Beat Museum, San Francisco, California

I have had the pleasure of being able to supply The Beat Museum in San Francisco with a number of Beat Generation items over the years. Recently the bought some rare postcards from me as well as books by the subjects of the postcards: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Creeley. I am glad to have been able to continue to their ever-growing collection.

dreams and realities

In my dreams now I am scouting for books. I dreamt last night of being in Portland, Maine or rather going to Portland, Maine and looking for books at flea markets, used goods stores, second-hand shops. In the dream, I wasn't finding anything special but - I was looking. I also had to hurry since I had to fly to Seattle later in the day and look there for books as well.

In my waking life, books are keyboard clicks away. Easy to find, too easy. Of course, half of the search - the physical search is the handling of a book. The thrill of discovery. The validation of a decent sale. Like when I found a copy of a local history book in Pennsylvania that was signed by both authors, and to have it sell for over $100.00. That's cool. That's why I do it. Rescuing unwanted books and finding better homes for them. Like place orphans into good homes. Similar in a way.

The down side of electronic pursuits is when a book, say Minutes to Go by Burroughs, Corso, Gysin, and Beiles comes from across the pond (England) and there's a note written on the inside front cover saying that this is not the copy I want. I want the hard-bound version from 1957(1959?) and not this Beach Books paperback edition with flimsy cover. Shucks! Is that true? Is the very rare hard-bound first edition that much better? I am glad to have any copy of this book. It's an important document in the history of "cut-up". For that alone, it's worth having - but is this copy really that inferior? Would it have made a difference if I had handled the book before buying it? The book has a provenance, it's an association copy. Did someone warn Michael Butterworth that he had the wrong copy? The note goes on to suggest a different book. The note, I failed to mention, was on the inside front of the book.

every cover tells a story

I have never seen this cover for Burroughs' Junky before. It is from a copy that was available in Japan. It's the best cover for this book that I have ever seen. So, why are some cover images acceptable in the Far East (for example) but not in the good old US of A? Self-censorship, of course. Our old Puritan background averting our eyes and shuttering the thought. But does it, really? Does self-censorship work? Has the burning of the library in Alexandria by Christians retarded our evolutionary development? (It has, actually done that) But it hasn't ended our native curiosity.

Nor will it. Our race was thrown out of Eden for being curious. For questioning authority. For thinking for ourselves.

Every cover tells a story. Of course some publishers abuse the privilege of putting tits and ass on covers that have little to nothing to do with the content inside. That's a given, regrettably. Still, I would prefer to have this copy of Junky than the candy-ass safe covers that sold in the US and Britain. Unless maybe this is the British version.

Such prudes we are, sheesh.

Book arts / book artists

over the past few years I have been exposed to, and become fans of "book artists". Tom Phillips really set the tone for this type of work with his groundbreaking book A Humument. His book came twenty some years after concrete poets began to reconfigure the page and the words on the page, and to reconsider the "canvas" that a book is in its physical nature. Phillips was responding to the experiments of William Burroughs and his "cut-up" techniques, taking them into a completely different visual direction.


I have never held in my hands a sculpted book by Stella Waitzkin, but I admire what she did - using the book as an object. In my own work I have created what I call a 'Liquid Library' which consists of books that have been altered or spray-painted, or sunk to the bottom of a fish tank. I have been working on the notion of "book as object: text as other". The concept that what we accept as "a book" need not be the only definition of that constitutes "a book".


Back in 2001, when the artist Katy Jean was discussing what I might do with the physical dimensions of my as of yet unpublished chapbook Spontaneous Chili one of the ideas was to put the table of contents in the center of the book in the form of a menu. The theme of a menu, rather, the presentation of the book as a form of a menu still hasn't been fully realized but it was an idea that lead in part to the cover image, and to the lay-out of the book in meal category listings, etc.

In 2003, Katy Jean came up with the idea of using vellum for the cover to our 'the Eternal NOW!' poetry series anthology and incorporating the image into the cover and end-pages so that the complete cover was two layers deep and could be changed by flipping open the cover.


But here I stop short to say that these steps were quite small compared to the work of Alisa Goldman and countless others who are doing much more in the way of appearance and presentation of a book. The Canadian artist Michael Snow has also done something remarkable, in my humble opinion, with his book Cover to Cover.