‘One must be possessed of a certain kind of madness, I feel, to compile a bibliography’ (Henry Miller, in Jackson & Shifreen, 1993, p. xxiii).
Having just finished the essay that follows,1 it occurred to me that a brief note might be helpful to stave off what some readers might regard as nothing more than a work written in a high-pitched manner of complaint. Shades of this might be unavoidable, I’ll grant, since completing Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources had more than its share of trying moments; however, my intended purpose in writing it was simply to lay out, without undue prejudice, a chronology of events both good and bad.
I’ve told the tale before, to a few friends and collectors, people who had the interest and were often privy to some of the frustrating events as they were happening, with me giving them either the ‘one-beer’ or ‘two-beer’ version, depending upon their curiosity and tolerance. For the last couple of years I’ve hardly thought about these details at all, but when Magnus Torén of the Henry Miller Memorial Library asked if I might be interested in putting down a few words about my bibliographic process, I realised that it would give me a chance once and for all to slay the dragon, as it were, to leave a permanent record for the curious before time and memory can nudge me so much as a single step from the truth.
I never set out to do a Henry Miller bibliography; in fact, it was an afterthought. Late in 1989 I had the idea that a Miller-related book that was just waiting to be written was the story of June (Edith Smith), Miller’s second wife, the woman who through devotion and determination pushed Miller into writing seriously. She was the direct inspiration for a handful of Miller’s books, and any woman who had that power was someone worthy of serious study.
I knew that in the 1950s Annette Baxter, the author of Henry Miller: Expatriate, had befriended June. In an attempt to contact Baxter, I called her last employer, Barnard College, only to find out that she and her husband had died in a house fire years before. The university had a telephone number and New York City address that they gave out to people who had queries about her, and from this I was able to get into contact with her son. When I asked him about June, he said his mother had been collecting material for a book on her, but some of the material was destroyed in the fire, some survived. When I expressed interest in finishing, then publishing the June material, he became vague, noting that he didn’t know for sure where the needed papers were, but if they were still around, it would be something he and his sister would publish. He added that his sister, who wasn’t home at the time, was really the one to speak with, as she was functioning in the role of literary executor. He didn’t know where she was, when she would be home, nor could he suggest a good time to call her. He must have been suspicious of me. I have been told that I have a certain enthusiasm for Miller-related activities and perhaps then I was approaching this man too quickly. I was not in the mood to waste my time on a wild goose chase, or deal with them if they were going to be difficult when it came time for serious negotiations, so I ended the conversation and abandoned the project.
Almost immediately I began to focus on the upcoming Miller centennial (December 1991). I thought that renewed interest in his works might follow whatever books and celebrations would certainly materialise during that year. And I thought about the need for a bibliography, though admittedly this is a specialised kind of book that would not have wide appeal. However, I reasoned it might be successful were it to be published concurrently with Miller’s centennial.
At the time I had a copy of Lawrence J. Shifreen’s 1979 publication Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources and knew from other publications that he had planned to compile a book of primary sources, too. It seemed strange to me that a book which documented writings about Miller would be compiled first when what dealers, collectors and researchers desperately needed was a book documenting what Miller himself had written, but that was the state of affairs at the time.
I wanted to see the primary sources book published because I wanted access to the information that would assist me in my own collecting of Miller’s works. The more familiar I was with Miller’s work, the more curious I became regarding additional titles he had written, items unknown to me. For some rare titles that I had only heard about but never seen, I wondered what they consisted of, how they could be described, and what kinds of illustrations they contained, if any. A good Miller bibliography would have provided me with that kind of information.
Now let me say right here that it wasn’t important or necessary to me that I be the person doing the actual bibliographic work. In fact, I would have much preferred at the time (and even more so as I got involved with the bibliographic project) to have been able to walk into a bookstore and simply purchase a copy of a good primary source bibliography. That would have been the ideal way for me to get the needed information. I would have found another project to do.
Yet the reality was that Shifreen’s primary sources book was more than ten years overdue. There was a nagging curiosity in my mind as to what had happened to the project, what had caused the delay or abandonment, and so I decided to find out the manuscript’s status before I considered putting together a bibliographic listing of my own. Black Sparrow Press had been identified as the publisher of this forthcoming book, but after writing them, I seemed to be no closer: they hadn’t heard from Shifreen in years; he and his manuscript were missing. The project was dead.
No one I spoke with knew Shifreen personally. One book dealer told me that he had heard Shifreen was dead. It wasn’t until I ran across some contributions that Shifreen had published in Richard Centing’s two literary magazines, Under the Sign of Pisces: Anaïs Nin and Her Inner Circle and Seahorse: the Anaïs Nin/Henry Miller Journal, that I got my first real lead, thanks to the appearance of his university affiliations in the articles. I figured I could contact him through the University of Maryland’s Alumni Association, which I did. The Alumni Association didn’t actually give me his address, they only promised to forward to his last known address whatever letter I sent them. A week later I got a call from Shifreen.
The gist of the call was that the planned bibliography of primary sources and secondary sources started out as his dissertation project. In the late 1970s, he was teaching at the University of Alabama, but figured that the trade-off of effort versus reward in the academic setting was not going to be the right balance for him, and he took a job with a defence contractor near Washington, DC. The text of his primary source book was stored away somewhere in his house or garage; he wasn’t sure since he hadn’t looked at it in over ten years. He said he was still in the phase of readying the work for final submission to Black Sparrow Press when he left academia.
When I expressed interest in seeing the book published, he was receptive, but believed his material would need to be updated to include the Miller publications from 1977 through 1990. Then, he thought, publication would be a real possibility. He said someone would have to go to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and comb their Special Collections Department, getting information on Miller’s recent titles.
On the spot, I said I would do it, but not without some reservations, and not without telling him my concern that collecting bibliographic information was something totally new to me. To the best of my knowledge, the only bibliographies I had ever seen were the early attempts at logging Miller’s work, such as Thomas H. Moore’s Bibliography: Henry Miller (1961), Bern Porter’s Henry Miller: A Chronology and Bibliography (1945), and the James F. O’Roark catalogue of Miller’s work published in 1982. Personally, I don’t ever recall the need to refer to any bibliography during my undergraduate or graduate days in school. In any case, Shifreen said he would send me a few sample descriptions from his work, something I could use as a pattern for describing the books in bibliographic form. Once I ‘got into the rhythm’, he said, logging the bibliographic information would come quickly.
In the quiet, more reflective moments after that discussion, whether I would prove to be the ‘right man’ for the job was not a serious concern since there was no one else clamouring for it. If the primary sources book was ever to see the light of day, then I was, by default, the chosen one.
The first opportunity after that call, I drove to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the closest university library to where I was living at the time, and perused their literary bibliographies, just to get a sense of what I was getting myself involved in. I looked at a couple dozen of them that day and had an immediate reaction. First, they were extremely varied in style, content and format. There seemed to be little agreement from one bibliographer to another as to what to include and how to include it. Some bibliographies had photographs, some indexes, some included brief or extended explanatory notes, some did not, and a few were simply checklists with little, if any, description. Although I was not aware of it at the time, later I would read a letter by Miller’s bibliographer Thomas H. Moore where he lamented that even what one would think to be the simplest, most straightforward question, ‘How many pages does a given book have?’ could not always be determined by available reference material. Where one bibliography would consider the last ‘numbered’ page as the official last page, another would count the last page of text (numbered or not) as the last page, and yet another would count the last page (literally) in the book, even if preceded by three blank pages, or pages of advertising, and unnumbered. Later I too would feel his frustration.
The second feeling I experienced that day looking at the various bibliographies was that of amazement. To anyone but the most devoted collector or book dealer, a bibliography is a strange, ‘goofy’ sort of book, a work so specialised that one can’t help but acknowledge immediately how limited the market must be for such an item.
A few days later, thinking about the publishing prospects of the bibliography, I called Shifreen back and told him that while publishing a bibliography would appeal to a very small segment of the people, this segment consisted of a well-defined market of librarians, book dealers and Miller fans and collectors, many of whom could be identified. College and book-dealer listings would be easy enough to compile; I was developing a circle of known Miller collectors, and, given this, why not plan on publishing the book ourselves? In fact, I was determined that this would be so because it would allow us complete control over the style, the formatting and the binding of the book. In addition, functioning as our own distributors, we would be able to develop a list of collectors who would be interested in follow-up publications that might be produced.
As I completed descriptions of new titles at UCLA, the plan was for me to forward to Shifreen the hand-written information. He would then enter the information on his computer at work, during off-hours. At the same time, the pages of information which Shifreen had compiled in the mid‑1970s, probably numbering about 350 in a conventional format (some pages at the time had no more than a few inches of text on a full 8½ × 11‑inch sheet) were also to be entered by him in his computer. Thus, at this point in the project, there were well-defined responsibilities and limits. My commitment would be short, three weeks in California, logging information on Miller’s latest books, then I would send him the new material. A proof copy would be finished by fall, and before the end of the year 1990, the long-awaited bibliography would be ready for distribution. That didn’t sound too bad.
These initial contacts with Shifreen were made in March 1990, I made plans to visit UCLA during the first three weeks of July, something that would be easy to do since I work as a school psychologist during the academic year and have summers off.
The summer of 1990, however, was an unusual one for me since I was relocating from West Bend, Wisconsin, to Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had resigned from my position and was, in a word, unemployed. The prudent thing would be to spend the summer looking for a job, rather than being holed up in the Special Collections Department at UCLA for three weeks, covering all expenses out of my own pocket. Yet, I was realistic enough in my own thinking to know that there was probably never a convenient time for a project like this one, so I focused on the bibliographic project and would deal with the employment issue upon my return.
Covering the initial expenses on my own was not a point of contention either, not at first. But in the near future I would find that completion of the project was going to require a lot more money, and almost all of it would come from my own shallow pockets. In retrospect, I now know that at the time of my first call to Shifreen, the most helpful thing he could have said to me would have been, ‘I’m not interested in doing anything with my original text… you’ll have to start your own’. Under such a scenario, the whole bibliographic project would have taken a different turn. Had I started off solo it would have moved faster, cost less money and eventually resulted in a better product.
I still had a couple of months before the trip to California, so I began to develop a strategy for compiling all the information I could about Miller publications, including reviewing my own collection and developing lists of known titles from previous bibliographic efforts. I contacted some two dozen major institutions housing large Miller collections. I sent them requests for a listing of the material in their collections and, depending on the university, either got a computerised listing or a letter noting that time and budget constraints prevented them from supplying such a listing. I also consulted the Union Catalogue of the Library of Congress and made notes of all the Miller titles listed. Furthermore, I went to the University of Michigan Library, got a copy of the American Book Trade Directory, and sought out every used and rare book dealer mentioned as having any interest in Modern First Editions or American Literature. I sent out a postcard request to one thousand dealers throughout the United States, Canada and England, seeking information on Miller titles they had in stock. From this mailing, nearly one hundred individuals responded. With all this information, I began to compile a master list of titles.
In the weeks after my last call to Shifreen, he sent me about fifteen sample pages from his original work, something to give me an idea of the format he had used, and promised to send a more complete listing soon. Unfortunately, I never received the list until the last week of June, a couple of days before my departure for UCLA. As a result, I found myself the following week wasting several days sitting in Special Collections at UCLA, logging information on books that I also had in my personal library. Secondly, rather than detailed information, which one really needs to distinguish one book from another, one variant from another, what I received from Shifreen was only the briefest skeleton list. For example, the information he gave me on the first American publication of Tropic of Cancer was, ‘Medvsa 1940’. No information on page size, page numbers, colour of cloth, title page, etc. In the published bibliography, I included Shifreen’s ‘Medvsa 1940’ copy, but also nine additional variants of this one edition. So, while it is true that I had an abbreviated list from him, it was nearly worthless, as far as the key items, such as books, pamphlets and broadsides were concerned.
For other areas, such as the section where Miller’s contributions to books were listed, his information was helpful, but woefully incomplete. For example, in this section of his original listing, he included information on 122 publications containing Miller’s contributions. When the bibliography was finally published, this information had grown to include 404 individually described items.
The first week of July 1990, I arrived at UCLA, where Miller’s manuscript and correspondence items are classified as a ‘closed collection’ and available for inspection only with written permission from each of Miller’s three children, Tony, Valentine and Barbara.2 I knew access to this material would be important, since it was here that information would be located that could help provide the descriptive notes on the various publications and the stories behind them. I stayed in one of the residence halls on campus and immediately began a regimented routine. I was at Special Collections from the time they opened till the time they closed, approximately 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; then, after a dinner break, would go to the general library and make use of reference material that helped me locate Miller’s contributions to edited publications and foreign translations of his work. I would leave the library at about 9 p.m. each evening.
A fortuitous event took place at UCLA when I came across a copy of the Bulletin of the Henry Miller Society of Japan. The text was in Japanese, but the title and table of contents also appeared in English. I had been unaware prior to that of there being a Miller Society in Japan, and I considered this journal an interesting find. The editorial office was listed in Japanese, but one of the library staff was able to translate the mailing address for me. My letter to the Society informing them of the bibliographic project went out soon after returning home from California. In my letter, I also listed a couple of Japanese titles I had come across while reading a reference work that contains an annual listing of translated titles published throughout the world.
I could see, therefore, that there were titles of Miller’s work published in other countries that did not have an exact American counterpart, due to the addition of illustrations or additional text, some of which was by Miller, some not. One example that caught my eye was the 1972 Japanese translation of To Paint Is to Love Again, including Semblance of a Devoted Past. The Japanese listing described this book as having 240 pages, with thirty illustrations, and with a high price at the time of five thousand yen. The American edition of this title published in 1968 had 120 pages, and twenty illustrations. The inclusion of ten additional watercolour reproductions made it a significantly different book, even though the text was the same.
My letter was received by Hiroshi Rikukawa, whom I later found out was not only an active member of the Henry Miller Society of Japan, but had also compiled in 1986, along with other Society members, a bibliography of Miller’s works published in Japan. By return mail, I soon received not only the titles I was seeking, but also a copy of their bibliography. With the help of a translator, I was able to review all items listed in the Society’s bibliography and identify significant Miller titles that were generally not known in the United States. Rikukawa and other members of the Society sent me over one hundred Japanese titles for inclusion in the bibliography. Even a casual glance at the contents of the published bibliography will reveal how significant the contributions of the Japanese collectors were to the book’s completeness.
Through Rikukawa I was put into contact with Sadajiro Kubo, the famous collector of Miller’s watercolours. Kubo was excited about the bibliographic project and immediately sent samples of his published works on Miller and related ephemera for inclusion in the book. He also sent in an advanced order for seventy-five copies of the completed bibliography, and this, in addition to the nearly fifty copies that would be purchased by Rikukawa for distribution to libraries and collectors in Japan, shows the extent of their own enthusiasm and support for Miller as well as for the bibliography. The number of copies of the bibliography shipped to Japan exceeds the total number of copies purchased by American libraries during the three years since publication, a curious phenomenon. It shows, too, what sector of the market was most responsive to the book – dedicated and impassioned collectors.
I returned from UCLA at the end of the third week of July and by early August all bibliographic descriptions had been sent to Shifreen, those obtained from California as well as those pulled from my own collection. August, September, and October all came and went and I had received next to nothing from Shifreen, neither the computer printout of the data from his 1977 typescript, which he was supposed to have been converting from his original sheets during my Los Angeles stay, nor the new information I had recently gathered. It became evident that having the book available in published form was not going to happen by the end of 1990.
What I saw from Shifreen during the next months came in dribs and drabs, ten pages here and there, perhaps twenty pages, but only after long periods of delay. I was in limbo, since my next official duty was to proof the text sheets he was typing. Without the material, I was simply waiting.
One day late in the fall of 1990, accepting but certainly not liking the delay, it occurred to me that I might enlarge the focus of my involvement in the project. I would take a fresh look at the entire book, checking its accuracy item by item. More importantly, I decided to seek out older titles that had been missed. I wanted to see how many more items I could dig up while I waited for Shifreen to do his assigned typing. With a changed attitude, I began scheduling trips to various libraries, including a repeat visit to the University of Minnesota and a stop at Ohio University to see their recently acquired collection. I sent word out among my own network of Miller fans that I was now actively searching for any item by Miller. A new round of purchases was made from book dealers, and I visited the homes of several collectors, people like John Bagnole, Al Berlinski, Joe Erdelac, and eventually my future collaborator Bill Ashley, though this would be some time later. In Germany, a fellow collector, Ernst Richter, began sending me information as well as German titles, plus corrected errors that appeared in some of the earlier sheets of the bibliography. I continued to send more and more pages of new information to Shifreen.
Karl Orend, who had obtained my name and information about the bibliography from a book dealer in France, contacted me and offered his help in finding foreign titles. He was living in Paris and was affiliated with Shakespeare and Company bookstore. By using his own network of associates, he began locating a slew of foreign language reprints of Miller’s works, titles in Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, etc. With tight budgets, libraries in the United States find it difficult to purchase American editions of Miller’s work, much less foreign translations. Over the course of the whole project, Orend and his agents sent me well over a hundred books – all titles that I would not have been able to obtain otherwise. Before the project was over, Orend’s interest had grown to the point that he published a 250-copy European edition of Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources.
When book dealers were told I was actively buying anything and everything by Miller – including small binding variants and obscure ephemera – plenty of items began to surface. In this way, a great burst of energy was initiated in the fall of 1990, with the dealer and collector network in full operation. Over the course of the next eighteen months, there would be upwards of twenty-five to thirty pairs of eyes in half a dozen countries keeping an active lookout for Miller titles on my behalf. For a long time, not a week would pass when I didn’t get a call or letter from someone offering an interesting Miller title. My great struggle was to scrape up the necessary money once the items were offered to me. What became apparent is that no bibliographic effort the size and scope of the one I was involved in could be accomplished in isolation.
Meanwhile, I was surprised at how much material was out there that had been overlooked in Shifreen’s original sheets. But you have to remember that Shifreen was not a collector, nor was he connected with the circle of Miller fans, and as a graduate student, he was not making purchases of items from book dealers either. All these valuable resource people were unavailable to him.
I kept digging for more titles, buying more. As new titles came in, the placement of Shifreen’s original description and entry number would have to be changed. I also changed the format of the book and enlarged its scope by including ephemera items and variants, no matter how small and seemingly unimportant. My focus was not on how to make it an academic book, but rather on how the bibliography could be designed to be of most practical use for collectors. This was my bias and when choices had to be made, I always sided in favour of the collector’s interest.
There were no ‘Notes’ appearing in Shifreen’s original sheets, but throughout my involvement I was personally fascinated by the bits of information and stories behind Miller’s publications, and I began to include as part of the descriptions detailed explanatory notes. In some cases, the notes added a new dimension to the existence of the book, or challenged what was assumed to be true, but wasn’t. To enhance the completeness of the various notes, I contacted universities and obtained copies of Miller’s correspondence with some of his key friends and publishers: Emil Schnellock, Jon and Lou Webb, Bezalel Schatz, Bern Porter and Judson Crews. These last two sent me personal letters noting information about their Miller publications.
The growth of new titles pushed the anticipated size of the book to five hundred pages. It had been a year since I had first contacted Shifreen. I had proofed and returned the fifty or so pages of material he had sent me, but it was becoming clear that there was not going to be any real ‘collaboration’ between us. At the rate Shifreen was typing, the bibliography would be delayed another ten years, so in March 1991, in desperation more than anything else, I purchased a computer, a Macintosh Classic, one with the miniature 5 × 7‑inch, black and white screen. I am a lousy typist, I make lots of errors, but I realised that unless I began to enter the data myself, the project was going nowhere. I set myself a new goal: to have the book available in nine months, December 1991, in time for Miller’s centennial.
The text of the bibliography was divided into six sections, identified as ‘A’ through ‘F’, with the ‘A’ section being the description of Miller’s books and the longest of the subdivisions.3 Shifreen was working on this section. I told him that I would start with the ‘B’ and ‘C’ sections, and I began to enter the data from his original sheets as well as the newly discovered information I had compiled. As I was entering the data on my computer and printing out sheets, I knew it would be pointless to send them to Shifreen for proofing – when would he ever get around to doing it?
In the spring of 1991, a fortuitous event occurred, which would change the whole complexion of the bibliography. I am referring to an unexpected telephone call from Bill Ashley of California. He had obtained my number from Jerry Kamstra, who was then director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California. Kamstra knew about my involvement with the bibliography and when Ashley was seeking some information on Miller titles published by the Loujon Press, Kamstra suggested he call me. It took no time for me to see that Ashley was an advanced and energetic Miller collector, and I soon discovered he had a keen eye and interest in bibliographic detail. He had a wealth of relevant background knowledge about Miller as well, and was aggressively adding new Miller titles to his own collection at a fast clip. During our call he offered to help with the bibliography, a great piece of luck for me. During the immediate weeks following our first telephone call, Ashley became my true collaborator in the bibliography and saw the project through to the end.
That summer and fall, I was entering data and sending the sheets to Ashley for proofing and comments. He checked my descriptions against his own collection and made suggestions on the format and arrangement of the information in the bibliography. He also began to send me titles from his own collection, new titles and variants that I had not seen before. I received about a hundred Miller items from Ashley during the project.
The ‘B’ and ‘C’ sections had been entered by the fall of 1991, so I expanded my efforts and began typing the ‘D–F’ sections. What is more, while I was waiting for the Shifreen ‘A’ pages to materialise, my focus turned to the inclusion of photographs. Shifreen’s earlier publication, Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources, did not contain illustrations, but during our early conversations, it was decided that eight or so photographs, those of Miller’s early Paris books, should be added. By this time, my own collection had grown to over a thousand books, and I began to see an opportunity to document, photographically, a large segment of Miller items, not just those that were most famous.
Now, you must remember the bibliography would be my first self-published book. I was new to this, and I didn’t have a working relationship with any of the professional support people in Ann Arbor, such as printers or photographers, who would be needed in preparation of the book. I scanned the Yellow Pages, made a couple calls, then settled on a man whose ad suggested a sort of general practitioner. I thought he could do the job. I explained the project over the telephone and while he admitted he had not done anything quite like what I was describing, he had photographed merchandise for a catalogue published by a local charitable group. He had the right attitude and I was encouraged. We talked price and he used a set fee per roll of film. The photo session took place on the second floor of a downtown commercial building. The studio itself was a large single room with an oak floor and was nearly empty. For the photo shoot he rolled out a carpet on the floor to be used as background and he had me lay out a few items. He brought out a small hand-held camera and began clicking freestyle. Right away I saw that every set-up was shot twice, not once as I would have expected. There was no rearrangement of the books between the two shots, either. According to him, two shots would assure that everything would come out all right. But I immediately realised that, since I was paying a fixed price per roll of film, my cost per picture had just doubled.
I scheduled another appointment later in the week, since I had quite a few more items that I wanted to include in the bibliography. When I arrived, I was surprised he hadn’t developed the rolls shot earlier that week. ‘No, I’ll develop them all at once’, he said, ‘once we are through with the project’. A few more sessions later, I was called back to see the developed pictures. The results were a disaster – out of focus, poor set-ups, lint visible on the background rug, books out of alignment and all items lacking the close, full-frame image I anticipated. I have seen photographs of such poor quality published before in some cheaply produced book-dealer catalogues, but with the project growing in importance to me, I wasn’t satisfied. He already had my money, hundreds of dollars, that was required in advance. I wasn’t in the mood to argue over aesthetic qualities. Not a single photograph from those sessions would be used.
I let the photographs ride for a while. I would deal with that later. Moreover, there was a practical advantage in doing the photographs more towards the end of the project, since I was getting more and more books coming in, and as my collection grew, so did my choice of photographs to include, and their arrangement.
Sheets from the ‘B–F’ sections were completed. I called Shifreen, wanting to know where he was in the ‘A’ section. He was making no progress at all. Since my part of the typing was complete, I asked him to send me half of the remaining sheets from his section.
During the end of 1991 and the late spring of 1992, a routine was established for dealing with the remaining ‘A’ section. I would enter my data, call Shifreen and have him send me half of what he had remaining. A few weeks or a few months later, I would call again, find out how far he had got, then have him send me half of what was then remaining, picking away at it, piece by piece. Initially, of course, I fantasised about calling him up one night and finding out that he had completed the ‘A’ section, but that was never to happen. The realisation dawned on me that not only was the delay real and persistent, but I could for the longest time tolerate it because of the wealth of new titles that kept being discovered, and it was this as much as anything else that kept my persistence up.
Though Shifreen was not genuinely involved with the project, he was, at the same time, reluctant to let it go. And yet, from my standpoint, there was no consideration given to abandoning the project, as to do so would have been a financial disaster. Over two years, I had invested more than a year’s salary in the bibliography, purchasing books and making research trips. My only hope of recovery was to get to the point where I had a completed book in hand, available for sale. I knew in a couple of months summer vacation would be here and I would have ten weeks of extended time to finish the project.
So I simply told Shifreen that he should send me whatever sheets were remaining in his part of the ‘A’ section, along with a disk of any data he had entered into his computer. I had a copy of the original ‘A’ section, but I was uncertain how much data Shifreen had already entered into his computer, and it would have been silly for me to duplicate this task. I waited weeks, then a couple months, for the disk to arrive.
Early in the summer, my wife and son were out of town for a week or so and I had a nice block of time when I could work uninterruptedly. I got up early one morning and began to enter the remaining pages, knowing all the while that much of this data was already on disk, but in Maryland. I wanted the job done, wanted it to be over, and as fast as possible; to start typing that morning was the most expedient thing I could do, so I proceeded. Sometime later the needed disk would arrive, but not until after I had already entered the majority of the text.
The receipt of the computer disk had symbolic significance in that it would become Shifreen’s last official act in the process of the bibliography’s production. His original plan to assume all the responsibility for entering the data had gone to smash almost from the beginning, so too his plans for doing an index for the book.
I knew I was going to finish up the project with Ashley’s assistance. There was a freeing feeling that came to me as I entered, rearranged and put the pages in final format and began readying the text for the remaining two hurdles: getting the photographs and creating the index. I was now able to move at my own pace, unhindered. The bibliography as it stood then, even without the last two sections, had little resemblance to Shifreen’s original sheets.
I zeroed in on the photographers’ advertisements again in the Yellow Pages of the telephone book. I went the opposite direction and contacted a photo lab. The name of the place sounded a bit too professional for me, Precision Photographics, and I knew the cost would not be cheap, but I ended up with clear, crisp photographs, all the way around.
The photographs came to be what I consider a key factor of the book. There was never any prior intent on including 104 pages of photographs, but new titles would appear that I believed needed to be added and so it grew. I was also cognisant of the fact that I had acquired items that would only be a temporary part of my collection, those purchased specifically for the project but not items I could realistically afford to keep permanently. With the unique foreign language translations I had obtained, I now had the opportunity to provide a photo document that would not be easy for others to duplicate. Secondly, I was well aware of the cost and time commitment of the project. Even if another assemblage of similar Miller material could be made at some later time, the cost and energy level might prevent a comparable photo section from ever being developed. If I didn’t do it right then and there, it might never be done.
In addition to getting the photographs that summer, I concentrated on completing the research for the Opus Pistorum essay that would appear as an appendix in the bibliography, making a second trip to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Bloomington, Indiana, and a follow-up trip to Southern Illinois University.4 During our collaboration, Ashley had acquired a stack of papers relating to Opus Pistorum, papers that were originally part of the Grove Press archive along with some material sent to me by Gershon Legman, the erotic folklore writer in France, and Miller’s biographer Jay Martin. In the end, there was enough raw data to piece together the story of how this book, though not written by Miller, would come to be associated with him, probably forever. I think the essay is an important document to a small group of interested researchers and its placement in the bibliography gives it some permanence, as opposed to it being published in some obscure journal. I realise, of course, that for the general reader, Opus Pistorum will continue to be linked to Miller due to continual reprintings of the book by Grove Press and the placement of Miller’s name on the title page.5
By fall 1992 I was ready to create the index for the bibliography, something I had actually looked forward to doing, since I am a firm believer in the helpfulness of good indexes. I wanted to do it right and make it as thorough and as practical as possible. I think I achieved that, but not without a few surprises and a bit of luck along the way.
The surprise came first: my Macintosh Classic computer was outdated by contemporary standards, and while I could perform the ‘sorting’ operation needed to automatically alphabetise the entries in the index, I found out in mid-process that my computer did not have the capacity to work with all the information at once. So I had to create a number of individual files, knowing of course that, at some point, I would have to use another computer to compile these many lists into a single grouping. The published index runs more than fifty pages, and with two columns per page, there are about one hundred titles per page, with each title having multiple entries, resulting in thousands of pieces of information. I took my index disk to the store where I had purchased the computer, explained the problem and was pleased to find a sales associate willing to make what he described as an easy conversion. Still, as the salesman started clicking the mouse, there was trepidation on my part, hoping that everything would come out as expected. ‘Oh… something is not right here’, he said. More clicks. ‘Let me try something else’, he added. To make it short, let me say something unanticipated happened, partly because certain entries had been wrongly identified, partially because of basic differences in my computer program and the one the salesman was using. As a result, there was a scrambling effect that took place: entries were kicked out of place and some titles split in two, each half-alphabetised separately. This was a major, unanticipated problem, and one that added to the delay of the publication at a time when I was feeling that the end was clearly in sight. There are few things more frustrating to me while doing research than using indexes that are incomplete or filled with errors. You find yourself looking for items that do not appear in the text, or find items accidentally that were not indexed in the first place. I knew the errors had to be corrected, and saw no way out other than manually cross-referencing each of the thousands of entries back to the original page of the text. It was a nearly impossible task, but I started a routine of getting up a couple hours early each morning before work, and took the pages one at a time. In retrospect, having used the bibliography considerably over the last three years, I am pleased that so few errors have been detected in the index, as the potential was there for disaster.
At the end of 1992, the sheets were sent to the printer. A few weeks would pass as I waited for the proofs to arrive. I continued to check for errors and typos along with Ashley, creating a whole series of replacement sheets that would be exchanged as soon as the original proofs were received.
Actual printing began in January 1993, with pick-up of the books coming in March, almost three years to the day after my letter of inquiry went out to Shifreen. A project I initially expected to take six months had taken me three years to complete. But it was now a considerably larger project and had it been completed in six months as planned, the book would have paled in comparison. Now all I had to do was find people who were interested in purchasing the bibliography.
I sent out several thousand fliers during March and began shipping advance orders following the day of pick-up. I had spoken to Shifreen briefly in February 1993, and we discussed marketing the book. The university list was divided up, so that schools beginning with the letters A–M would receive fliers from Shifreen, and I would do schools beginning with the letters N–Z, along with the dealer and collector lists I had developed. As it turned out, the entire task of marketing fell upon my shoulders, since Shifreen never got around to sending out any fliers.
In June 1993, three months after publication, I got an unexpected call from Shifreen. I forget the actual reason for it, but I let him know the book had been published and that I would send him a few copies soon, which I did. He would have seen the finished book towards the end of June 1993. I have never received any response from him by phone or mail since his receipt of the copies mailed to him. I assume he was satisfied with the finished product. I doubt if he recognised it.
As far as highlights are concerned, the photographs are one of the two features that are most frequently commented on by users. In spite of the cost and frustration that are associated with them, I agree that the photographs were worth the hassle. The second comment I usually get involves the printed endpapers which list the titles and entry numbers of Miller’s most important publications. The idea to include this feature occurred to me one morning as I was driving to work. The night before, I had been printing out sections of the index with the realisation that it would be huge. While I was enthusiastic about this, because it represented so much information, there was the practical problem of how to find quickly those key items that readers would have reason to refer to over and over. As it stood, it would take them just as long to locate the entry number to Miller’s most obscure titles as his more famous ones. The printed endpapers became a natural outgrowth of this predicament. In actual practice, the location of most items that people will routinely refer to will be found by simply flipping open the front or back covers of the book and scanning the endpapers. The index was thus a two-step process: first, develop the most detailed and complete index as possible, then create a subsystem that would keep the user from having to refer to the general index very often.
In terms of the book itself, I regret not expanding the ‘Note’ section of individual entries to include historical data about each of Miller’s items in the ‘A’ (books) section. As it stands, the notes are very extensive and detailed, but the bibliography does not include data on each item. It could have been done; the information could have been located and assembled over time and at some cost. Realistically, however, you get to the point where you just want the project to end so you can go on to other things.
The biggest surprise, and the one that still amazes me, in my more reflective moments, is how much money it took to put together the bibliography. Certainly, it could have been done more cheaply; lots of corners could have been cut. For example, eliminating the photographs would have saved nearly $5000 alone, and the printed endpapers another $500.6 Expenses went beyond any expectations I had. And it wasn’t just printing costs, as those represented just about one third of the overall cost of obtaining needed information, book purchases, photocopying fees, and travel costs to university libraries. It is true, of course, that over the years that I was compiling information, I received hundreds of books that were sent as exchanges: as foreign titles would come in, an equivalent value of American books would be sent out in reciprocity. What graduate student or academician could do it unless this person was a collector of Miller as well? In most instances, people lack the willingness or means to commit such an amount of money. I was more willing to do so, not because I have unlimited resources, but because it was a self-published book and I expected to have a profit margin that exceeded the standard royalty structure that bibliographers would typically expect.
Now, putting together this project was hindered, not helped by having access to Shifreen’s several hundred pages of bibliographic data. But there was no way I could have known this at the time. Take Tropic of Cancer, for example. Shifreen visited a few university collections and documented sixteen editions. Ashley and I come along, working with our network of dealers, collectors and foreign correspondents and the sixteen become fifty-six. This increase of editions was not the result of sitting in a Special Collections Department somewhere, logging information on shelved titles, but of ferreting out copies of rare items and variants made available to us by dealers, collectors and our own scouring of countless bookstores. One thing is for certain: when people know you are an active buyer, material will be readily offered to you by dealers and other collectors. What we would not have had to contend with in starting the project from scratch would have been the impossible delays and waits. In the case of Tropic of Cancer, we could have easily logged information on the sixteen institutionalised titles and then moved on to the forty new ones at a fast clip.
Was it worth it? ‘Yes and no’ is the only answer I can give, and this, only with explanation. If I could have seen at the outset the unfolding of developments as they would happen, no, I would not have actively chosen to spend three years doing a scholarly task with which I was unfamiliar, to say nothing of the kind of money it took to complete. What sensible person would? The process of completing of the project was so often one of frustration and delays; the end always seemed so close at hand, yet in reality, it was like a mirage that recedes into the background with each step forward.
Yes, it was worth it in the sense that once you go through the whole process, the three years of work, you have side benefits which occur, benefits that were totally unexpected. Most importantly, you come into contact with like-minded individuals, many of whom turn out to be close and significant friends. That is a real benefit. The bibliographic project also spawned additional activities, including a second volume of the bibliography and Henry Miller: A Personal Archive, both completed with Ashley, along with my publishing of three dozen books and booklets by and about Miller. This last activity has been very positive and continues to be so to this day.7