The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

No true Western philosopher could forget the stunning conclusion of Sergio Leone's masterpiece: the bad dies, the ugly survives, and the good rides off into the sunset weighted down with gold. Books have met other fates. You can't judge a book by its cover; vigilant readers know that the back, spine, margins, typography, paratexts, paper, binding, printing, illustrations, and yes, sometimes even the content, should be taken into account.

When I was in Portland recently, I had the pleasure of visiting David Abel's exceptionally well-curated Passages Bookshop. I bought a copy of poet Brian Patten and painter Pip Benveniste's When You Wake Tomorrow (1971) published by Turret Books. The edition is limited to 125 numbered and boxed copies signed by the poet and artist. My typographic hero Asa Benveniste printed this sumptuous, oversized portfolio. The poems aren't exactly my speed ("I met her early in the evening / the cars were going home / I was twenty four and dreaming"), but there's much to be learned from Asa's impeccable design, and Pip's images hold their own. Although content always comes first in my appreciation of a book, I do pick up things from time to time because I value them as works of art (or craft, if you prefer).

Philip Whalen's Highgrade (1966), a book that isn't particularly rare, but much cherished by its readers, was also a fortunate find at Passages. In the preface, Whalen states, "I write everything with a fountain pen that must be coaxed and warmed before it will work properly. The following pages were written more for the pen's benefit and instrumentation than they were for mine or for that of the public." In this oversized facsimile edition published by Coyote Books, I observe Whalen's poems and doodles as direct expressions of his thought in a verbal/visual continuum. Witty half-truths and playful elegance characterize this work. Although the book is lovely (rusty staples and all), it is its transparency that I value most.

At Powell's Books, I found So Long (1993) by my favorite contemporary fiction writer, Lucia Berlin, and tore through it over a couple shots of espresso one rainy morning. Books published by Black Sparrow Books are fairly formulaic, especially in their later years, and those designed by Graham Mackintosh (this one wasn't) are brilliant, though unassuming. Aside from the grotesque cover designed by Barbara Martin and the clunky use of ornaments by a typesetter named "Words Worth" (!), I was so infatuated with her subdued stories that the physical fact of the language I was holding became immaterial. I wonder if Berlin was thinking of one of the characters in Leone's film when she wrote the last couple of lines of her short story (included in this collection) entitled "Good and Bad": "There was nobody to speak to. To say I was sorry." As to which is which, invariably, only the reader can decide (or prefer not to).