Bookdar, Blades and Banned In Boston

It's been awhile since I mentioned "bookdar", that mysterious force which somehow serves as an internal meter more powerful than the dreaded scanner at alerting booksellers to a must-buy volume. Sometimes it sends a jolt like an electrical charge and sometimes it just whispers, "Hey, you! Pay attention, okay?" Yesterday it whispered just loud enough to shift my focus to a numbered, limited edition of Joseph Moncure March's explosive and VERY risque narrative poem, The Wild Party. We're talking sin and gin to the tenth power here. What's interesting is the fact that I can neither blame, nor thank, my internal bookdar for the outcome. All it did was compel me to look -- and look hard  -- then make an educated guess.

As I picked it up it I thought of something that occurred back when the first wave of  technologically enhanced booksellers desecended upon the Cuyahoga Falls Library book sale waving electronic scanners. Compared to that shiny new weapon  the great sword Excalibur was kid stuff, all cardboard, tinfoil and make-believe.  I'm telling you, I will never until the day I find myself browsing the shelves of the Big Bookstore in the Sky, forget what I heard in line that afternoon. It was hotter than the the back end of hell, my sundress stuck to my skin like cellophane, and my mood was about as cheery as Finnegan's Wake minus the booze. Behind me rang out a voice I can still hear and which Eric and  I quote verbatim several times a week.

"Those old-time book dealers think they're so great cuz they know stuff, but you don't gotta know nothin' to sell books." If someone had taken my blood pressure at that precise moment the EMTs would have zoomed in to pick me up in the Batmobile.

Anyway, I'm looking at this book thinking about that, and registering what superb "book feel" it has. I wasn't sure whether it had ever had a jacket -- sometimes privately printed numbered limited editons don't, but I thought it might  at least have had a glasscine wrapper. I then opened to the yellow endpapers and immediately spied a gift inscription. Some people like these, some people' don't. I love them, especially if they're heartfelt or clever. This one is written in French, which I do not speak, but it didn't take Claudine Longet  to translate the first line,"Avec l'amour." Who's not in favor of  l'amour?

But the big question still  remained. Who was this author, Joseph Moncure March? And does he matter? The last thing I need is a 1947  edition of a narrative poem by a poet known and loved only by his long-departed mother. But wait! There's an introduction by Louis Untermeyer. Okay, now we're talking. Untermeyer was a poet, critic, and anthologist of the day, on the scene in 1928 when Covici bravely published the first edition of this book. Things were definitely looking up. So I open  to the intro and right away Untermeyer shoots me in the eye with descriptive darts --words like vulgar, brutal, cynical, ugly, sensational, repulsive, fascinating, viscious and vivacious. He worries that the Purity League will go after the book with blazing banners, but then decides that might actually be a good thing. Turns out, they did go after it. The Wild Party, along with Finnegan's Wake, made the Banned in Boston list.

I flip back a page and take a gander at the frontis art, a scene of  Greenwich Village Jazz Age decadence, then flip forward and read at random from half a dozen pages. WOWZA! 1928???????? The Roaring 20's roared louder than I'd ever imagained, flappers' knees and bathtub gin not withstanding. So, now what? Do I buy it? Or not buy it?..... I bought it.

There had to be story behind this one, I told myself as I tucked it in the crook of my arm. There HAD to be. So the second I got home I started digging. Turns out it was easier than I would have thought -- in fact, so easy I felt like a dummy for not knowing about it before, especially since it had been reprinted in a couple of editions, one of which in the late 60's was edited to remove the anti-Semitic bits. Then thirty years later still another new edtion came out with illustrations by the great Pulitzer Prize-winning Art Spiegelman and the language reverted to its former state. The Wild Party also inspired some movies, the first of which, oddly, incorporated the Fatty Arbuckle scandal which found the corpulent comic in court defending himself against charges of rape and the accidental killing of a minor actress. In 2000 The Wild Party also  gave way to  two musicals -- one on Broadway, one off. And yet somehow I managed to take up space on the planet this many years deaf to the entire thing. Amazing.

So then. Was it a good buy, or wasn't it? The easy answer is, it depends. The hard answer is, it depends. Art Spiegelman illustrations and the original language make the edition from the late 90''s pretty desirable (ha-ha), but this one's not exactly chopped liver. Online prices,  after you knock out the beat-up copies in the $12-15 range, hover around $22-25 on the low end with the rare book guys standing firm at $100. I bought it with the idea that I might not list it online and now of course I won't. It's a book you have to touch, a book you have to open. A book in which Untermeyer shoots you in the eye with darts and Joseph Moncure March follows up with razor blades.

To get the full experience you  have to be there.