It's nearly 1am and I've made two blog entries I didn't intend to make, and have not made the ones I intended to make. I've been truly night scribbling...
On to stuff I wanted to blog.
I was in New York City this past weekend, taking part in some of the festivities celebrating the tradition of creative and loyal (for me, anyway) dissent in a world in which such dissent is increasingly criminalized. Tomorrow I will blog my little photo album from the weekend and explain a little more about what I mean by the above.
While in NYC, I was staying in the lovely home of a friend, in Greenwich Village, whose parents are both literary agents. It was a house full of books, which seems a rarity these days, a veritable heaven for bookworms such as myself.
On my last day there I had the opportunity to peruse the library in the super-skylighted upper story, where there was one whole long tall wall of books, maybe ten shelves high, with one of those book shelf ladders-on-wheels, like you'd see in a proper old book store, to reach the higher shelves. Again, a bibliophile's wet dream (maybe dry, dusty dream would be more apropos). While perusing, I came across a book that got me very excited.
It was a first-English edition of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. Just the title was enough to get me to pull the book out of the stack--even though it was obviously in a delicate state (fig. 1). Once I pulled it out I discovered something that made me run for my camera. It was an amazing paratextual element--the drawing of a young Jean Genet by Jean Cocteau (fig. 2).
It wasn't just the fact that this great queer writer, at the beginning of his notorious career, had been depicted by a great queer artist and film-maker--a wonderful confluence of marginalized genius; it was also the care that had been taken to make it look like it had been inscribed--I might even say "scribbled"--in pencil on that cover. It looks like someone had handed Genet's book to Cocteau and asked him to do a quick likeness of Genet, as if he were doodling on a cocktail napkin.
I think whoever thought of adding that doodle to the cover was brilliant, and certainly someone who loves books as artefacts, as objects d'art (certainly I'm allowed a somewhat pretentious French phrase when I'm writing about Genet and Cocteau). And why was I so excited about seeing it? Because I'm someone who loves books as artefacts, as objects d'art.
And yet my excitement was tempered by the thought that such examples of book art are rare to the point of nonexistence today, and that the man who owned the book--the literary agent whose home I was staying in--probably knew that better than most, being very well acquainted, in the day-to-day dealings of his trade, with the bottom-liners and bean-counters who run most publishing houses today.
But then I was excited again by the thought that this man might be my literary agent someday...but that's a tale for another time.
Posted by jeb at September 2, 2004 1:39 AM | TrackBack
