I cleaned up a large bookcase this weekend, and filled a purge box with close to two dozen books. I took that box to the used bookstore I frequent to trade in for store credit, and browsed a bit, hoping to find a used copy of Joy Williams’ The Visiting Privilege (I finished her debut collection Taking Care this weekend).
No luck with the Williams. I ambled down by the Zs though, where I found a new copy of Unica Zürn’s novella The Trumpet in English translation by Christina Svendsen. I knew a bit about Zürn (mostly her art and text poems, as well as her relationships with Hans Bellmer and Henri Michaux), but I hadn’t heard of Trumpets.
The Trumpets of Jericho is published by Wakefield Press, which has a great track record as far as I’m concerned. I loved their edition of Gisèle Prassinos’ The Arthritic Grasshopper and they’re recent book Letters, Dreams & Other Writings by Remedios Varo is one of my favorite things this year. Anyway, here’s the Wakefield blurb for The Trumpets of Jericho:
This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zürn’s most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body—its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds—animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.
The Trumpets of Jericho includes a few of Zürn’s illustrations, including this one—
I also browsed John Barth books a bit. I’ve been reading Robert Coover’s early novel Origin of the Brunists, which reminds me a bit of John Barth’s first two novels, The Floating Opera and End of the Road. It’s not the content as much as the style of these early works that I find similar, and I wanted to dip into the prose of The Floating Opera, which I do not own.
(I have a movie tie-in version of End of the Road. I have never seen the movie, but one of my favorite reading memories is reading the entire novel in a friend’s mother’s childhood bedroom in an entire night. We had gone down to Miami for a few days and were staying with his grandfather. His mother had been an English major, and her bedroom seemed wholly unchanged from like, 1973 (the whole house seemed stuck wonderfully in 1973), and I picked up End of the Road at like midnight and read until four or six or whatever. Great times).
Anyway, this round-cornered Avon copy (1964) of End of the Road jumped out at me. I was smitten! I feel like I’ve seen round-cornered massmarket paperbacks before, but I don’t really remember any specifically. So I googled, and came up with this unsigned article from The New York Times from 17 March 1964:
Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation, has attacked the problem of the dogeared paperback by cutting off the ears. The result is a book with rounded corners at the edges and square corners at the binding.
The company has also improved design, type and paper of its paperbacks. The first titles in the new format are “The Time Has Come” by John Rock, Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy,” Herbert Tarr’s “The Conversion of Chaplain Carr,” Nathaniel West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts,” Aldous Huxley’s “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” and “Those Barren Leaves,” and Van Wyck Brooks’s “The Writer in America.”
I dogear the hell out of my books, by the way.
Biblioklept 