The following is an excerpt from Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, Who Was Sinclair Beiles?, published in 2009 by Dye Hard Press. The book contains interviews and essays that create a portrait of Sinclair Beiles, the South African poet who worked for Olympia Press, helped to edit Naked Lunch, and collaborated with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso on the first cut-up book, Minutes to Go.

I first came across Sinclair Beiles’s name one drunken night in 1991 outside a bookshop in Yeoville’s Rockey Street. A newspaper clipping reviewing Sinclair’s selected poems A South African Abroad, published by Lapis Press in California, was pinned up in the bookshop window with a handwritten message ‘Soon available in South Africa’ scrawled at the bottom. In a few short paragraphs I learned that Beiles had mixed with the Beat poets, collaborated with William Burroughs on Minutes to Go, was influenced by surrealism and was virtually ignored in South Africa.

I was immediately excited by what seemed akin to the surrealist marvellous exploding into my dull mediocre existence of restricted and frustrated desires. I couldn’t believe that a South African poet had been out there in the avant-garde European literary scene.

I formed a picture of Sinclair in my mind that was to prove worlds apart from what he actually was. I saw him as a lean, calm pipe-smoking poet who had lounged around on placid Greek beaches contemplating sunsets and occasionally churning out fragile yet fascinating poetry.

Over the next year or two I picked up more information and hints about what Sinclair was really all about. I borrowed a copy of A South African Abroad and apart from the selection from his initial collection — Ashes of Experience — I found most of the poems weak. This I found was almost a trademark of Sinclair — flashes of excellent poetry punctuated by collections of dubious quality, some of which seemed no better than doggerel. A young man in a bookshop told me that the handful of collections sampled for the selected volume were misleading. Sinclair was in fact a prolific writer, churning out masses of poems and plays in frantic bursts of activity. He was also, a woman informed me, ‘not well in the head’. He roamed the streets of Yeoville — where he lived — in a similar fashion to how he had roamed the streets of Paris. An article about him in the Mail & Guardian at the time referred to him as ‘The Wandering Poet of Paris and Yeoville’.

Two years later I read that Sinclair’s play about Lorca, My Brother Federico, was being performed at the experimental Black Sun Theatre. Shortly after that, I obtained Sinclair’s home telephone number from poet Roy Blumenthal, who had until recently been quite close with him. Roy had endured enough of Sinclair’s paranoid behaviour, and had suffered the displeasure of having Sinclair yelling at him in the street, threatening to ram his typewriter down Roy’s throat and challenging him to a boxing match.

A few weeks later I had succeeded in setting up a meeting with Sinclair at his house. I was stunned to find that his house looked onto the back of a block of flats that I had been staying in only a couple of years previously. On arriving at his door — he had invited me round for Sunday afternoon tea — I was greeted by his wife, Marta Proctor.

Sinclair wasn’t home; he had gone down to a Rockey Street cafe. Marta was busy changing her granddaughter’s nappy at the time, and in my naivety I had extreme difficulty in placing an international Beat poet within this scene of mundane domestic activity.

About fifteen minutes later, Marta sighed and suggested that I go down and look for Sinclair. It wouldn’t be difficult to mistake him, she said. He was tall, with a slight stoop, grey hair and a beard. I began to dread that he’d forgotten about our meeting.

After searching one or two bars, I found him sitting at a table drinking tequila and sharing jokes with a couple of people. Sinclair hadn’t forgotten our meeting at all, he was just running late, he assured me, as we got up to leave. After taking a couple of steps out the door, we bumped into two young girls who seemed to know him very well. As we left the girls, Sinclair remarked: ‘They used to be waitresses at that dump we just left. The owner fired them because they were doing such a good job. They showed up his lack of professionalism.’ Then we bumped into someone else and it was another exchange of greetings. Sinclair was evidently a well-known figure in this area where I had once lived and socialised yet never encountered him.

I mentioned his Lorca play to him and said that I regretted not seeing the production.

‘Oh, the production was terrible,’ Sinclair shot back. ‘The director messed it up and the actress was clueless. The reviews were atrociously bad, written by inexperienced theatre critics.’

‘But I read two very good reviews,’ I protested.

‘Ah,’ said Sinclair. ‘They were exceptions and the reviewers only said it was good because they didn’t understand it and couldn’t bear to reveal their ignorance.’ This all sounded like a bit of a contradiction but I didn’t say anything. I had been warned about Sinclair’s paranoia and I was getting a taste of it firsthand.

*

But who was Sinclair Beiles? In my conversations with him, as well as in various articles and interviews, Sinclair painted an eventful past for himself. Often these stories contradicted each other, raising the question of whether some/all/none of them were true. Yet Sinclair’s name has cropped up in some unusual places. Charles Bukowski mentions receiving a letter from him in one of his short stories, and Allen Ginsberg refers to him in his Indian Journals. However, in a world where dreams and life freely intermingle and where distinctions between reality and myth are increasingly blurred, I have often wondered whether it is really important to establish the ‘truth’ or ‘definitive facts’ about Sinclair’s life.

Still, here they are.

Sinclair Beiles was born to English parents in Kampala, Uganda in 1930. He told me his father was an army doctor but told others that he was an industrial chemist.

Educated at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and obtaining a degree in Literature and Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Sinclair went to London in the early 1950s, ostensibly to study languages, but found himself in Paris. It was here that he met with such literary luminaries as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Arthur Adamov and, on one occasion, Pablo Picasso.

Back in Johannesburg by the mid-fifties, Sinclair could not resist the pull of Paris and the end of the decade found him back in Europe, working as an editor for the notorious Olympia Press and mixing with, among others, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. He also met with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac during a short stay in Tangiers.

But there were also push factors that sent Sinclair out of South Africa. He often claimed that he had fallen foul of the government for writing an article on the Dutch Reformed Church and apartheid. He also, however, claimed that it was his affair with a married woman that drove his scandalised family to send him packing on the first ship out of Cape Town harbour.

It was this second period in Paris that saw Sinclair’s initial publications. His erotic novel, Houses of Joy, was published by Olympia Press under the pseudonym of Wu Wu Ming. He also collaborated on the now legendary book of cut-up writing, Minutes to Go, with Burroughs, Corso and Brion Gysin. In conversation with me, Sinclair claimed that his first publication was a novel called The White-Hearted Nigger, but I have not been able to trace it and he never included it in his list of publications.

It was also this period that saw Sinclair taking part in a happening called Space Flight with the Greek sculptor Takis, which involved the use of electro-magnets. It was this experiment that Sinclair claimed was the cause of the manic-depression which was to plague him from then on, causing him to spend a substantial part of the next decade in clinics and hospitals. Sinclair’s behaviour had certainly become eccentric. In his biography of Burroughs, Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan recounts how one day, in the company of Burroughs and Corso, Sinclair dropped his pants in the middle of the street and stuck a finger up his arse. Burroughs was disgusted and Corso called him a social climber.

Apart from psychiatric treatment, the 1960s also witnessed Sinclair spending quite a few years in Greece and it was during this time he wrote the poems that were to form the back-bone of his first collection, Ashes of Experience, which, after publication in 1969, was to be the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker poetry prize.

Other publications followed, such as Deliria and his collection of poems and plays, Sacred Fix, which had been written while in psychiatric care in London. His work appeared in an anthology published in London called Monsieur Dada, alongside Andrei Codrescu, Brian Patten and Nanos Valaoritis. There was also Luna Park, with Cathedral of Angels by George Dillon Slater, published in Athens in 1976. The early 1970s also saw the publication of his first book of rhyming poems, Tales, with woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes.

Sinclair’s rhyming poems, of which many were to follow, are in my opinion inferior to his blank-verse works. Sinclair told me that he employed rhyme as a means of drawing together images that are not usually associative, thereby creating stronger, more startling images, very much in the way that the surrealists worked. This can, however, also be employed with blank verse, or with the cut-up methods that he had used for his early poetry.

Sinclair returned to South Africa in the late 1970s and a flurry of small limited editions followed within a very short period: Ballets?, Illuminations in White Tobacco Smoke, Dowsings, 20 Poems, Poems Under Suspicion (with Poems on Bits of Paper by Marta Proctor) The Crucifixion and Death Notice.

But Sinclair’s reputation remained very much underground and while he had been published in important South African literary journals such as Quarry and Ophir, the anthologies generally ignored him. A South African Abroad was published in 1991 and the excellent collection Khakiweeds in 1994, followed shortly by On Stage.

When I met up with him on that sleepy Sunday afternoon in Yeoville, Sinclair was sitting with two book-length narrative poems, The Golden Years and Aardvark City.

Interview with Sinclair Beiles, Yeoville, 1994

Gary Cummiskey [GC]: When did you first become interested in writing?

Sinclair Beiles [SB]: I first became interested in writing when I felt, or rather realised, that I could write down things that I’d dreamt about. This must have been when I was about three of four.

GC: What led you to venture to Paris in the 1950s, and how did you become involved in the expatriate scene?

SB: Well, I was born in Uganda, and the first very interesting culture that I was introduced to was French, as a result of my friendship with The White Fathers, who were French missionaries, living near Lake Victoria. They looked after lepers, on a place called Leper Island. They taught me all the French fables. So I had, at an early age, a strong French cultural background. Later, in South Africa, I was introduced to a publication called transition, a French underground magazine. Somehow copies arrived here, and this put me in touch with France. Also, I have always been very interested in architecture, and particularly medieval architecture, as well as medieval writers, whom at that stage I didn’t read in medieval French, or Old French. People like Rabelais and very many other medieval writers. At that time I also became interested in the witty, political writers, like Voltaire, who at the same time were quite surreal. There was also French painting, which I saw in reproductions. There used to be more French paintings at the Johannesburg Art Gallery than there are now. There were also sculptures. There was, and still is, a wonderful Utrillo, which gave me a tremendous impression of a part of Paris, which I wanted to see. In Paris I also discovered sculptures, like those of Tinguely, with his Absurd Machine, and his Writing Machine. I discovered Tristan Tzara, whom I came to know personally. I discovered Picasso, whom I also came to know personally. We lived quite near to each other, and we would use the same bookshops, where he was always buying political books. I was also present at a reading of his play Desire Caught By The Tail, at his studio. I became friendly with Camus and Adamov, but I wasn’t particularly into Sartre. I used to see him often, but I never went near him really. I was friendly with Giacometti. There was also a number of Americans I was friendly with, particuarly Richard Wright, who wrote Black Boy. I was familiar with Jimmy Baldwin, but not as friendly with him as I was with Richard Wright. I also met the English poet Christopher Logue. This was during the early fifties, but then I left, returning again in 1957.

GC: Could you share with us a few recollections of people such as Burroughs, Corso and Ginsberg, as they were back then?

SB: Burroughs was very interested in primitive religions, and this influenced his writing a lot. For instance, when he was writing a book of cut-ups, he refused to alter the arrangement at all, because it read like an incantation. He is very, very learned. He speaks German, French, Italian and Spanish — apart from English. Corso was agitated, eager, writing very quickly and brilliantly. I remember him lying on the floor of his room in Paris, composing his poem ‘Bomb’. He was also difficult, however, and very moody. Nevertheless, I still regard him as the greatest American poet of the 20th century. As for Ginsberg … you know, we’ve just been through three hundred years of strife, and if you take Ginsberg’s latest book — or any of his books about politics — all you have to do is change the names, and the situations are just the same as the ones we’ve been through here. I personally don’t like to be reminded of Ginsberg, and also don’t want to become involved in any crusade, as Ginsberg tends to encourage one to do these days. He just sent me his latest book the other day, and of course, although he didn’t mean to insult me, I found it a fucking insult. Here we are relaxed, after this long period of shit, and someone comes along with their preaching about shit elsewhere. I really don’t think this book will go down well here, and it isn’t good poetry either.

GC: Some writers, such as Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso, have used drugs as a springboard to creativity — could you comment on this?

SB: The only poet who really used drugs as a springboard to creativity was Ginsberg. It’s true that Burroughs had been a junkie, but that was before he started writing. Corso was also into drugs, but not constantly. I can remember when Corso and I shared a room in Athens, and I would have to go out to the chemist at 3am to get something or other for him, in order to keep him going. Corso couldn’t go to the chemist himself, he looked too wrecked!

GC: Your first published book was Houses of Joy, a novel, and then you worked with Burroughs, Corso and Gysin on Minutes to Go. Could you tell us about this early phase of your literary career?

SB: Actually, my first published book was a novel entitled The White-Hearted Nigger, which was published in England by The English Literary Review. Why did I publish novels? Because I was very impressionable of course, and at the time I was very impressed by the writer Elias Canetti who wrote the novel Auto-Da-Fe. I was friendly with him, and as he was urging me, and everyone else, to write novels, we all wrote novels! As for Houses of Joy, the reason why I wrote a novel based on a Chinese tale, was because at that time most people in Paris were down on the Chinese. I thought I would take this tale, and make it a better novel, especially from the view of erotica. It was published under a Chinese pseudonym, Wu Wu Ming.

GC: The story behind Minutes to Go has now become somewhat of a legend. What are your personal recollections of the collaboration?

SB: Well, there have actually been quite a few distortions, particularly in Burroughs’s biography, and also in one on Ginsberg. At the time, not only was I in a senior position at the Beat Hotel, but I was also on the editorial staff of Two Cities. When Jean Fanchette heard that there was a book of cut-ups being produced, he wanted to have it published. It appeared with a cover by Gysin, and then there was all kinds of shit. Gysin was an appropriative person. Like with Ian Sommerville’s Dream Machine. Gysin patented it and made a lot of money out of it. He also appropriated Minutes to Go, and maintained he had created the book. It doesn’t really matter I suppose, but … at the beginning, the book had no influence on literature, but did on music and pseudo-philosophy. One day, a young doctor, Edward de Bono, came by to learn about it, and then formulated the concept of Lateral Thinking.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

As Bill Reed’s memoir makes clear, independent bookstores are key locales in a creative community. Part employment office, soup kitchen, flophouse, café, and publishing house, the bookstore functions as a communal center like the American Express office in Paris, the barber shop in Harlem, or the general store on Main Street. The role of the bookstore in literary history remains to be explored in full, but there are a few publications on the subject that I know of that look fascinating. Sylvia Beach’s memoir of Shakespeare and Company is essential for anyone wanting to get the full story of the Lost Generation. In 1997, rare bookseller and publisher John LeBow gathered a collection entitled The Phoenix Bookshop: A Nest of Memories. The book provides essays by writers like Diane Di Prima on Robert Wilson’s legendary store. LeBow did his subject proud with a collectible limited edition. Wilson added in his two cents in 2001 with Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York’s Legendary Phoenix Bookshop. I own some cancelled checks from the bookshop that document Wilson as a financial resource on top of all the other services he provided to artists and writers. A similar book could be written about Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop, Better Books managed by Bob Cobbing, or thousands of other stores around the world over the years.

Recently, I wrote about the threatened closing of John Calder’s bookstore in Great Britain. Anyone reading the literary blogs, like Silliman’s Blog, or similar information sources on literary topics get the sense that the independent bookstore is going the way of the carrier pigeon. Such closings are quite a blow to general readers and creative artists alike. To my mind, the independent bookstore is an essential institution, one needed for a healthy and happy existence.

In his memoir Early Plastic and in the excerpt on Eighth Street Bookshop, Bill Reed tells many tales of life on the Lower East Side. One of my favorite ancedotes was his description of seeing William Burroughs leafing through a book of poems by Charles Bukowski in the stacks at Eighth Street. I love the linking of Burroughs and Bukowski, but I also enjoy the fact that Burroughs haunted the alternative bookstores in his community. In his memoir on the Sixties, Barry Miles tells a similar story of Burroughs frequenting the Indica Bookshop at 102 Southampton Row in London. Burroughs lived nearby and was something of a regular there. Miles writes, “Bill had pinned a sign on the bookshop noticeboard some weeks before offering free Scientology auditing sessions to anyone who wanted them in order to improve his own auditing technique — even giving his home address and telephone number, which I thought was very trusting as he usually wanted to keep that very much a secret.” Despite his desire for a low profile, Burroughs was very much an active member of his neighborhood and something of a bookstore junkie.

One book in my collection highlights the important role of the independent bookshop in Burroughs’ social and creative life. Kaddish, Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, and Bomb were all written in part at the Beat Hotel, but the book that most captures the spirit of 9 rue Git-le-Coeur is Minutes To Go. In his editor’s note to Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, Jan Herman describes the Beat Hotel atmosphere as like a “laboratory,” and Minutes To Go is certainly the most representative result of those experiments in lifestyle and literary technique.

I want to focus on the community of bookstores involved with this cut-up collection. In fact independent bookstores made Minutes to Go a pubished reality. Minutes to Go was issued by Two Cities in 1000 copies on April 13, 1960. A limited edition of ten copies included a manuscript page. This reminds me of the limited edition for the C Press Time. I have never seen the limited Time or Minutes to Go for sale on the rare book market. The John Hay Library at Brown possesses a copy of the Minutes to Go and displayed it prominently at their Burroughs exhibition years ago.

Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine.

Fanchette ran his magazine out of George Whitman’s Mistral Bookstore. The Mistral was a hang out for expat writers along the lines of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. In fact, Whitman would close the Mistral and reopen as Shakespeare and Company in the mid-1960s. From the Merlin Group around Alexander Trocchi (the Group that discovered the fiction of Samuel Beckett and published him in English with the assistance of Olympia Press) to the writers associated with the Paris Review, Whitman’s store functioned as a water cooler in the literary office that was Paris. In Exiled in Paris, James Campbell writes, “The Mistral doubled as ‘The Left Bank Arts Center’ and announced ‘a program of cultural events'” in 1951. Campbell continues, “The Librairie Mistral was housed in an ancient building near St. Michel, facing Notre Dame Cathedral. Before Whitman bought it… it had been an Arab grocery store. Not content with offering lectures, exhibitions and the rest, he set up a lending library with an estimated 10,000 books.” To this day, George Whitman’s bookstore is a thriving literary hangout and an essential stop for any bibliophile and aspiring Beat.

In Literary Outlaw, Morgan writes that Burroughs cruised the store, largely unsuccessfully. Yet Burroughs met his long time companion and collaborator Ian Sommerville at the Mistral. A student at Cambridge, Sommerville worked at Whitman’s bookstore in the summer of 1959. (According to John Geiger’s biography of Brion Gysin, Sommerville was perched on a ladder and dropped a book on Burroughs’ head.) Corso and Ginsberg both read at the bookstore. Burroughs’ first public reading occurred there as described by Harold Norse in Memoirs of a Bastard Angel. Like with Indica or Eighth Street, the Mistral was part of Burroughs’ routine.

My copy of Minutes to Go has the bookstamp of the reopened store. As Minutes to Go did not sell well despite a nice turnout at the publication party, copies were probably lying around the store for years. To the horror of collectors, Whitman diligently stamped the books sold in his store with the Shakespeare and Company logo. He claimed the stamp actually increased the value of the book due to the association with the store. I wonder, but the stamp does link my copy to the Paris bookselling community out of which Minutes to Go took shape as a literary experiment and as a published object.

Fanchette ran out of money and could not bring Minutes to Go to completion, so Gait Froge, the Frenchwoman who ran the English Bookshop, stepped in and saved the day. She ponied up the $500 needed to pay the printers. Froge’s bookshop was another legendary hangout for young writers. Campbell writes the English Bookshop “was a smaller affair [than the Mistral], and necessarily more discriminating in its stock. Whereas the Mistral boasted books ‘in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and German,’ she offered a mix of classics and the latest productions of the avant garde.” Froge delighted in mixing with writers and artists, opening her bookstore to the creative community of expat Paris. The Merlin Group was headquartered at the bookshop after a falling out with Whitman. Burroughs particularly appealed to Froge’s sensibilities and avant garde tastes. The English Bookshop financed the first pressing of Call Me Burroughs in 1965. This record has French and English liner notes and came out before the ESP LP of 1966.

In Barry Miles’ The Beat Hotel, there is mention of the release party for Minutes to Go in April at Gait Froge’s English Bookshop. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press supplied the champagne. A large portion of the sales at the English Bookshop came from the tourist market in Girodias’ Traveller’s Companion titles of which Naked Lunch was one (No. 76 in fact). The writers who hung around the English Bookshop (as well as the Mistral) provided Girodias with his stable of pornographers.

According to an interview Ted Morgan did with Sinclair Beiles, the four authors, Burroughs, Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, all signed at the party. One prominent bookseller challenges this fact in his description of a dedication copy of Minutes to Go to Gait Froge on sale for $32,500. This book of course lacks the Corso signature. In Literary Outlaw, Morgan recounts that Corso arrived with his girlfriend Sally November and that Froge, herself, commented “Do you have one for every other month as well?” In addition, all of Corso’s letters collected in An Accidental Biography from April 1960 are postmarked from Paris. It would appear that Corso was there and not in Scandanavia as suggested. Burroughs was lucky to make the party. At the time, the French authorities were pursuing Burroughs on a drug charge and suggested that he leave the country. Burroughs left Paris (soon after the publication party) and traveled to England with Sommerville. I believe he also went to Scandanavia as well before returning to Paris once the pot smoke had cleared.

Yet it is true that the Corso signature is unusual given the fact he disavowed all involvement with the book as contrary to his sensibilities as a poet. This is made very clear in a postscript to Minutes to Go. Yet he wavered on this point. The publication of a cut-up with Burroughs in the collaboration issue of Locus Solus in 1961 is proof that he was still associated with the technique after the publication of Minutes to Go. Possibly the dedication copy currently on the market was signed to Froge at a later date or maybe Corso refused to sign it at the party in an act of spite. Corso was nothing if not unpredictable. My copy is signed by Burroughs, Corso and Gysin. I like to think that the book was signed at that party and that in the hustle and bustle Beiles never got around to signing it, but that may be wishful thinking. Sadly, my copy of Minutes to Go lacks the wraparound band that said “Un règlement de comptes / avec la literature.” Translated, to settle a score with literature. Members of the Beat Hotel, the publishers, and those at the signing party would have caught the drug reference.

No doubt the crowd at the publication party had its share of thrillseekers, but, naively perhaps, I have the sense that they were mostly members of the anglophone literary community around the Beat Hotel, Olympia Press, and the independent bookstores. Again a look at Corso’s letters complicates this impression. On roughly April 19, 1960 a few days after the Minutes to Go party, Corso writes in a letter to Peter Orlovsky, “I had it out with Burroughs, his ass-licking friends are bores and they hate, and he, Bill, is okay, but he does not know me.” In an earlier letter also to Orlovsky from April 19th, Corso writes, “Yelled at Burroughs for being the world’s number one stool-pigeon which of course he ain’t.”

Corso is probably expressing his ambivalence about the cut-up and Burroughs’ embracing of the technique. These feelings may have been brought to a boil by the recent party. Yet it hints at a deeper critique of Burroughs. Corso has a reputation as a tragic clown, but he was a brilliant poet and something of a gadfly to the Beat Generation. Corso poked holes in the inflated egos of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs and challenged the myths of the Beat Cult. I have suggested that Burroughs was something of a scenester. As others have stated, Burroughs thrived in an active community and required contact with others. The mention of Burroughs’ “ass-licking friends” proves interesting and puts a negative spin on this need of Burroughs. According to Corso, Burroughs was far from the lone wolf of the Beat myth and more of a queen bee surrounded by a hive of drones. A literary community could shade into something of a fawning royal court.

From Shakespeare and Company of the Twenties to, well, Shakespeare and Company of the present day, the English language bookstore in Paris has a tradition as strong as the café for writers and artists. Sylvia Beach published the unpublishable in 1922 when Ulysses was issued in its wrapper the color of the Greek flag and the Mediterrean Sea. In the late 1940s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti studied in Paris and was greatly impressed and inspired by these bookstores, particularly Whitman’s Mistral. City Lights was founded on this model. By 1960, the term “Published in Paris” had a long history and the independent bookstore was an important part of it. Not surprisingly, histories and biographies dealing with the Beats in Paris inevitably mention Gait Froge, George Whitman, The Mistral, The English Bookshop, and Shakespeare and Company. Like the Beat Hotel or the Olympia Press, the independent bookstore and its owner play a crucial role in Paris of the Fifties. Quite possibly, the final touches and publication of Naked Lunch and development of the cut-up could only have happened in one city in the world in 1959. It was in this environment that Burroughs flourished and matured as a writer. In the circumstances surrounding its creation and publication, Minutes to Go captures the spirit of the Beat Hotel as well as the central role of the independent bookstore in that literary community.

Paris: Two Cities Editions 1960, bound in wraps, one of 1,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A3a. A collaborative effort between Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso, and the first of the “cut-up” publications. There was also a limited edition of 10 copies (only five of which were for sale) each signed and numbered by the publisher and containing a manuscript page from each of the 4 authors. Contrary to Maynard & Miles statements, these copies are not printed on special paper or in special bindings. They are merely the standard work signed and numbered with an envelope containing the manuscripts pasted onto the inner rear cover. These were offered for sale at $25.00 each, rather more than the $1.50 retail for the trade edition. A copy of the limited edition is held at the Brown University Library and includes a letter from the publisher outlining prices for the different issues of the work. Correspondence from Miles indicates that most of the 1,000 copies had a wraparound band but these are seldom encountered now.

San Francisco: Beach Books 1968, bound in wraps but a different design from above, text is the same, one of 1,000 copies. Maynard & Miles A3b.