glass
TRANSCRIPT
Loren GlassUniversity of Iowa
Counter-Culture Colophon:Grove Press and the Democratization of the Avant-Garde
When Barney Rosset bought the fledgling reprint house Grove Press for $3000 in 1951, the
publishing world was on the verge of what historian John Tebbel has called “The Great Change,” the era
of conglomeration and consolidation during which book publishing, which had remained relatively
insulated from the broader culture industry during the modern era, was gradually absorbed by it.1 Over
the course of the sixties and seventies, most of the major publishing houses would be bought up by
large publicly-owned corporations that would both capitalize and rationalize an industry that had
remained something of a genteel backwater during the first half of the twentieth century. The book
publishing world was an insular community of (mostly) men, based in New York City, all of whom knew
each other and most of whom shared a commitment to literary culture that, they felt, distinguished
their industry and their product from others. Many of these publishers, in particular the so-called “new
breed” of second-generation Jewish immigrants such as Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, and Bennett
Cerf, shared a sense of mission that led them both to take risks with unknown authors and to remain
loyal to those authors once they had established themselves. Tebbel calls this earlier era the “Golden
Age Between the Wars”, and under Rosset Grove was in many ways a holdover from it, an independent
publisher modeled on a modernist disregard for the bottom line and using modernist standards of
aesthetic evaluation. Like the “new breed” that preceded him, Rosset was committed to bringing the
latest in European experimental literature to the attention of an American reading public, and this sense
of mission trumped any simple profit motive.
1 John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Volume IV. The Great Change, 1940-1980 (New York: RR Bowker, 1981) 105-282. See also Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2000).
Nevertheless, Grove marketed its titles aggressively, and I hope to prove that its promotional
efforts were crucial to the process whereby the democratic distribution of experimental literature
funneled the aesthetically subversive energies of the post-war avant-garde into the political ferment of
the sixties. At the center of this process was the paperback book. The early fifties marked the tail-end
of the so-called “paperback revolution,” during which most paperback books had been reprints either of
bestselling hardcovers or of classics that were out of copyright. Indeed, Rosset initially expanded his
title list by reprinting classic texts by authors such as Henry James and Herman Melville. But in the later
fifties, following the lead of Samuel Epstein’s groundbreaking Doubleday imprint Anchor Books, Grove
began publishing original avant-garde texts by authors such as Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet as
inexpensive “quality” paperbacks.2 Using instantly recognizable Abstract Expressionist covers designed
by Roy Kuhlman and deploying a variety of innovative promotional schemes, Grove marketed these
Evergreen Originals, as they were called, to a principally academic audience of students and professors,
establishing its colophon and the Evergreen imprint early with the baby boom generation that would
swell the ranks of the counterculture.
Grove launched the Evergreen Originals imprint as an experiment analogous to the avant-garde
literature on its title list. Thus, in a 1958 circular to booksellers, boldly headed “An experiment,” Grove
notes the industry’s concern “over the shrinking market for new, original fiction” and attributes this
shrinkage to “the wide gap between the prices of original hardbound fiction and paperback reprints.”
They propose that their imprint will “bridge that gap,” and request that booksellers “display these
books, talk about them, and report them to your local bestseller lists.” The first of four titles listed in the
2 On the “paperback revolution,” see Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
circular is Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which in fact would become a bestseller in the ensuing
months. Thus, a mere six months later, Grove ran an ad in the New York Times Book Review trumpeting
their Evergreen Original imprint as “an experiment in book publishing that worked!”, listing The
Subterraneans’ “best sellerdom” as proof of their success, and offering new titles by Samuel Beckett and
Alain Robbe-Grillet as the latest additions to the line.
Between issuing the circular and publishing the ad, Grove, in coordination with the now
legendary Bay Area bookseller Fred Cody, organized of an “Evergreen Book Week” in Berkeley, CA. The
series of events scheduled for what would end up being a three-week long promotion was kicked off by
a full-page ad in The Daily Californian headed “Cody’s Salutes Evergreen Books,” and announcing that
“EVERGREEN BOOKS are a vital force on campus today.” The events of the first week—which included
performances of Eugene Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and The Lesson, a preview performance of Beckett’s
Endgame, two radio shows, numerous panel discussions with critics, editors, and English professors on
both the UC Berkeley and Stanford campuses, and readings by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and Robert Duncan—amply illustrate how Grove worked not only to associate their imprint with the
latest in experimental literature, but also to establish themselves as a cultural force in the communities
which both produced and consumed this literature in the United States.
Grove had already dedicated the second issue of the Evergreen Review to the “San Francisco
Scene,” and the Cody’s salute was clearly designed to exploit and expand the West Coast connections
they had established in composing that issue, which included the first serial publication of Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Thus lectures and panel discussions included such topics as “The Art of Writing in
the San Francisco Bay Area,” “Prose Writing in the San Francisco Bay Area,” and “The San Francisco
Renaissance: Fact or Fraud?”, while all the readings were by authors who had been published in the
special issue. By combining these readings and discussions with performances by Ionesco and Beckett,
Grove helped to highlight the affinities between the European and American avant-gardes, and to
encourage cross-fertilization between them. Furthermore, the inclusion of editors, publishers, and
professors along with authors on the scheduled panel discussions encouraged participants, mostly
faculty and students, to understand the avant-garde as a cultural network, not just a list of titles.
Donald Allen, who translated Ionesco for Grove, co-edited the Evergreen Review with Rosset, edited
Grove’s groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry (1960), and would be Grove’s West Coast
representative throughout the sixties, is a crucial figure in this regard, a consummate networker whose
role in literary history is obscured by the famous poets whose work he edited and introduced.
In the East Bay, Cody’s Books was establishing itself as a crucial institutional node in this
network. Like City Lights in San Francisco, it specialized in paperback books, and its customer base was
the faculty and students at UC Berkeley. In an account of his “Evergreen Salute” printed in Publisher’s
Weekly on May 19, 1958, Cody claims he had “felt for some time that Evergreen Books make a special
appeal to the University public served by the bookstore.”3 For three weeks, Cody devoted his entire
front window display to promoting Evergreen Books, which Grove had provided for him on
consignment. And he emphasizes that his discussions with his customers not only about Evergreen
books but also about the book industry more generally were a crucial component of the campaign. Thus
he notes that “talk of what Grove was doing in the Evergreen Series led customers to discussion of other
paperback lines and to a discussion of the ‘revolution’ in publishing brought about by paperbacks.” He
also notes that “new respect was gained for the store which had made the effort to organize a special
promotion.”
Cody’s somewhat crude display features the Evergreen Colophon as a sort of visual pun,
emphasizing its similarity to an arrow pointing downward, thereby directing the eye to the titles on
whose covers and bindings it prominently appears (see figures). But the colophon itself is only a small
3 Fred Cody, “Evergreen Salute,” Publisher’s Weekly (May 19, 1958)
part of the visual language Grove deployed to generate brand identity and brand loyalty. As the
prominent photos of Kerouac and Beckett affirm, Grove early on worked to acquire an identifiably
experimental stable of authors and, as with Beckett, strived to publish all of that author’s work.
Beckett’s photo is featured prominently in a majority of Grove’s advertisements over the course of the
sixties.
However, as these displays and the contemporaneous advertisements reveal, it was the design
of the books themselves, in particular the cover art, which made Grove and Evergreen into a
recognizable brand of literature. Between 1951 and 1965, most of Grove’s covers were designed by Roy
Kuhlman, whose aesthetic sensibilities had been forged by the Abstract Expressionist pioneers of the
immediate post-war era. Rosset, whose first wife Joan Mitchell was one of the few women to become
associated with this male-dominated school, shared Kuhlman’s aesthetic taste, and their loose
collaboration over this crucial period would cement Grove’s identity as a counter-cultural force. Ned
Drew and Paul Sternberger, co-authors of By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, claim
Kuhlman has been “vastly underappreciated” as a book designer, noting that he “produced one of the
most consistently distinctive bodies of work in the history of book cover design.”4 Steven Brower and
John Gall agree, calling Rosset and Kuhlman’s collaboration “a marriage of imagery and the written word
that had not been seen before, or, perhaps, since.”5
Kuhlman did not read the books whose covers he designed. Rather, working from a brief
description, he would subordinate textual content to experimental form, creating a consistent graphic
language that both integrated a variety of literary genres and national origins and provided a visual
context for the Evergreen colophon, which almost always constituted an element of the cover design in
this line. Thus Kuhlman’s cover for The Subterraneans, prominently displayed in the Cody’s salute,
tropes on the Bay Area location of the narrative with a recognizable silhouette of the Golden Gate
Bridge, but then renders that silhouette as an abstract formal experiment in shape and color, distorting
its symmetry and altering its hue. The off-balance green shades that bisect the bridge against the black
background contrast with and foreground the blue lettering for the word “by” which links author and
title and the colophon that takes the place of the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner, obliquely
reminding us of the mediating role of the publisher in the production of the text (see fig).
Another title Grove frequently used in its early promotions for the Evergreen Originals imprint,
and which can be clearly seen in the Cody’s display, was The Blind Owl, a novel chronicling the gradual
descent into madness of a solitary male protagonist by the Persian writer and Sartrean acolyte Sadegh
Hedayat. For this cover, Kuhlman sketched out an assemblage of asymmetric grids, filling in selected
squares with daubs of purple and brown. As with The Subterraneans, the color scheme provides a visual
framework for the display of both the authorial name, which appears in the upper right in brown, and
the colophon, which appears amidst the gridwork in purple. The overall design, then, in its irregularities
4 Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) 65, 67.5 Steven Brower and John Gall, “Grove Press at the Vanguard,” Print (March/April 1994) 60.
and asymmetries, tropes on the theme of insanity while also providing a syntax in which the colophon
can figure as both an element in and source of the distinctive visual style. Similar strategies are evident
in the two next illustrations from the same period, of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and Beckett’s Unnamable.
All four of these covers represent the verbal experimentation of the texts in an abstract expressionist
style that integrates both the colophon and the authorial name into its visual vocabulary.
Over the next five years, Grove would cement its reputation as an avant-garde publisher in its
prominent campaign to publish a host of underground classics from the modernist era, including most
famously D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, both of which
provoked highly publicized obscenity trials which resulted in their legal exoneration and, ultimately, the
so-called “end of obscenity” for the printed word.6 In order to capitalize on the notoriety and acclaim it
received for waging these expensive battles, Grove launched a campaign in 1966 inviting readers to
“Join the Underground” by subscribing to the Evergreen Review—whose format had been changed in
1964 from a quarterly quarto to a bi-monthly, and then monthly, folio size magazine with glossy covers
and a wider diversity of advertisers, emphasizing book, record, tape, and poster clubs, as well as cars,
6 See Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill (New York: Bantam, 1968).
cruises, clothes and alcoholic beverages—and by joining the Evergreen Club, which Rosset had started in
that same year as a conduit for distributing Grove’s rapidly expanding catalogue of “adult” literature.
In the first months of 1966, full page ads inviting readers to “Join the Underground” appeared in
venues such as The New York Times, Esquire, Ramparts, New Republic, Playboy, The New York Review of
Books, and the Village Voice, and on posters throughout the New York City subway system. Grove also
distributed tens of thousands of free stickers to subscribers which began to appear on public benches
and in public bathrooms across the country. Their ad in the New York Times opens by provocatively
specifying its target demographic: “If you’re over 21; if you’ve grown up with the underground writers
of the fifties and sixties who’ve reshaped the literary landscape; if you want to share in the new
freedoms that book and magazine publishers are winning in the courts, then keep reading. You’re one
of us.” The ad proceeds to chronicle Grove’s literary and legal triumphs, from the court battles over
Lawrence and Miller to their promotion and publication of Beckett and Robbe-Grillet. And it then
confirms, “Grove’s growth paralleled the growth of a new generation of readers, and at the same time,
freed a new band of contemporary writers. Both groups began turning to us in larger numbers, and out
of the need to provide a forum for these emerging writers, we created a new magazine, Evergreen
Review.”
In order to entice the audience expanded by its efforts to join the club and subscribe to the
magazine, the ad offers a free copy of one of three titles: Eros Denied by Wayland Young, Games People
Play by Eric Berne, and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, which Grove describes as “an authentic
literary masterpiece of the 20th century that has created more discussion, generated more controversy,
and excited more censors than any other novel of recent times.” As a boldly experimental and wildly
explicit novel originally published in Paris by an American author, Naked Lunch epitomizes the
combination of avant-garde aesthetics and underground notoriety that constituted Grove’s fully
established reputation in the mid-sixties. And while the “Join the Underground” campaign offers the
hardcover free with subscription and membership, the most popular edition was surely the mass-market
paperback, which included a text of the Massachusetts Supreme Court Decision and excerpts from the
Boston obscenity trial. Grove issued this edition of Naked Lunch under their Black Cat imprint, which
they had introduced in 1961 as “the new mass-market line with the liveliest look in the field.”
As with Evergreen Originals, Grove aggressively marketed this imprint to an academic audience.
They featured it in their 1966 college catalog, claiming in their prefatory Note to Teachers:
The complete Evergreen-Black Cat list of inexpensive quality paperbacks in the fields of
literature, philosophy, religion, history, and sociology will be found for the first time in
this catalog. Many of the books have already been widely selected as texts and for
collateral reading in leading junior colleges, technical schools, colleges, and universities.
For example, more than 300,000 copies of the works of Samuel Beckett alone have been
chose for classroom use in drama, religion, philosophy, and other courses. Other
widely-adopted authors include Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Eugene Ionesco,
Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, E.E. Cummings, Alfred Kazin, Robert S.
Lynd, Robert L. Heilbroner, and C. Wright Mills.”
This strategic blending of quality and mass-market paperback format can be taken as an indication of
the increasing popularity and democratic accessibility of the avant-garde aesthetic that Grove had been
promoting throughout the late fifties. Unlike the Evergreen originals, Black Cat covers tended to
emphasize word over image, foregrounding author, title, and publisher as a more directly discursive
package. For books such as Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer, this was surely because the explicitness
of the content discouraged Grove from further provoking legal reaction with the type of provocative
illustrations associated with mass-market paperbacks. Rather, these covers trumpet their faithfulness to
the hardback text, already affiliated with Grove as the company which made it legally possible to publish
them in the first place.
During this same period Grove would begin publishing paperback reprints of titles acquired from
the left wing publisher Monthly Review Press, under both their Black Cat and Evergreen imprints. With
these titles we see how Grove leveraged its avant-garde and underground reputation into the political
arena, as it began to publish revolutionary handbooks and radical political theory associated with the
burgeoning New Left. Kuhlman was doing less work for Grove at this point, and these covers are
correlatively less abstract, though still innovative in their use of typographical and photographic design,
and the colophons are more conventionally positioned. Significantly, the Evergreen colophon has now
been encircled in such a way as to emphasize its similarity to a peace sign, by the mid sixties a widely
familiar icon of the counterculture, providing a somewhat ironic counterpoint to the violent imagery and
subject matter of these texts.
One final advertisement from the New York Times can illustrate how Grove worked to
consolidate and combine these somewhat disparate elements of its image. In the March 19 edition of
the Book Review from 1967, Grove placed a full page ad announcing “Guerilla Warfare: New Strategy of
the Underground,” with a photo featuring a guitarist, a flautist, a filmmaker, and Regis Debray wearing a
set of headphones. The opening paragraph of the ad copy reads:
There’s a new scene on the New Left. The culture wing is taking over with a battle style
all its own. Like a small band of guerillas, they hit and run with slashing spontaneous
poems, quick committed journalism, underground films, propaganda wrapped in folk-
rock music, and savage satire unleashed from Off-Broadway launching sites.
Here the political and military connotations of the term “avant-garde” are rhetorically absorbed into its
cultural meaning, establishing Grove Press and the Evergreen Review as the foco of the counterculture,
the principal purveyor of revolutionary literature for the New Left. The prominence in these campaigns
of Debray, who before joining Che Guevara in Bolivia had studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and
Fanon, whose work was first published by Presence Africaine and introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre, further
affirms the degree to which the network Grove had established to funnel the European avant-garde to
the United States established the connections it would later exploit in acquiring its more politically
oriented titles.
The American university remained a crucial node in this network, as a glance at Grove’s College
Catalog from 1968 conveniently illustrates. Here are all the imprints discussed in this paper, from
Evergreen originals to Black Cat handbooks, from signal representatives of the aesthetic avant-garde to
revolutionary writers in the political vanguard, all contained within a single composite image. By 1968,
Grove had consolidated its reputation as a countercultural colophon, and its title list would thereby
become what S.E. Gontarski calls “a formidable countercanon,” providing “literary respectability for
previously marginal literature.”7 The effects of this underappreciated publishing revolution remain with
us today, as the classic titles Grove made available, from Waiting for Godot to The Wretched of the
Earth, continue to appear on syllabi across the country.
7 S.E. Gontarski, “Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of a Countercanon,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10:3 (Fall 1990) 17.