John Martin

The founder and former publisher of Black Sparrow Press, John Martin, has died. The Times has a nice obit by Adam Nossiter, who can be forgiven for a throwaway reference to the press's authors as "offbeat literary rebels." The online version even includes the cover art for my favorite Black Sparrow book, Paul Bowles's Things Gone and Things Still Here. Martin is survived by his wife, Barbara, who was responsible for the elegant design of the Black Sparrow volumes.

The Deceiver

At first glance this is a typical example of the kind of cheap fiction for adolescents that was popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. The publisher, A. L. Burt Company, was known for reprinting authors like Horatio Alger, whose books are indeed advertised in the back matter, specifically under the heading of "Books for Boys." Even though Reynard the Fox isn't by Alger, the figure on the front seems like a typical Alger hero: an adolescent boy on his own, staff and bag in hand, ready to find his way in the world. In fact, though, the cover is a complete work of misdirection. To begin with, where is the fox of the title?

The author of this book, or rather its editor and adapter, was Joseph Jacobs, a well-regarded Australian-born scholar who wrote a number of books on folklore and fairy tales as well as on Judaica. He states in the book's Preface that he sought to "provide a text which children could read with ease and pleasure, and at the same time give their parents, their cousins, and their aunts a short résumé of the results which the latest research in folklore and literary history has arrived at with regard to the origin of the book." There is a fairly learned Introduction and occasional footnotes, as well as amusing drawings by W. Frank Calderon.

The book's full title is The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox; it was originally published by Macmillan in 1895. Jacobs explains that he has reworked a text published by one Felix Summerley (a pen name for Sir Henry Cole, who is credited with the first commercially marketed Christmas cards). Summerley / Cole in turn took his material from a volume published in the 1490s by William Caxton, who drew on a Flemish version of stories that had been shaped and reshaped since at least the twelfth century. With all those hands involved you might expect something fairly watered-down, but Jacobs's Reynard is actually quite lively and readable, and it has been reprinted several times, notably by Schocken Books. Reynard is classified by folklorists as a typical animal "trickster," but in these pages he's more of a sociopath, a serial murderer, thief, and fabricator. His story doesn't have a tidy moralistic ending; instead, deceit is rewarded, Reynard triumphs over everyone he has wronged, but he's so engaging that of course we root for him all the way.

There's no adolescent boy in the book, let alone an obviously modern one, and the closest the text ever comes to justifying the Burt edition's cover art is a scene where Reynard is described holding a staff and bag of his own. So the question is, was the cover meant to depict the typical reader, rather than the protagonist, of Reynard the Fox, or was it simply a case of bait-and-switch? The bizarre alternate cover below, also published by A. L. Burt, suggests that it may be the latter.

Needless to say, there are no Native Americans or canoes in Reynard the Fox.

Postscript: Twice in the narrative the text refers to two minor animal characters as "the leopard and the loss." "Loss" puzzled me, as I could find no definition for an animal by that name (but Jacobs thought it unnecessary to add a footnote). With a little research I found that Caxton had "losse," and this is from the Dutch "los," meaning "lynx." So this is our old friend the lonza.

Peculiarities

There's a curious disclaimer on the copyright page of the Dalkey Archive Press reprint of Vincent O. Carter's book about his experiences as an African-American expatriate in Switzerland. The Bern Book, written in the 1950s in part to explain the obvious question — Why Bern? — was published in 1973 by the John Day Company (a copyright date of 1970 is also listed), and sank with barely a trace. Carter died in 1983, leaving one unpublished novel, Such Sweet Thunder, which finally came out twenty years later. This Dalkey Archive volume, with a Preface by Jesse McCarthy, was issued in 2020 amid growing appreciation for Carter's work. The disclaimer states that "There are peculiarities of style in this book, which we decided to keep from the original edition."

It's not clear exactly what "peculiarities of style" the publisher had in mind, or why they would have even considered altering the book, but of course they made the right decision in not doing so. The Bern Book is unique, to be sure, but little on the Dalkey Archive list counts as conventional, and the book poses no major challenges to a reasonably open-minded reader. I half-wondered whether "peculiarities of style" was a euphemism for "offensive material," but there's no more of that in the book than in the writings of any other frank African-American writer of Carter's day.

It's true that once or twice Carter seems to lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, but that could only have been fixed in consultation with the author, and in any case the muddles are barely noticeable. The Dalkey Archive edition, which in general is commendable, seems to have introduced a few minor typographical eccentricities in the form of superfluous hyphens that were presumably line-breaks in the first edition, and because of an apparent OCR error the name of a Swiss architect appears alternatively as Brechbühler and Brechbiihler [sic] on the same page. But this is trivial.

I suspect that Carter himself may have slipped up at the beginning of this lovely paragraph:

I had seen the city at four A.M. and six A.M. I had heard the first streetcar rumble down the street and beheld with wonder from the center of the Bahnhofplatz the last magical moment when all the streetcars stood in the station filled with the homebound who had been to the movies and to the tearooms or dancing or to choir rehearsal, strolling or working late, huddled in a tight little group under the shelter when it rained, and ranging freely, leisurely, under the strain of a pleasant fatigue when the moon shone and a warm breeze wafted them on: waiting—having boarded now the streetcars, paid and pocketed their transfers—for the signal, a short blast of a whistle. It blew! as the bell in the tower of the Evangelical church rang, and all the cars moved silently in the eleven directions from the heart of the city, while the buses coughed and whined through the shifting crowds of pedestrians which dispersed like sparks of fire before the wind.

Carter perhaps meant to write "at four A.M. and six P.M.," but the Dalkey Archive editors, if they noticed the issue at all, were right to respect the original reading.

Vincent Carter apparently spoke only rudimentary German at the time he wrote the book, and while he was familiar with the writings of Goethe and Kant he implies that he hadn't read much contemporary Swiss literature. One writer I suspect he did not know was his fellow flâneur Robert Walser, whose death came, as it happened, during the years that Carter was writing the book. In spite of their very different backgrounds, there is a not-too-distant kinship in the mixture of innocence, formality, and irritability evoked in this passage:

One day I encountered a young man upon the street who approached me in a very familiar manner, addressing me by my first name, which I found a little uncomfortable because I did not recall ever having made the gentleman's acquaintance. He presented his card and asked me if he might speak to me. "Oh, I guess so," I replied, and we went into a rather pleasant café, which was near at hand, where he ordered coffee, over which he suggested that we might speak more comfortably. And when he made it clear to me that he was paying for the coffee I relaxed in my chair and gave the young man my undivided attention, for, as you can well imagine, I was a little curious as to the nature of his business.

The appalling comic outcome of the anecdote, however, would not have happened to Walser: the young man represented a chain of supermarkets and wanted Carter, as the one black resident in Bern, to provide publicity for the opening of a new branch by donning a colorful uniform and selling bananas. Needless to say, Carter declined the offer.

Jason Epstein (1928-2022)

Publishing pioneer Jason Epstein has died. At 93, he managed to outlive his obituarist, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who died in 2018.

Epstein worked with a long list of authors and founded or co-founded Anchor Books, The New York Review of Books, and the Library of America. I confess to a fetishism for the early Anchor paperbacks, including those published after Epstein left the company in 1958. I have a dozen or so in the house and often re-read some of them. Many have wonderfully dotty covers by Edward Gorey. Today Anchor Books and many of its erstwhile competitors and imitators in the paperback market, including Vintage, Penguin, Signet, Ballantine, Bantam, and Dell, are all subsumed under the same corporate umbrella.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

City Lights Books has announced the death of its co-founder, the writer, bookseller, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after an astonishingly long and productive career. Ferlinghetti was 101 and had just published a book a year or so ago, making him (along with Herman Wouk) a rare centenarian author of consequence.

I've never been to San Francisco and it's been years since I read any of Ferlinghetti's poetry, but the bookstore and publishing company remain active, having survived a financial crisis a year ago with the help of donations. Long may it continue along its cantankerous way.

I've owned a handful of City Lights books over the years, but the only two I seem to have now are shown here. Both are fairly minor works by writers I admire, but the press did a nice job on them and I'm glad that they exist.

Collection internationale

Until relatively recently, the availability of foreign-language reading material in the US was a bit hit-or-miss, unless you happened to live in a major city. What student editions existed of texts in French and other languages tended to be heavily (and often annoyingly) annotated, and they were often abridged or censored to remove passages that might corrupt the youth of America. This series from the early 1960s was an interesting attempt to remedy the situation, at least for French, which was the prestige language of the day. They were published by Doubleday under the direction of an academic named Bert Leefmans, and the publisher promised that "no English, except the Doubleday copyright line, will appear in any of the books." Below is a two-page advertisement that ran in the French Review in 1961.

The books were comparable in price to Doubleday's Anchor series, and bore a simple cover design created by the noted artist and graphic designer Leonard Baskin. The selection of titles wasn't particularly edgy, but at least the edition of Candide was presumably better than the one I used, which had all the naughty bits removed. The line doesn't seem to have lasted very long, and I've only come across used copies once or twice.

Drue Heinz 1915-2018

Drue Heinz, the former publisher of Antaeus and the Paris Review, has died. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a lengthy obit.

The past year or so has seen the deaths of two of my favorite writers, Charles Simmons and Harry Mathews (and no doubt others I've forgotten for the moment), as well as New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers. For better or worse, the literary and intellectual world I grew up in is dwindling to an end. Something will replace it (though not for me). Time moves on.

My appreciation of Antaeus can be found here.

Things Gone & Things Still Here

The pieces in this little volume have all been republished in subsequent collections of Bowles's stories, but I still prefer to read them as they first appeared, in an edition published by Black Sparrow Press in 1977. Four of the stories -- "Allal," "Mejdoub," "The Fqih," and "The Waters of Izli," form a natural group, both in style and setting. "Istikahara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat" and the title story, though also set in North Africa, stand somewhat apart as they take the form of historical anecdotes rather than fiction. All take place in a Moslem Maghreb in which European influence is felt only distantly, if at all. Women are hardly present, and when they are they're generally up to no good. "Afternoon with Antaeus" is a mythological jeu d'esprit, and only in "Reminders of Bouselham" do Europeans share the stage with Maghrebis. "You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus," a description of an outing with some Buddhist monks in Thailand which may be either fiction or travelogue, is the only piece not set in North Africa.

The narratives are not much concerned with interior states, and descriptive detail is kept to a minimum; the unraveling of the tale is all, with each step provoking the next by inexorable fate -- "everything is decided by Allah." If the stories convey anything beyond fatalism, it's a sense of the impossibility of penetrating the consciousness of another, especially across cultures. This is so even in the one story, "Allal," where identities are literally exchanged, in this case between a young Maghrebi and a snake, under the influence of kif paste; the transaction ends in the destruction of both parties.


I miss John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. Back in its heyday, in the '70s and '80s, these colorful, matte-surfaced books were a refreshing alternative to the glossy trade paperbacks that were the standard in the publishing world. (There were also hardcover editions with acetate jackets and paper spine labels, but I could never afford them.) A lot of bookstores wouldn't touch them -- I'm not sure Martin really pushed their distribution all that much -- but they were always on prominent display in places like the Gotham Book Mart.


Much of the Black Sparrow list was devoted to writers like Charles Bukowski and lesser-known Beat poets I wasn't all that interested in, but it also included people like Bowles who had kind of fallen between the cracks of the publishing business at the time. (Bowles, by the way, firmly disavowed Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno's statement that he had complained of never being paid royalties for the Black Sparrow editions of his work.) Martin also put out a series of numbered pamphlets, entitled Sparrow, usually showcasing excerpts from the full-length books. He sold the bulk of his list to David Godine when he retired in 2002, the balance (Bowles, Bukowski, and John Fante) going to Dan Halpern's Ecco Press, which also had a long relationship with Bowles.


All of these books have colored endpapers and all except Midnight Mass below (perhaps because my copy is a second edition) have colored title pages as well. The designer was Barbara Martin.

Conrad at Anchor

Joseph Conrad: These handsome uniform editions of Joseph Conrad with introductions by Morton Dauwen Zabel were published by Anchor Books in the early '60s, when that imprint, which under the leadership of Jason Epstein had pioneered the trade paperback format, was a legitimate competitor of Vintage and Penguin as a publisher of serious literature and non-fiction in paperback. The cover designs were by Diana Klemin, the art director for Anchor's parent company, Doubleday. The use of photographs rather than art works in several of these titles was, I think, a little unusual at the time.



In addition to these six there were two listed as being in preparation that apparently were never issued, at least in the same form: Tales of Conflict and Falk, and Other Tales of the Sea; Zabel's death in 1964 may have prompted their cancellation. Anchor published a number of other Conrad titles with different cover treatments as well, some of them featuring art work by Edward Gorey. Doubleday's association with the Polish-born Conrad was already at least a half-century old at the time. At some point in the cascading consolidation of the book industry the connection lapsed, although a number of Conrad titles remain available from Doubleday's sister imprints under the Random House umbrella.

The Pleasures of Drabness

As a rule I'm a sucker for loud, garish colors, the more the merrier, but the images below celebrate the lost, enforced virtues of tight publishing budgets, matte stock, and limited color palettes. (And also of age, dirty fingerprints, and exposure to sunlight.)


The best American literary magazine of the 1920s, the Dial was home to Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, D. H. Lawrence and just about every other major American and English modernist. The design is a bit formal, in keeping with its highbrow tone.


Twice a Year, a hefty hardbound journal, had a run of several years in the 1940s.


A postwar Schocken edition of Kafka. Beneath the jacket the book itself was green, with a nice title stamp on the spine. I think Schocken's other Kafka titles from the same period probably shared the same design.



The Pantheon edition of one of Flann O'Brien's best books, erroneously dated 1940 but actually published several years later. I'm not sure whether the typographic arrangement on the front cover was supposed to suggest bird's feet.


A slender Irish periodical, with a nice woodcut. Here's the advertising on the back:


Below is another Irish pamphlet, front and back. The Dolmen Press was a highly regarded printer active for more than thirty-five years.



Finally, I imagine the name of this periodical, which had a brief run in the 1970s, was meant to allude to the better-known Poetry. The editor or editors responsible for its creation are uncredited within.

Antaeus, 1970-1994

In later years it would become just another literary magazine, albeit a very good one, but in its first decade there really was something special about Antaeus, which was founded in 1970 in Tangier, Morocco by Daniel Halpern at the instigation of and with the assistance of the novelist and composer Paul Bowles. It was refreshingly if selectively international, a little bit like a North African version of Paris Review, (it even imitated the latter in presenting interviews with literary figures, at least at the beginning) and it featured a number of excellent writers who were then undiscovered or forgotten in the US. Much of its uniqueness must have been due to the influence of Bowles, its "consulting editor," who as a longtime expatriate had contacts with literary circles on several continents.

I was a bit young for it when it first appeared, but by the mid 1970s I had discovered it and become a subscriber, and I eagerly devoured each new number and looked forward to the arrival of the next, which might be six months off if it was a double issue. At some point I believe it switched from a quarterly to a semiannual publication. I can think of any number of moments of pleasure or illumination I gained from its pages, but here are just a handful of favorites:

• Laura (Riding) Jackson's over-the-top diatribe, in response to a request for suggestions for a list of "Neglected Books of the 20th Century," in issue #20
  
• Bowles's own "Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaghanat" from the "Special Essay Issue" #21/22
  
• J. G. Ballard's disturbing "Low-Flying Aircraft" from the "Popular Fiction" double issue #25/26
  
• The Yannis Ritsos poetry feature, from #28
  
• Harry Mathews's droll short story in the form of a recipe, "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" from #29

Eventually Antaeus became quite successful and influential, at least as literary magazines go, and by the mid-1980s it had relocated from Tangier to New York and had became slicker, thicker, and to my mind rather tame, devoting way too much space to the same inbred roster of American poets that every other lit mag was publishing. But maybe I was the one who changed. It spawned a publishing company, the Ecco Press, which for a while did a commendable job of restoring to print writers like Bowles and Cormac McCarthy who were then out of fashion. (Sadly, the Ecco Press is now just another imprint of Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins.)


I love these early covers, which were printed on matte stock, as were all the issues of Antaeus until #54. The curious little grotesques on the ones shown here are by the Moroccan artist Ahmed Yacoubi, a friend of Bowles; the one exception is number 8, which is based on an artifact from Crete.

New Directions in the 1940s

James Laughlin started his career as publisher in 1936 with the first New Directions in Prose & Poetry, but in addition to the flagship anthology he soon branched out into other projects, some small-scale, others remarkably ambitious for a small press (the family's steel fortune was put to excellent use). By 1941 the New Directions annual was well over 700 pages and encompassed writing by Bertolt Brecht, Delmore Schwartz, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, John Berryman, Ezra Pound, and many others.

The following year, well ahead of the celebrated Latin American literary “boom,” the house issued a similarly hefty bilingual Antología de la poesía americana contemporánea / Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Edited by the classicist Dudley Fitts, the anthology included poets like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo, all of whom would remain largely unknown to the American literary audience for another generation.

But New Directions didn't just think big; it also thought small, and in fact Laughlin experimented with a variety of formats, from chapbooks to subscription publishing to limited editions. Some of these experiments didn't work out and were quickly abandoned; others became long-running series with lasting influence on both publishing and literature.

The Poets of the Year series, begun in 1941, was one early New Directions series. According to Laughlin, writing many years later,

I hit on the idea of a series of 32-page pamphlets of poetry, each one printed by a different fine printer, an artist of design. It seems incredible now but I was able to sell these for fifty cents, or $5.50 for a boxed set to subscribers.

Though Laughlin was enjoined by the Book-of-the-Month Club from calling the series “the poet of the month,” the chapbooks were in fact issued on a monthly basis for the first three years (1941-1943); in 1944, the final year, wartime paper rationing caused a reduction to six issues, including the one shown here.


Once again Laughlin was ahead of the curve: Alberti, a Spanish poet then living in exile in Argentina, would remain otherwise relatively little known in the English-speaking world until the appearance of Ben Belitt's rather poor translation in the 1960s and Mark Strand's much better one in 1973. This particular volume was printed for New Directions by the Press of Henry G. Johnson; the other volumes in the final year of the series were Selected Poems of Herman Melville, “designed by” Margaret Evans; Thomas Merton's Thirty Poems, printed by the Marchbanks Press; The Soldier by Conrad Aiken (the George Grady Press); A. M. Klein's The Hitleriad (the Samuel Marcus Press); and A Little Anthology of Mexican Poets (the Printing Office of the Yale University Press). The last of those was edited by Lloyd Mallan, who also translated the Alberti. The latter is a saddle-stitched paperback, with a removable dust jacket; the books were also published hardbound, for a dollar an issue.

Below is the fourth (and final) number of a short-lived New Directions periodical called Pharos, from 1947. The version of Confucius it contains is by Ezra Pound, a New Directions mainstay from almost the beginning of the house. Not having seen the other numbers I can't be sure, but its possible that in this instance the poet's name was left off the cover (but not off the title page) because its appearance on bookstore shelves so soon after World War II might have touched a raw nerve, given Pound's flirtation with Fascism.


The text ends on page 53 (page 49 is mistakenly paginated 39), and is followed by eleven pages of ads, including a full-pager from the Gothan Book Mart. (As in the early issues of New Directions in Prose & Poetry, the ads are arguably as interesting as the editorial matter.)

According to an editor's note inside, Pharos was being phased out in favor of Direction, an example of which, from 1949, appears below:


Unlike Pharos, which was wrapped in something resembling blotter paper, the volumes in the Direction series were jacketed hardcovers, retailing for $1.50 each. This particular one is in a “pocket-size” format, roughly 4 ½ x 6 ½. Although they were available on a subscription basis, they have now crossed the line from magazine to book. Other selections listed on the jacket include Albert Guerard's Joseph Conrad, Cyril Connoly's The Rock Pool, and Nabokov's Nine Stories. Although he isn't credited, I think the jacket design may be by Alvin Lustig, who did many covers for New Directions, in particular for its successful New Classics line.

Next is a bilingual anthology that wouldn't seem like the company's typical fare; in fact you could easily miss the fact that it was a New Directions book at all, since the only place that it's identified as such is at the bottom corner of the front flap of the dust jacket.


The jacket itself is unusual, having been made of some kind of transparent plastic, possibly acetate. The lettering you see is not on the boards but on the acetate (if that's what it is); the illustration, however, is on the book. According to the colophon, “three thousand copies of this book were printed in April MCMXLIX by the University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” There are some nice illustrations inside, and the spine is ornamented with a decorative motif. It sold for $7.50, rather pricey at the time.

Finally, a more enduring literary monument (if an ambivalent one), sized to match. Here is an early (but not first) printing of Pound's collected Cantos, published in 1948.


The book, which sold for $5.00, is confusingly paginated, as each succeeding section starts the numbering afresh, and there's no table of contents. In later editions, at least since the 1970s, the dust jacket has been changed to a reddish-orange color, the typography has been redone, and the drawing of the poet (by Gaudier-Brzeska) no longer appears.

In my experience, innovative literary presses tend to follow a certain generational pattern. Companies like New Directions, Grove Press, Black Sparrow, the Ecco Press, or the original North Point Press — each of them closely identified with one or two innovative founders — find a niche in the marketplace with some fresh ideas, publishing authors and kinds of books that aren't being represented by the mainstream houses. A decade or two later the ideas are widely imitated or just don't seem that interesting anymore and the house, if it survives, gets absorbed by a major publisher or just settles into tame old age.

By most standards, New Directions under James Laughlin had a longer run than most. By the time I started reading New Directions books, in the early 1970s, the press had settled on the handsome and serviceable look of the New Directions Paperbook line.


It was a superb series in many ways, but the kind of experimentation with format the house conducted in its midcentury heyday was mostly in the past. Today, after Laughlin's death in 1997, New Directions continues to uphold a fine publishing tradition but it's no longer groundbreaking in the way it was in its first decades.

Update (January 2009): When I wrote the above I was not aware of Geoffrey Connell's translation of Alberti's Sobre los angeles (Concerning the Angels), which was published by Rapp and Carroll in 1967 and which also appeared, apparently in full, in — where else? — New Directions 19 in 1966.

Update (December 2013): New Directions is now revisiting some of its innovative marketing ideas, in the form of poetry and prose chapbook subscriptions. Hats off to them.

Cortázar: Hopscotch cover art

The first edition of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) was published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires in June 1963. During the planning of the book the author and his publisher, Francisco Porrúa, had extensive discussions about the cover art, documented in a series of letters that are reproduced in the first volume of the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters.

The idea of using a drawing of a hopscotch grid as part of the design apparently originated with Porrúa. In a letter of October 8, 1962 Cortázar wrote that he planned to visit bookshops in search of, among other things, a book of Brassaï photographs that Porrúa had indicated might contain a picture of such a pattern. He also promised to send his publisher a sketch, photo, or plan that could be used as a model for the cover art. Later (March 13, 1963) he sent a photograph, and also sketched out in his own hand a rough plan in which the hopscotch game would be laid out horizontally across the front, back, and spine of the book, with the title superimposed across the portion that appeared on the front. He also mentioned that a friend and compatriot, the painter Julio Silva, was working on a mock-up, which Cortázar promised to forward to Porrúa when it was ready.

Porrúa suggested that the rayuela be rotated ninety degrees so that it would appear full-length on the front cover. Cortázar responded at length on April 1:

And now we're going to put the cover on the book. So you've been studying the thing with Esteban and, for one brief moment, thought that the hopscotch would be better standing up? Enormous cronopios, I started out that way as well and I had it standing up for along time until the poor thing's Earth got tired. No, my friend, I don't think that will work. It won't work, as you have seen very well, because that front cover has its other side, and I would prefer if possible that it not have a front and a back. You detect an unfortunate implication in the Heaven on the back of the book, and it's true, but there's more to it than that. Very briefly, imagine that, making a praiseworthy sacrifice, you have just purchased a copy of Rayuela, and without wasting a moment you have immersed yourself in reading it. If you are a normal person, you will hold the book with your left hand, while your right hand will occupy itself with turning the pages, while going back and forth with your pipe, alternatively taking sips of the Mariposa brandy that your wife has served you, and from time to time you will make a signal of admiration that stirs the air in your home. Fine, so here we are with your left hand holding the book. Part of your palm and the base of your fingers are resting on the cover, that is to say, on Earth. But the most spiritual part of your hand, the fingertips, the thirst and desire that dwell in your fingertips, will be on the other side searching for Heaven, perhaps grazing it even, briefly entering it. Can you picture it? Your hand is reading the book as well, with that extra-retinary vision of which the sages speak, and which in reality is another attempt to grasp that which, inside the book, your eyes are seeking for. Facile symbolism? Maybe. But I have always been sensitive to book covers, and at times I have found in them things that are curiously linked to the text, unless that is they are published by Santiago Rueda. All joking aside, I think that my “unreasons” will be reasonably understandable … So that, to the extent that it's doable, I take my stand for the idea of the reclining hopscotch, and now let's go to battle. I hope to be able to send you the mock-up as soon as possible; I will immediately issue a ukase to Silva, who has gone totally silent on me in Paris.

A week later Cortázar gave in:

Julio Silva just sent me from Paris the plan that I am enclosing. You will note, among other errors, that the title of the book includes an article that must be suppressed. You will note (and you will enjoy it if you read my last letter) that Silva also stood the hopscotch up like you and Esteban did, but in order to make me a little happier, he repeated it entire on the spine, which strikes me as magnificent. You already know my sensitivity to the matter of the spine, and really a little hopscotch showing out in a bookstore somewhere would be quite nice, don't you think?

I, personally, continue to believe in the reclining hopscotch, but Aurora tells me that it's enough to take one look at Silva's mock-up to understand that it's much more effective if the reader sees the whole hopscotch when he picks up the book, and that the drawing should not squirm like a worm around the book. I think that you and Aurora are pretty much right, and of course I accept the idea. …

One thing that I like is that on the front cover the Earth and Heaven are replaced by the names of the author and publisher, but on the spine, which is the most sacred part of the book, Heaven and Earth shine forth as they ought to. Don't you like that?

In later correspondence Cortázar devoted much attention to the question of the colors of the lettering of the cover. Silva's mock-up was mishandled en route, but eventually turned up, and was evidently used as the basis for the final cover treatment. When he received the finished book Cortázar expressed to Porrúa his great satisfaction with the finished product.

The image at the top of the page here, which was culled from the web, shows a first edition of Rayuela that was sold at auction recently. My own copy, a later reprint from 1973, bears only yellow lettering on the face, the multiple-color arrangement having been abandoned, no doubt for reasons of economy.


George Salter, a well-known graphic artist, designed the Pantheon edition shown above, issued in the United States in April 1966 in a translation by Gregory Rabassa. The title and author's name are hand-lettered. Salter made use of a hopscotch drawing very similar to the one on the Sudamericana cover, but tilted it at an angle, and then underlaid it with a series of colorful diagonal bands. (It was a bit of a cliché at the time for American publishers to use striking colors for books with Latin American themes.) The pattern continues onto the spine, but the back cover is taken up by a photo of a very young looking Cortázar. I'm quite fond of this cover, perhaps because I first read the novel in this edition, but Cortázar firmly disliked it. When he received the advance copies he told Porrúa “the dust jacket is horrendous, but as soon as you toss it in the trash the rest is a wonder of a book.”


This Signet edition of the novel was the first American paperback publication, in December 1967. I don't know if the cover art depicts an actual George Segal sculpture or just an imitation of his style; in any case the book credits neither the designer nor the artist. It's a fairly generic piece of art; perhaps the salient point is that the woman is naked and lying in bed, as the publishers were apparently eager to punch up the erotic angle of the book. The words above the title read LIFE | LOVE | SEX, which I suppose is one way of summing up what Rayuela is about. In case anyone missed the point it's spelled out again on the bottom of the back cover: “Hopscotch / a game of / LIFE, LOVE, SEX.” The blurbs are pretty hilarious: Harvey L. Johnson of the Houston Post promises “Sexual bouts, drunken orgies … escapes into hallucinations and trances, emphasis on sex, unmindful frankness … shocking and sordid … crude or amusing … Hopscotch will not soon be forgotten,” while the Baltimore Sun simply promises that it “leaves you limp.”


The Avon Books edition, first issued in 1975, is another story entirely. The entire Bard series of Latin American literature was elegantly and imaginitively designed, and this one, which was created by Roger Stine, is one of the better ones. As with the rest of the series, the title, author, and front blurb are separated from the illustration, printed in block letters, and hence very easy to read, even from a distance. I'm not sure whether the man looking down — who bears a rough resemblance to Cortázar — is meant to literally have one foot in Paris and the other in Argentina (which would make perfect sense), or whether the whole night scene is supposed to be Paris. (The artist has included the Eiffel Tower in the background, just to make sure we know that part of the book is set in Paris.) On the pavement, which may be cobblestone, is the familiar hopscotch grid, along with a young boy in short pants who is probably meant to represent a younger version of Horacio Oliveira. That last detail may be a little of a mistake; one thing Oliveira does not spend much time doing is reflecting on his childhood. But the boy is appropriately placed on the Earth of the hopscotch, looking ahead at Heaven or at his own future. The interplay of darkness and illumination is very appealing, particularly on the man's sweater, which seems to be lit by a flickering glow.


Above is the cover treatment used in the edition of the De Oro Library of Latin American and Latino Literature imprint of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The design is by Monica Elias; the painting is by the Argentine painter Xul Solar. It's a fairly handsome cover, though why it would be chosen for Hopscotch rather than for any other random modern novel that happened to be in need of a cover I'm not sure. One possible clue: the painting is called Homme des Serpents; a little nod, perhaps, to the novel's Club de la Serpiente?


Finally, above right is the current US edition in the Pantheon Modern Writers Series, which shares the same clean but rather drab design as the other volumes in that series. I suppose the woman in the photograph is meant to represent la Maga or Talita, but if so she seems miscast. Maybe she's Pola or Gekrepten.

(All translations from the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters are my own.)