to do it and told Brion Gysin “I am not much of a proof reader” — the corrections never made it into print.

It is easy to explain how Burroughs’ corrections went unused. Olympia had the type set for the first printing. For subsequent reprintings, they used photo-offset — basically photographing the original edition and printing the photographs. That perpetuated the errors, the lone text decoration, and the stray instance of bold type. Maynard & Miles state that Olympia did plan a “special edition” which they never ended up issuing. There are galleys with corrections in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. The handwriting looks more like Gysin’s than Burroughs’ but it’s possible these were the corrections made for the “second” printing. At any rate, they were unused and provide no further way of distinguishing between the various Olympia editions.

Tracking the First Copies of the Book

As much as I learned from the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library, I still had unanswered questions. What was the meaning of the periods and commas in the price? Was there any way to differentiate between a true first and a pirate edition of Naked Lunch? Was it possible to identify the very first books Olympia issued — the ones in the month before the dust wrapper was added? It occurred to me that the next step was to look at copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch which had documented histories. There were books which Burroughs signed to friends in 1959. There were books which Olympia sent to reviewers. Did these indisputably true firsts harbor telltale signs of their primacy? I made a list of Burroughs’ friends and associates in 1959 and set to work seeing if I could figure out where their copies of Naked Lunch had landed.

This was complicated not only by the passage of time but by the difficulty of getting the book out of France in 1959. Allen Ginsberg had predicted that Naked Lunch would drive readers mad. What really drove them mad was getting their hands on a copy. Piero Heliczer wrote a correspondent about the difficulties of getting it into England. “Three people,” he said, “who will pay for it want to peruse a Naked Lunch if you cant bring these within one month please send them at once Naked Lunch must be by personal mercury as customs officials of post like getting indigestation.” [sic] In the United States, the post office confiscated many copies. Bill Dobson, whom Burroughs had befriended in Mexico City, described how hopeless the situation was in small-town America. On October 6, 1959, he wrote Burroughs,

Sure disappointed that the book didn’t get through — I kept hoping though I didn’t expect it would get here. The postmaster in every town big enough to have a radio station gets free broadcast time to inform the public about the revolting stuff that comes through the mails and its direct contribution to crime generally and juvenile delinquency in particular and urging everybody to vote for more stringent laws that will enable the Postmaster General to purify our reading and deliver us from evil.

Allen Ginsberg had received the letters out of which Burroughs fashioned Naked Lunch but even he could not manage to get the printed result. On August 14, 1959, Ginsberg wrote Burroughs: “Send me your book, a number of copies, I don’t have one.” On September 29, he wrote: “I still have not receivd a copy of yr book. Presumably one was sent, & didn’t get through. Please ask Gerodias [sic] to try again.” On November 17, he wrote again: “I still haven’t got my copy — tell Girodias try send me one not under my name but care of my brother… Also another one care of my father.” Another case in point was Edwin (Ned) Erbe, the publicity director of New Directions, who was working with Gregory Corso to publish The Happy Birthday of Death. Erbe tasked Corso with getting him a copy of Naked Lunch in November 1959. In spite of multiple requests, Erbe only received the book in May 1960 when it was delivered to him by Peter Orlovsky. In April 1960, a New York Times article about Girodias claimed that “Olympia had exceptionally bad luck with review copies of ‘The Naked Lunch‘: only two out of twelve reached their American addressees.” What abyss did those confiscated books fall into? One imagines the inscription Burroughs must have written on that first copy to Ginsberg.

Grove Press, which would go on to publish the book in America, struggled to get a copy. On September 21, 1959, Fran Muller of Olympia wrote to Judith Schmidt at Grove: “I am surprised to hear that you did not receive the copies of ‘The Naked Lunch‘ we have sent to you.” On September 29, Gregory Corso wrote Burroughs that “I still didn’t get my copy; Diane was hesitant to send me her copy then I got a letter awhile back from her saying she sent it on, I await.” Diane who? Diane di Prima? Evidently Corso received this or another copy. He wrote Ned Erbe in November to say that Naked Lunch was great and that he had loaned his signed copy to Tennessee Williams. Kells Elvins, Burroughs’ childhood friend, had not managed to obtain Naked Lunch by that point either. On November 13, Burroughs advised him, “If you cannot buy Naked Lunch in Rome I will send copy.” In his letter of July 30, Burroughs had promised Paul Bowles that “you should have a copy within the next few days,” yet on December 7 he was following up to say “I hope you got the copy of N.L. I sent you with Achmed Yacoubi.” In December, Burroughs wrote to his son Billy, “I was glad to hear from you [that you] received Lunch and enjoyed same.. That’s something the cook always likes to hear..” Incredibly, the book had gotten through U.S. customs to a twelve-year-old. (And one wonders about Burroughs’ parental judgement in sending it to him.)

Who else managed to receive books? A pristine copy described as the author’s is located in the Burroughs archive at the New York Public Library. Burroughs must have handed Brion Gysin his copy at the Beat Hotel, presumably within days of publication. He inscribed it “For Brion Gysin / nothing is true everything is permitted / William S. Burroughs.” That copy, covered with a handmade dust jacket of silver leaf paper, is now in the Burroughs archive at the NYPL too. Irving Rosenthal also received a copy hot off the presses. On August 23, 1959, he wrote Burroughs to acknowledge receiving a copy of Naked Lunch. Rosenthal loaned his to Lyle Stuart, a publisher to whom he was trying to sell the American rights to Naked Lunch on Burroughs’ behalf. In the same letter he mentioned that the Partisan Review had received a review copy. “I hope,” Rosenthal wrote, “you have airmailed copies of NL as we asked. Neither Allen nor Jack nor I nor anyone friends we know have rec’d copies from Olympia — but Partisan Review has rec’d a review copy. The copy you sent me has been with Lyle Stuart & his lawyer.” This copy is now located in the Irving Rosenthal Papers at Stanford University. It is accompanied by a note by Rosenthal titled, “On the Olympia edition of [The] Naked Lunch sent me by WSB 8/3/59.” The note begins, “This is the first copy of NL to enter the U.S.” — language repeated in the finding aid for the Rosenthal Papers.

I decided to visit Stanford in order to inspect this copy of Naked Lunch. I have to say that it was an enlightening, even moving experience. It is common knowledge that Rosenthal used the Olympia edition to put together the Grove Press one, which has since become canonical. But until you see the Rosenthal copy in person you don’t really appreciate just how extensive an editing job he performed. At a glance, the book is the most beat-up copy of the Olympia edition that I have ever seen. The spine has been taped. The covers are cracked. The wrappers, normally a flat green, have been so thoroughly handled that they’re sort of greasy looking. Page after page after page contains proofreading symbols, deletions, insertions. Paragraphs are crossed out or moved around. There are inserts with typewritten text. There are sheets of paper with handwritten text — in various colors of ink — taped in. It resembles one of Burroughs’ cut-up scrapbooks from the 1960s. It’s tempting to think that this is exactly how Naked Lunch ought to look — jumbled, unstable, cobbled together from multiple sources, printed and typed and handwritten. “This book spill off the pages.”

Although the cover of the Rosenthal copy is beaten and worn, I was able to use a magnifying glass to ascertain one important detail. The price on the rear of this copy, which is indisputably from the first batch of books printed, contains a period: “1.500.” The price on the rear of the author copy and the Brion Gysin copy at the NYPL uses a period. The price on the copy purchased by a Harvard student in August or September 1959 also makes use of a period. Based on the evidence furnished by these four copies, it is difficult not to conclude that the very first copies of the printed book bear this previously unremarked point of distinction: they had periods in their prices. Books with commas came later. When? They had to have been printed before April 1960, the date scrawled by an owner on the Pleasure of Past Times copy. It’s possible that the Samuel Beckett book, the only other Olympia book of the time to have a comma in the price, suggests a date. Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnameable was printed in October 1959 by Imprimerie du Lion. Naked Lunch had been printed by S.I.P in Montreuil. Did Girodias, reaching out to a different printer for the Beckett volume, task them with generating another run of Naked Lunch? Did the same printer use the comma in both books?

Tracking down other known copies of the first printing would lend further weight to this thesis. The poet-bookseller Harry Nudel purchased Gait Frogé’s copy from her estate. Burroughs inscribed it, “For Gait Froige [sic] – The English Book Shop – Minutes to Go.” The inscription indicates that Burroughs can’t have signed the book before October 1959, when he began experimenting with the cut-up technique, and most likely signed it in April 1960 at the launch of Minutes to Go, which Frogé funded. Notably, the book has a period in the price on the rear. Paul Bowles’ copy appears to be held in the Paul Bowles Collection at the University of Delaware. Bowles himself can be seen showing the book to the camera in the 1995 documentary The Complete Outsider. A snapshot of it has also appeared online. Bowles had the book covered in red Moroccan leather. Was the rear cover with the price bound into the book? Was it taken off and thrown away? I have not been able to visit Delaware to find out. Alan Ansen’s copy is also a mystery. He received his by October 1, 1959, when he wrote Burroughs: “I did get your book and thank you ever so much for the inscription.” Where is Ansen’s copy? I have been unable to find out. Where is the review copy received by the Partisan Review? It is not catalogued in the Partisan Review archives at Boston University.

Another copy that has gone missing is Harold Norse’s. In Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, Norse describes how Burroughs personally gave him the book after a reception at the English Bookshop.

That evening Burroughs came to my room and handed me an inscribed copy with disarming warmth and shyness. “This copy is for you, Harold,” he said, standing in his topcoat and trilby, his back to the window that faced the street. I accepted it gratefully and read the inscription: “For Harold Norse, ally and accomplice, with very best wishes.”

Where is Norse’s copy? I cast around looking for it. Norse sold some papers to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. Other papers landed at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. So far as I could find out, neither university has a record of it. I asked Todd Swindell, a friend of Norse who runs haroldnorse.com. He suggested that it might have been pilfered. “Harold did have some of his archives stolen around 1996 by a friend of his roommate — a disastrous event that precipitated his heart attack. Perhaps there’s a chance it might have been amongst that material.” It must be in a collector’s library somewhere.

Putting It All Together

I managed to track down five copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch with documented histories — books that belonged to Burroughs, Gysin, Irving Rosenthal, Gait Frogé, and a Harvard student. Five of five have periods in the prices on the rear. It is reasonable to conclude that the “truest” firsts of Naked Lunch, the ones distributed in August 1959 before the dust jacket was finished, can only have been copies with the period in the price. Conversely, books with commas in the price were probably not available before fall 1959, when the Samuel Beckett book with a comma in the price was printed. The print runs were significantly larger than described by the bibliographies. The first printing, the one with the green border on the title page, was probably 10,000 copies. In my experience, period copies are somewhat rarer than comma copies. It is also harder to find period copies with the New Francs stamp, which suggests again that the period copies were issued prior to the comma ones. As a rough guess, I’d say something like 3,000 copies in the first print run had periods and the remainder had commas. The second official printing, the one with 18 francs on the rear wrapper and no green border on the title page, was printed in a run of at least 6,800 copies. Kearney’s date of “c. 1962” for the second printing is realistic but, in the absence of documentary evidence, it could have been earlier or later.

What about pirate editions? I stumbled on a pirate of the Grove Press Naked Lunch that’s in the Beinecke Library at Yale. It belonged to the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot bibliographer Donald Gallup, who wrote in the front fly-leaf “A pirated ed. sold in Taiwan.” There were likely other pirates of the Grove edition but what about the Olympia? Given how often Olympia Press books were bootlegged, it’s logical to assume pirate editions of Naked Lunch must have been printed. Books too large for their wrapper might be an indicator but eventually I decided that my own Fat Boy wasn’t really that fat in comparison to other copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch that I’d accumulated. Other dust wrappers do fit on it and there are any number of plausible reasons to explain the sloppy fit of some wrappers. Maybe the jackets were scored wrong. Maybe the designer made an assumption about the length of the text and therefore the thickness of the book which changed as Burroughs and his collaborators revised Naked Lunch for publication. Nothing else about my Fat Boy screams “botch job from Formosa.”

I have learned of one pirate of Naked Lunch with an intriguing and indisputable backstory. The book was once in the collection of Barry Miles. It has red wrappers, which some Olympia titles did have, and was purchased by Brion Gysin in an Iranian airport during his pilgrimage to Hassan-i Sabbah’s mountain fortress in 1973. In “A Quick Trip to Alamut,” Gysin mentions finding copies of Naked Lunch for sale “in the airport of Isfahan… probably both bootlegged and pirated.” On his return, he gave one of these copies to Miles, writing in the front leaves, “This copy of Naked Lunch was bought at the airport at Isfahan, Iran and taken on the quick trip to Alamout Castle, the HQ of Hassan I Sabbah, Grand Master of the Assassins, on a very scary day, Wednesday Aug 22, 1973. Brion Gysin.” Burroughs inscribed it too, “All the best to Alamout by Brion Gysin. William Burroughs.” In an email, Miles shares that the book “is a straight forward offset litho reprint — no green border on the TP.” A pirate edition from the command post of Hassan-i Sabbah — this must be one of the coolest copies of Naked Lunch in existence. The thought of other red pirates floating around the mideast has tormented me during the years I’ve been researching the publication history of Naked Lunch. They must be out there.

There is one other pirate of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch in my possession. A few years ago, an eBay auction offered a 1959 text block of Naked Lunch with no wrappers. It had been in the collection of the San Francisco Public Library. Presumably the library rebound the book in boards which were removed when it was deaccessioned. Purchasing the text block, I set myself the task of recreating the famous green wrappers of the Olympia Press edition in Adobe InDesign. I printed this out on a color laser printer, fixed it to a sheet of cover stock, and wrapped the text block in it. My Fat Boy may not be a bootleg of Naked Lunch but I now have this piracy of one, a 1959/2018 hybrid of French printing and American do-it-yourselfism. I imagine dying one day and the book being sold off or deposited in a library along with the other copies of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch I’ve collected. So as not to confuse bibliographers, collectors, or librarians of the future, I made one tweak to the cover while recreating it. Below the 1.500 price on the rear, I added the domain name REALITYSTUDIO.ORG. If you ever see the book around, now you’ll know who pirated it.

Thanks

Thanks to Barry Miles for sharing the red pirate of Naked Lunch formerly in his possession, Harry Nudel for sharing the Gait Frogé NL, and Jed Birmigham, Oliver Harris, and Jan Herman.

Notes

Archives

ASU. Ted Morgan Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Arizona State University Library.

Berg. William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951-1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

HRC. Paul Bowles Collection 1897-1995, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Kansas. Burroughs-Hardiment collection, 1957 – 1964, Kenneth Spencer Research Library Repository, University of Kansas.

Stanford. Irving Rosenthal Papers, Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University.

Bibliographies

Maynard, Joe, and Miles, Barry, William S. Burroughs: A Bibliography, 1953 – 1973, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1978. Miles confirmed in an email on July 27, 2020 that they used Joe Maynard’s copy of Naked Lunch to write the description in their bibliography.

Kearney, Patrick, The Paris Olympia Press (New Edition Revised and Expanded), Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007.

Correspondence

Unless otherwise specified in the notes, cited letters can be found in the two volumes of Burroughs’ correspondence.

Burroughs, William S., The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945 – 1959, edited by Oliver Harris, New York: Viking, 1993.

Burroughs, William S., Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959 – 1974, edited by Bill Morgan, New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Notes

William Burroughs to Paul Bowles, July 30, 1959. HRC.

Brion Gysin interview with Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, Tape 143 A. ASU.

Olympia Press royalty statements. Berg.

Maurice Girodias to Peter Matson, July 17, 1969. Berg.

Piero Heliczer to unnamed correspondent, fall 1959. Quoted in listing on BeatBooks.com for “Ten typed letters, nine of them with holograph additions, drawings and other embellishments; one typed postcard; one autograph postcard; and one autograph aerogramme from Michael Horovitz to Piero Heliczer, c. May – November 1959.”

Bill Dobson to William Burroughs, October 6, 1959. Kansas.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, August 14, 1959. Berg.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, September 29, 1959. Berg.

Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, November 17, 1959. Berg.

Henry Popkin, “The Famous and Infamous Wares of Monsieur Girodias,” New York Times, April 17, 1960.

Fran Muller to Judith Schmidt, September 21, 1959. Berg.

Gregory Corso to William Burroughs, September 29, 1959. Berg.

William Burroughs to Kells Elvins, November 13, 1959. Berg.

Irving Rosenthal to William Burroughs, August 23, 1959. Stanford.

Photographs of Gait Frogé’s copy of Naked Lunch were very kindly provided by poet-bookseller Harry Nudel.

Alan Ansen to William Burroughs, October 1, 1959. Berg.

Barry Miles to the author, July 30, 2017, email.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

This may not be exactly true, but permit me to float it out there anyway. I have a firm belief that anybody who owned a copy of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch from 1959 to 1962 was interesting. A person to sit down in a bar and talk to for a couple hours. You know what I am talking about: the idea that the possession of certain objects bestows an aura on the owner. Got a copy of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica then you must be wonderfully weird and eccentric. Is there a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on your shelf then you must be into some deep ass shit. I fall victim to this myself. When I was setting up my first house back in 1998, my hardcover copies of DeLillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason Dixon, and Gass’ The Tunnel were lined up like squat soldiers upon the middle shelf. They shouted to all who passed through the doors of my library that I was a serious motherfucker when it came to Modern Literature. Or so I hoped. Better not to mention that I got lost and could not find my way to the end of The Tunnel. Who was I fooling? Who was I trying to impress? I was definitely trying too hard. Man, did I break a sweat with all that mental heavy lifting.

Now mind you, this theory is on one level complete poseur bullshit, but I cannot shake the feeling that owning the Olympia Naked Lunch from 1959 to 1962 held real meaning. It made a strong statement of who you were. It spoke of one’s credentials. Reading Naked Lunch bought you to the table of a secret society, a bubbling underground. It was like breaking bread with the in-crowd. This is because getting a copy of Naked Lunch at the time was something like a back-alley drug deal. It was clandestine and seemingly dangerous. Brown paper and under-the-counter type shit. Or you took the time and effort to go to Paris and hit the bookstalls. Think of Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky. It is all about literary tourists vs. travellers. Owing Traveller’s Companion No. 76 was part and parcel of being a flâneur who explores bibliographic roads less travelled.

There is something definitively less hip about the Grove Press edition when compared to the Olympia Press edition. Maybe it is the dust jacket. The Grove is not dressed as sharply as the Olympia. The purple and white, the olive green. That reminds me of a zoot suit. The Grove gives off a little too much of grey flannel. Or maybe it is the old New York vs Paris debate. Paris is so exotic, erotic, and faraway. The Olympia copy just because it was published in Paris seems sleazy yet sexy. It is decadent and depraved. In the City of Lights, the Olympia edition reminds you of the red light district. It is a true dirty book. After all it could get you busted. It definitely put you in contact with undesirables like beatniks, junkies, and jazz musicians. The Grove with its paratexts, which explain away all mystery and depavity, is too clean cut. It is a dirty book sanitized like a rapist conservatively dressed and shaven in preparation for trial. Reading the Grove put you in contact with professors, lawyers, literary critics, and the public at large. So November 20, 1962, the publication date of the Grove edition, spells the beginning of the end of cool in some ways for Naked Lunch. Instead the book became a hot topic. No longer spoken about in whispers in dark, seedy cafes and cold-water flats, it was now proclaimed and promoted far and wide by loudmouth poseurs like Norman Mailer at literary conferences to any who would listen. Naked Lunch was no longer the work of a drug addicted murderer, but a work of genius.  

Philip Larkin found the pivot point of the 1960s to be 1963. He states his case in “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

It just so happens that 1963 was likewise a crucial year for the reception of William Burroughs. In a sense that was Burroughs’ Annus Mirabilis, or if you are a curmudgeon like me, his Annus Miserablis. You may have noticed that we have been posting a few reviews and articles on Burroughs of late. They all happen to be from 1963. This is no surprise or accident. That was the year in which the mainstream press firmly got its hooks into Burroughs. It could be argued that Burroughs never escaped the clutches of the mainstream media. Remember Life took Burroughs’ mugshot just months after the publication of Naked Lunch. Hauser and O’Brien were always hot on Burroughs’ trial, but in 1963 the deluge. It was then that the definitive edition of Naked Lunch shifted from the Olympia edition to the Grove edition.  

In book-collecting circles, the most highly prized collectible is that which is closest to the author’s hand. Manuscripts and letters trump proofs and galleys which have an edge over first editions and then there are the lowly reprints and reissues. There is something to this especially in terms of Naked Lunch. The rawest, funkiest Naked Lunch is in the letters to Ginsberg and can then be found in the pages tossed into a scattered pile in Burroughs’ dingy apartment in Tangier. Naked Lunch in this nascent state is something like performance art. The routine is a literary striptease strictly for Ginsberg, an act of provocation. The scene Kerouac describes of Burroughs writing Naked Lunch in Tangier is also a performance and something of a Happening or installation involving the Hunger Artist. Here’s Kerouac from Desolation Angels:  

In fact I hung around his room several hours a day altho I now had a great room on the roof, but he wanted me to hang around about noon till two, then cocktails and dinner and most of the evening together (a very formal man) so I happened to be sitting on his bed reading when often, while typing out his story, he’d suddenly double up with laughter at what he done and sometime roll on the floor. A strange compressed laugh came out of his stomach as he typed. But so wont Truman Capote think he’s only a typewriter, sometimes he’d whip out his pen and start scribbling on the typewriter pages which he threw over his should when he was through with them, like Doctor Mabuse, till the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting.  

The preparation of the proofs for Olympia Press is a scene out of Rashômon. Nobody can agree on how the final version actually happened; in fact it seemed to appear spontaneously like a rabbit pulled out of a magician’s hat and it kind of did. (Burroughs’ next act, the cut-up, sprung from Tristan Tzara’s fedora.) The Olympia edition retains that sense of mystery and excitement. On to the Grove edition which is not a performance or happening, but instead Exhibit A in a courtroom drama over obscenity. Then we get to the various reprint paperbacks which package Naked Lunch for consumption by the mass market. Despite the claims of The Restored Edition of authorial intention and definitiveness, for me the progression of Naked Lunch over time has been a dilution of the book’s energy and vitality. The Olympia edition will always be the definitive published edition and I will always wish I could have watched Burroughs perform Naked Lunch in Tangier.

It might seem daring and transgressive for an article on Burroughs to appear in the men’s magazine Rogue in September 1963. Burroughs and porn. A potent combination. Yet by that time Naked Lunch‘s obscenity was being explained away as satire and magazines like Rogue (itself bastardization of Playboy, which mixed sex with science fiction, making one wonder why the publishers did not get a little more creative and print excerpts from Novia Express) presented sex as a consumable product and lifestyle packaged in a safe vehicle that company men could drive home to their recliners in Levittown. The piece titled “The Invisible Man” opens: “William Lee Burroughs, a man who for many years has been a mystery in the writing world, is becoming increasingly visible these days.” Make no mistake; the mystery still lingers to some extent. Even the author, Ann Morrissett, cannot get a firm grasp on the elusive Burroughs. William Lee Burroughs. The cover story of the secret agent, the pseudonym from Junkie, still protects Burroughs’ identity even as “[his] notorious book, ‘The Naked Lunch,’ after surreptitiously floating between continents beshrouded with rumor, has of late been clothed in so many reviewers’ words that the work itself may come as an anti-climax for those who finally get down to its bare reality.”

Morrissett’s article captures the pivot point I described earlier: the emergence of Burroughs into the bright light of the mass media. Another article by Morrissett makes this clear through metaphor. In Evergreen Review No 29 (March/April 1963), Morrissett opens “An Account of the Events Preceding the Death of William Burroughs” as follows: “Nine Lies-the-Heart: the door opens on a narrow cell with a bright window. A high figure is silhouetted against the light. Gradually I make out its features. Stretched over the skeleton and meat is a fine yellow parchment on which have been written many things now carefully erased. Dark-rimmed glasses are painted around the eyes.” From March/April 1963 to September, Burroughs has become “increasingly visible.” The death Morrissett describes is the demise of Burroughs’s anonymity and the birth of Burroughs as a celebrity in popular culture.  

As for Morrissett, during her travels to Paris and the Beat Hotel in 1962, she undoubtedly picked up a copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch. Morrissett’s interaction with Burroughs may have been a pivot point in her life. Just as these articles were published, Morrissett married William Cooper Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford. Was her trip to Paris and her interaction with Burroughs one last adventure before settling into comfortable married life on a college campus? Not exactly. Throughout her life she was an anti-war advocate, pacifist, and feminist. She and her husband practiced tax resistance against the Vietnam War and her husband was, in 1971, named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger, and Davidon organized the March 8, 1971 FBI office break-in, in Media, Pennsylvania, and informally lead the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI which led to the disclosure of COINTELPRO. Morrissett sounds like quite an interesting person, no? Maybe my theory is not so far-fetched.

1963 Burroughs Publicity

John Pearson, “The Burroughs Affair,” The Sunday Times Colour Section (3 February 1963)

Ann Morrissett, “An Account of the Events Preceding the Death of Bill Burroughs,” Evergreen Review (March/April 1963)

Ann Morrissett, “The Invisible Man,” Rogue (September 1963)

Ann Beat, “Junkie Culture,” excerpted from Books and Bookmen (November 1963)

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#13: The Olympia Press The Naked Lunch (1959). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

I call my mom several times a week, not so much because I am dying to talk to her, but more because I can count on her to answer the phone at all times. You see, I am not a Facebook or Twitter guy; I use limited texting and brief emails. No, when I want to reach out and touch someone, I still use Ma Bell. Often as the night progresses and the supply of Natty Boh (and me along with it) slips into oblivion, I feel the urge to rap about Burroughs and book collecting. In such times of need, I go through my progressions dialing all the book dealers, collectors and scouts that are saved on my phone. And inevitably the phone rings and rings as nobody wants to hear me rant on about how Jeff Nuttall is the most interesting collaborator of Burroughs’ career for the thousandth time. So I dial 555-2323 and rest assured I will soon be serenaded by my Mom’s sing-song “hello.”

I got a hold of her recently, after I had yet again unsuccessfully attempted to reach any book dealer or collector in the continental United States in order to hash over this Burroughs list. I asked her, “What is the most interesting Burroughs collectible?” and she responded without hesitation, “You have to consider the Olympia Naked Lunch.” And there you have it: the book that once offended an entire generation has become your mom’s Burroughs collectible. The general public knows one Burroughs book if they know one at all and a smaller subset of that public knows only one Burroughs collectible. Naked Lunch has become something of an old grey lady of American literature, your eccentric grandmother to be sure, but what I am saying is that the book has become respected and even seems to be inching towards respectability. When I stop in at the Hudson Booksellers in Union Station on my commute home from a day at the mines, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text jockeys for attention next to the latest James Patterson or Jonathan Franzen title. Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruits now read the novel on the subway pulling away from Washington Square Station. Time magazine, which in 1962 blasted Naked Lunch as a sick novel, listed it as one of the most important novels of the American Century.  

In book-collecting circles, the Olympia Naked Lunch is a mainstay of any respectable modern first dealer’s stock. It sits alongside Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kerouac’s On the Road, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as a blue-chip collectible. These are the book’s peers but the Olympia also has nothing to be ashamed of sitting in a display case (as it often does) with A Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury. Walk around the ABAA Bookfair in New York City in April and you cannot swing a dead Ruski without hitting an Olympia Naked Lunch. As a Burroughs collector it is the one Burroughs book you absolutely must have in order to be considered a serious player in the game. Even if Burroughs is not your bag and you find yourself in the ever shrinking group that still finds reading the book as embarrassing as being caught holding Steely Dan III from Yokohoma, as time goes on and you want to collect highspots of American Literature, the book’s reputation has become such that it is mandatory in that regard as well.

Briefly on the topic of mothers. In podcasts and posts, I have talked a bit about the influence of my father on my book collecting. His shadow definitely looms over my library, but this is not to downplay my mother’s role. She is in my collecting DNA as well; in that regard, like Burroughs, I am a momma’s boy. She specialized in frogs and wishbones. Both collections were stored in bathrooms. This is collecting as home decorating. The frogs and wishbones do not so much fill a personal desire as a personal space, or in the case of the bathroom, they personalize a utilitarian space. But my mother expressed desire though collecting/gathering as expressed through consumer purchases. For example, there was the time she tried to buy every last softshell crab in Reading, Pennsylvania, because she was craving them. Another time she cornered the market on Aqua-Net hairspray because she heard it was going to be discontinued. Compulsion and obsession. The cornerstones of collecting.  

When my brother and I graduated high school, my mom wanted to continue an interest in high school tennis. In an effort to get more involved, she took the exam required to umpire official tennis matches and proceeded to officiate on the local level in high school and college matches. In the matter of a few years, she was officiating at the U.S. Open in New York, as well as doing matches for the likes of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and the Williams sisters. My mom puts hard work and dedication into her all avocations. Did I mention she does 500 crunches a night? All these traits fed into my Burroughs collecting. My father may have instilled in me the desire to collect, but in the depths to which I was willing to go to follow that desire, I followed my mother’s example.

When it comes to the question of why do I collect generally my parents are a big part of the answer. But if the question is “why collect Burroughs?” the answer could only be Naked Lunch. When I read Naked Lunch in the summer of 1990, my overwhelming reaction was: You can fucking do this? This is possible? Burroughs was the first writer who showed me that in literature, as in art, music and any creative endeavor, nothing is impossible and everything is permitted. Naked Lunch expanded my consciousness and opened up a new world of possibility like nothing before it. That same summer, the most important and most influential period of reading in my entire life, with the possible exception of the 100 days I spend in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. That year I took a course on Post-WWII American literature with Jonathan Wilson, a very popular professor on campus. The syllabus seemed to be full of books he was not excited to teach, and in class after class he would talk about the books he did not assign, urging us to read them. I dutifully wrote all the titles in the margins of my notebook and that summer I sought many of them out. Gravity’s Rainbow (and Naked Lunch) was one of the books in the margins. Again, Pynchon did things I never knew were possible in literature and I could not fathom that one mind could come up with such a kaleidoscopic, surreal worldview. I learned more that summer about my surroundings and about myself than in any of my courses.

Since then I have read almost everything that Pynchon has written, yet I became a Burroughs collector, not a Pynchon collector. The reason stems from the differences between the first edition of Naked Lunch and that of Gravity’s Rainbow. Even at that early stage, as a neophyte collector, before I even knew Burroughs’ bibliography all that well, I realized that the Olympia Naked Lunch was cool and unusual. First of all, it was a paperback. I have always enjoyed the look and feel of a paperback over a hardcover. I knew as a collector that I wanted to collect paperbacks. Second, it was published by a pornographic press out of France, run by a maverick publisher who did not give a fuck. Gravity’s Rainbow was a hardcover published by Viking Press, a corporate publisher run by gray flannel suits who played by the rules. Increasingly, I found that those rules were determined by the debits and credits of a balance sheet. The alternative press was all about breaking, bending or ignoring those rules and creating new possibilities. Like with Naked Lunch in literature, I found that the alternative press did things that I did not think were possible in publishing. In the Mimeo Revolution, everything was permitted.

As I got more into collecting, the more I realized that novels were not where it was at. First edition novels are generally in hardcover and the products of corporate publishing, and as objects they are boring and, for me, uncollectible. First editions of poetry on the other hand generally came out of the alternative press and many of these books were in paperback, which I found fresh and interesting as objects. It took me a long time to realize that I collect Burroughs not because he is a great novelist, which he is, but because for the period in which I collect, 1957 to let’s say 1967, Burroughs was a great poet and artist. So I stop collecting Burroughs when he transitions from poetry to narrative, which meant getting in bed with corporate publishers. From that point on, Burroughs’ bibliography is fucked.  

A look through his bibliography makes this clear. It makes perfect sense that Burroughs was first described as a San Francisco Poet in Chicago Review. For years, Burroughs was published with and alongside poets. Until the mid-1960s, his novels were published in paperback like books of poetry. And to me Naked Lunch feels and reads like a poetry chapbook from the Mimeo Revolution. This is especially true of the Olympia edition. For me that is the book’s appeal, and that is why I wanted to collect Burroughs, not Pynchon, even if I could not have articulated it when I started out. 

Over the years my mom has expressed dire concern over the debits and credits of my balance sheet due to my Burroughs habit. I respond, “It’s alright, Ma, I’m only reading.” But I know in my heart of hearts that I am hemorrhaging cash. Yet I cannot help myself as collecting is in my blood and Burroughs has gotten under my skin. I am after all a momma’s boy. When I purchased my copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch, I thought I had arrived as a Burroughs collector and maybe possessing this book would stop the bleeding. Not so but, that said, the book is the beating heart of Burroughs collecting; it is what keeps the Burroughs rare book market alive and it is Naked Lunch which brings Burroughs to life for the average citizen, possibly turning that reader into a Burroughs junkie. Without a copy of the Olympia Naked Lunch on your shelves, your Burroughs collection is flatlining, but inject that purple and white paperback into your bookcase and your entire collection will rush back to life like Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. 

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

So here goes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This type of stuff does exist on some level in the small press world. The Joseph Zinnato Burroughs collection contained an archive related to the publication of Time. Stephen Gertz writes, “And so here was the original issue of Time magazine Burroughs used with all the spaces where text had been cut-out; a 26-page signed, typed manuscript with corrections in his hand; another draft, a 14-page typed manuscript with autograph corrections; an 11-page typed manuscript / collage with title page; a 12-page photo-negative of the prior item with extra drawings and highlighting by Joe Brainard; a 32-page small mock-up of the book in ink by Brainard; the cover as prepared by Burroughs with art by Gysin; the publisher’s ledger/account book with production costs, orders to whom and how many; and over 100 pieces of mail concerning ordering and publication, including the copyright certificate, and the complete list of where copies of the 1-10 edition and 1-100 edition were sold, providing a remarkable insight into the marketing of the book.” This type of stuff is incredible to me and is valuable in financial and scholarly terms. The ultimate would be an archive like this surrounding the publication of the Olympia Naked Lunch. I would love to see galleys and proofs from that period since such information would help solidify the history of the book’s publication, which has been shrouded in mystery for decades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also part 2: Naked Lunch Prospectus.

Olympia Press Catalog 1957

Olympia Press Catalog
Front cover
1957
Download the entire catalog

Olympia Press Catalog 1959

Olympia Press Catalog
Front cover
1959
Download the entire catalog

Olympia Press Catalog 1960

Olympia Press Catalog
Front cover
1960
Download the entire catalog

Olympia Press Brochure 1966

Olympia Press Brochure – Good News and Bad
Front cover
1966
Download the entire brochure

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Also see Jed Birmingham’s “Top 23 Burroughs Collectibles #13: The Olympia Naked Lunch” and RealityStudio’s “Secrets of the Olympia Press Naked Lunch.”

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

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

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

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

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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