This early edition of “Authors” dispenses with the writers’ portraits, offering instead these colorful and decorative designs.  The authors represented are Ouida, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Black Scat Books has just released my translation of Isidore Isou’s “Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara,” as the eighth of their elegant little chapbooks, “Absurdist Texts and Documents.” Isidore Isou is little known to American readers, and few of his writings have been translated.  In the late 1940s, he founded a […]

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We return to that interesting character, Benjamin De Casseres.  There are only a few pictures of him online: a caricature, for example, and a photo of him celebrating the 21st Amendment.  So, here’s a portrait of De Casseres with his wife Bio. The picture is taken from his 1931 book, Love Letters of a Living […]

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Ray Palmer is one of my favorite editors.  He took over the early science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in the ’30s; and turned it into an extremely unusual magazine in the ’40s, when he published the hallucinatory output of Richard Shaver.  (We’ve featured Shaver ourselves here many times, as a search will reveal.)  Readers balked […]

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If the melon insists on having slices, it will end up eaten by families. Boredom and idleness are, I think, the principal motives for devotion.  We only lift our eyes to the heavens when we have nothing to do or hope for on earth, and we only kiss holy images when we have nothing else […]

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“Dichter-Quartett” is an undated German edition of “Authors.”  I’ve chosen Adelbert von Chamisso, for his contributions to botany, and for the creation of Peter Schlemihl.  The other authors in this canon are: Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Victor von Scheffel, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Rückert, Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Emanuel Geibel, […]

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I’m happy to note that one of my favorite literary hoaxes is online, which means that you can read it for free, instead of paying a lot of money for the rare original.  The Dance of Death (1877) is a remarkable polemic against the “filthy lust” of the waltz.  The author was “William Herman,” a […]

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We return to the Bowery News, “The Voice of Society’s Basement,” for some selections from Dec. 15, 1948. First, some cartoons by staff artist C. L. Burlew. Next, a report from Cleveland. And, finally, something for the ladies. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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We return to Benjamin DeCasseres for this characteristic prayer, from his book Saint Tantalus. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Benjamin De Casseres wrote books on Shaw and Emerson, contributed copiously to magazines, played Super-Checkers with Charles Fort, went on drinking sprees with Don Marquis. He summed up his attitude like this: “Hope the whore and Knowledge her pimp were not motived profoundly enough in my nature to save me from death. Only thee, Alcohol, […]

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