THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

Ray Roberts: Editor – and Collector – of Thomas Pynchon

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On May 1, 1997, Washington state bookseller Ed Smith was attending a rare-books auction at the Swann Auction Galleries in New York City. In a room full of dedicated rare-books collectors and dealers, Smith found himself seated directly in front of Glenn Horowitz, one of the best-known dealers of rare books and manuscripts in the United States, if not the world. When a U.K. proof of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., with a pristine “trial” dust jacket, came on the block, there was lively and aggressive bidding for this highly sought-after Pynchon collectible. Smith was certain Horowitz would come away with the prize but, to his amazement, he ended up winning the auction, paying $517.[1]Smith says Horowitz would’ve likely won the bidding were it not for a pretty & pierced young women seated next to him with whom he was flirting. According to Smith, “Glenn was … Continue reading

U.K. uncorrected proof copy of V. that Ed Smith won at auction

“When the auction ended,” Smith recalls, “[Horowitz] introduced himself and we chatted awhile. I ended up visiting his shop and purchasing a couple proofs, though no Pynchons.” Unbeknownst to Smith at the time, Horowitz was a close friend and trusted book-collecting advisor to Ray Roberts, Thomas Pynchon’s editor, who’d also had his eye on that UK proof of V..

Smith continues: “A day or so after returning home, I got a call from Ray Roberts. I had no idea who he was, but he said he was Mr. Pynchon’s editor, and I believed him. He’d apparently contacted the Swann Galleries to inquire about the UK proof and gotten my phone number. He asked me if I’d be interested in trading the V. proof I’d won at auction for ‘something special.’ He asked me to send him the U.K. proof and he would send me his ‘special’ item. I did as instructed and, in return, Ray, as good as his word, sent me one of the Mason & Dixon blue galleys.”

It was through this fortuitous set of circumstances that Ed Smith came to know Ray Roberts, who it turned out was not just Thomas Pynchon’s editor but also one of the most successful and respected editors in New York City, not to mention an avid and knowledgeable collector of modern first editions.

And it was through this transaction that the blue uncorrected proofs of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon came to light, proofs that quite possibly landed Roberts squarely in conflict with his desires as a collector and his responsibilities as a trusted editor.

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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 Smith says Horowitz would’ve likely won the bidding were it not for a pretty & pierced young women seated next to him with whom he was flirting. According to Smith, “Glenn was directly behind me playing grab-ass with a young woman who was with him who had multiple face/ear piercings long before they were the fashion. Charlie Agvent, whom I knew, sat behind me too and he would remember that incident.”

Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse – Helen Dudar

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Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse

By Helen Dudar, a freelance writer living in New York who writes about publishing

[Dudar, Helen. “Lifting the Veil on Life of a Literary Recluse.” Chicago Tribune Bookworld 8 Apr. 1984: 35-36. Reprinted as “A Pynchon for Privacy.” Newsday 9 Apr. 1984, sec. II: 3.]

Picture this: Your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him, and legions of journalists yearn to interview him. So what will he talk about? He may talk about movies, about which, as any attentive student would know, he has a lifetime hoard of memories. He may talk, knowledgeably, about baseball. He will talk about himself, wittily and artfully, without allowing intimacy to seep into the conversation. If he is camping in your house for a spell, he may quarrel with your preschool child about the television shows they will watch; his tastes run to the sort of junk embraced by any addict committed to pop culture.

Here we have, if not a 3-D portrait, a slightly fuzzy outline of Pynchon, author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, a man widely thought to rival J.D. Salinger in reclusiveness. The fact is that any prominent person who will not confront the media is apt to suffer the label of recluse. Pynchon has never delivered himself into the hands of the working press, has not been photographed for publication since his yearbook days and lets his friends know that talking about him publicly amounts to betrayal.

But if Howard Hughes, squirreled away in a hotel with a 10-year growth of toenails, is the modern avatar of invisibility, Pynchon hardly qualifies. He has been seen; he gets around; he enjoys the company of women; he has phone pals, better than pen pals, distanced as they are by long lines.

I’m telling you all this because your neighborhood bookstore should have on hand the first Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow, that immense, dense, apocalyptic vision of the world at war, which was published in 1973, and because this new book is certain to result in a fresh set of ruminations about his so-called solitary life.

The book, Slow Learner (Little, Brown, $14.95), is not a new work, but a collection of five early stories, four written while he was still at Cornell University, all viewed with disarming deprecation by their author. For years, the stories have been turning up in unauthorized pamphlet editions, and, apparently weary of the piracy, Pynchon agreed to their publication. When the book was offered around the trade last year, it carried a Rolls-Royce price tag. Pynchon does not customarily nest on best-seller lists, but he is a campus perennial in paperback and a quality lit ornament in any publishing house. Even so, there were scattered gasps of surprise at the report that Little, Brown had paid a lavish $150,000 for it.

The collection is no Dubliners (the reference that comes to mind because Rainbow was widely greeted as an event akin to the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses), but it is a fascinating display of the feeling for style and imagined event this greatly talented, intelligent man had by the time he was 21. The stories are flabby and only marginally interesting. Maybe Pynchon’s obsessions were not fully focused; the fiction reads like the work of a man who has yet to learn how to express what is flickering dangerously at the edge of his consciousness.

For the Pynchon cultist, the real treat is his introduction, the first autobiographical notes ever to flow from his hand into print. It is relaxed and charming and sometimes alarmingly cute, an excess to be found in his fiction on occasion. Nearing his 47th birthday, Pynchon talks of the fumbling writer he was, of the sources for the stories, of the music and writings that influenced him.
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Interview with Raquel Jaramillo, aka R.J. Palacio, Designer of the Mason & Dixon Dust Jacket

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Raquel Jaramillo, 2020 – With a small selection of the many books she’s art-directed

At this point, Raquel Jaramillo is probably better known under her nom de plume R.J. Palacio, under which pen name she has written a number of successful children’s novels, including Wonder (2012) which was a best-seller.

Ms. Jaramillo lives in New York City with her husband, two sons, and two dogs. For more than twenty-five years, she was an art director and graphic designer, designing book jackets for other people’s books while waiting for the right time in her life to start writing her own novels. But a chance encounter several years ago with an extraordinary child in front of an ice cream store made her realize that the right time to write that novel had finally come. Wonder was her first novel (no, she did not design the cover). She has since written several other books in the Wonder-themed universe, including her latest, a graphic novel that she wrote and illustrated titled White Bird. She is currently working on her latest novel, to be published sometime in 2021.

Last year, I worked up the nerve to reach out to Ms. Jaramillo to see if she’d be open to being interviewed about her experience designing the dust jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon. After not hearing back from her for nearly a year I’d pretty much lost hope. Then, out of the blue, she responded to my original email, explaining that it had gotten buried in her inbox and she’d just discovered it. Fortunately, she was happy to talk about her Mason & Dixon experience!

Her talent and intuition, and collaboration with Pynchon, resulted in the perfect dust jacket for one of Pynchon’s finest novels. And she’s a lovely person, to boot!
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Interview with Andrew Boese, Creator of The “C” Section — The Collected Unpublished Works of Thomas Pynchon

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Andrew Boese at WorkAndrew Boese is Pynchon fan and collector who in 2016 gained some notoriety by publishing, via his Optics Press, The “C” Section, a lovely hand-bound edition of the collected unpublished works of Thomas Pynchon. As Andrew writes on the website, he created Optics Press to produce high-end, extremely low-run prints of rare, unpublished, and unique works of art. Each volume is designed using only the highest quality materials, with one or two titles released annually, cased and numbered.

Tell me a bit about yourself, what your life journey looks like, and the Optics Press.

Andrew: I grew up in a printing family. Combine that with my love of reading and it was a natural progression into bookbinding. My favorite books to collect have always been limited and fine press editions. Stuff like George Macy’s Limited Editions Club really opened my eyes to how much book design, printing, and binding can go into enhancing the reading experience. Even though there’s a bunch of presses out there doing incredible work, I noticed that there was a niche of work that I’d like to see in a fine press edition that wasn’t being explored. There’s always been a healthy availability of classic works of literature and there’s some incredible work being done currently in the Sci-Fi/horror genres but there’s still so much out there that’s at risk of being lost to time, dust, and decay. I started The Optics Press as an excuse to make books that for whatever reason don’t exist that I want in my own collection. I make a handful of copies to sell at cost on the chance that there’s other collectors out there that feel the same way I do.

Are you a collector of Pynchon, a fan of his work, or both? If so, when did you get interested Pynchon and how do you interact with the community of Pynchon fans?
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Ismar David — Graphic Artist and Cover Illustrator of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

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Ismar David, Berlin, ca. 1930,
from The Work of Ismar David
RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press (2005)

Although Ismar David (1910–1996) had been a respected calligrapher and illustrator beginning in the early 1930s, many became familiar with his work when he designed the dust jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., published by Lippincott in March 1963.

Considered one of the few graphic designers, illustrators, and calligraphers of international reputation, David was a German-born graphic artist who practiced the first third of his professional career in Jerusalem and the remainder in New York City. He is noted for his brilliant work in Hebrew and Latin calligraphy, lettering, and type design, as well as for his distinctive linear style of illustration. David liked to say that the hand is the most marvelous tool if properly trained, and his own handwork supports this conviction. [1]

In order to track down David’s design mockups for V., I first contacted Helen Brandshaft who manages the Ismar David Electronic Archive (IDEA). She directed me to the Cary Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, which houses Ismar’s “archive,” including artwork and correspondence. As Ms. Brandshaft said: “In those days the artist who did the jacket submitted dummies of the jacket design for the publisher to see and choose from. These are astoundingly exact paintings of the jacket design. The printed jacket was usually made from color separated art. That means the artist specified colors and created black and white images for each color.”

The finding aid for the collection showed that the artwork for V. was in Box 33, folder 578 and included “dust jacket, cover dummies, lettering”. Ms. Brandshaft thought I might see ideas for the cover that were rejected by the publisher.

In our email exchanges Ms. Brandshaft, who worked with Ismar David for many years, commented: “Ismar did tell me that the jacket was considered pretty radical for its time. It certainly is unusual in terms of his style.”

This is quite true. Most all of Ismar David’s designs for books (and in other contexts), with the exception of V., utilize elements reminiscent of Hebrew texts and calligraphy, with stark line-sketch illustrations.
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The Liner Notes for “Barefoot in the Head” (1990) – NOT written by Thomas Pynchon

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Liner notes by Thomas Pynchon Thomas Pynchon has written liner notes, as of this date, for two albums: Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones (1994) and Nobody’s Cool (1996) by Lotion.

Another LP — Barefoot in the Head (1990) — has liner notes that are ascribed to Thomas Pynchon but are DEFINITELY not written by Pynchon (confirmed in no uncertain terms by the author’s agent). The LP, by Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich (from Borbetomagus) and Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), borrows not only Pynchon’s name, but also its title — from Barefoot in the Head (1969), Brian Aldiss’ hallucinogenic sci-fi novel — as well as its cover art — La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) — by the German artist Max Ernst.

What follows are the faux-Pynchon liner notes which are a passable pastiche but lacking that certain je ne sais quoi…

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One night Johnson, Coley and I were sitting in the back yard with a bucket of fresh sangria and a few bongloads of some very righteous boo. I’d brought out a box of my live Sonic Youth tapes and we were arguing about Lee Ranaldo’s tongue vectors in the third quadrant of ‘Society is a Hole’ (Folk City, NYC 12/1/82) when one of T. Moore’s downstrokes caught our attention. We ran the tape back and listened to the passage a few times. The subtly monstrous and mindless GUSH with which T. Moore hit the ‘E’ chord made it obvious that his playing was not coming out of a complete spiritual void. This was a real revelation. It meant that he was capable of actually unclenching his brain and loosing demons of soul creativity.

Because we hate to see anyone lackeyed to jive-ass, pop-structure, white-man a-motionalism, a plan was immediately spun for freeing T. Moore from the shackles of Peggy Lee-descended dogshit that were obviously choking off his TRUE HUMAN FORCE. Deciding which hominid cudgels might be best wielded against these procedural chains was a lead pipe cinch. Who but Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich? These two men are the freest, loudest, swingin’est white motherfuckers to ever jaw-cleave an industrial strength reed. Their work with Borbetomagus has long been a raucous fountain of tonal explosion and aesthetic purity, as well as a black-gloved fist up the diz of all conservative musical architects. If anyone could blow the lock off of T. Moore’s creational emo-safe, Jim and Don were it.

The rest was a snap. I had my agent get in touch with all the parties. She explained the points of our proposal in no uncertain terms. The results are presented here. Two free men meet a slave. Everyone goes home barefoot. Right-fuckin’-on.

Thomas Pynchon, Somerville, MA
January 1990

So who wrote these liner notes?

The most likely suspect is the aforementioned Byron Coley, an American music critic who wrote for Forced Exposure magazine in the 1980s. He’s also written liner notes for many albums including for the 2007 deluxe edition of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. According to this interview, on the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Coley admits to making stuff up when answering written interview questions for Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

So Byron Coley is Prime Suspect here.

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Pynchon Dodges the Press After the Publication of V.

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This short article published on the heels of the publication of V., Pynchon’s first novel, describes and clarifies his so-called “reclusiveness.”

New York Post – 29 April 1963

Success is elusive and so is Thomas Pynchon now that he’s found success.

Pynchon won wide critical acclaim with this month’s publication of his bizarre first novel, “V.” He is now living in Mexico, but no one is quite sure where.

Pynchon’s publisher, J. B. Lippincott, says, “We used to give out his Mexico address, but he wrote and asked us not to. Now we don’t really know where he is.”

His mother, wife of Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Thomas Pynchon, denied that her son had become a recluse. She said: “He is still a member of the family. We haven’t seen him for three years, but he still calls and writes.”

A college friend said: “He isn’t anti-social. It’s just that he loathes personal publicity. He feels the book is the thing.”

No Lion in College

Pynchon is not alone in his belief that the book and not the author should be publicized. J. D. Salinger’s unavailability has itself attracted wide publicity. Nor is John Updike fond of being a public figure.

Actually, Pynchon’s reticence is not recent. While in college, a friend remembers, he was “not the kind of person who stays in the classroom.

“He would just go home and write amazing papers.”

“He was always a kind of an individualist,” his mother said. “When he decided to do something he just went off and did it.”

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Cook’s Tour – Richard Poirier’s 1963 Review of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

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Cook’s Tour

The New York Review of Books, June 1, 1963
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, $5.95

Richard Poirier

Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathaniel West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them. V. is full of self-mystified people consistently avoiding direct relations with one another through disguise or evasion, people living the disrupted existences either of the Cook’s Tour, in one plot or in the other, of a kind of contemporary tourism called “yo-yoing,” the pointless repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway. Neither of the two interwoven plots is presented in sequence. One involves a self-styled schlemihl named Benny Profane, his naval buddies, and a gang in New (sometimes “Nueva”) York who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew. The other is an international melodrama of spying that covers the years since 1898. It is reconstructed by Herbert Stencil – the name meaning that he is a copy of his father in the effort to keep track of the elusive V. He cannot be sure what V. is, whether she (or it) is not wholly a fantasy.

Even the title of the novel is thus cryptographic, V. comes to stand for anything to which, in the absence of love, one devotes his passion and curiosity. It can refer to a bar called V-note, where Benny and the Crew listen to a jazz player named McClintic Sphere; to Valetta on Malta; to a sewer rat, Veronica, so named by a Father Fairing who wants, in his efforts to convert the rats of New York to Roman Catholicism, to make Veronica his first saint and his mistress; to Venus, the goddess, the planet, the mons Veneris – to Venezuela and Queen Victoria, to Vesuvius and other volcanoes, to the mythical land of Vheissu with its iridescent spider monkeys. So far as Stencil is concerned, however, V. is a lady internationally renowned as spy, lover, transvestite and impersonator. She has been on the scene of various international crises since her first appearance in Cairo during the Fashoda incident in 1898. There, in her nineteenth year, and under the name Virginia Wren, she is deflowered by a British agent. The next year she is in Florence coincident with a manufactured crisis over Vheissu (and, of course, Venezuela), during which she seduces Stencil’s father at the British consulate, thereby becoming Stencil’s mother. In subsequent impersonations, she is identified in Paris in 1913 as the Lesbian fetishist lover of a dancer named Melanie l’Heuremaudit. Still later, she is placed in German Southwest Africa during a native rebellion in 1922, and in this instance is given two simultaneous identities by Stencil: as a child of sixteen with white-blond, hip-length hair and the information that “I am Hedwig Vogelsang, and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man”; and as the older, more subtle Vera Meroving who sports a glass eye, the face of which is also a watch, and a star sapphire sewn into her navel on Malta in 1919 – she was known then as Veronica Manganese. She makes her last appearance, in Stencil’s increasingly weird dehumanization of the figure, again on Malta in 1939 when, disguised as a priest with a detachable gold foot, she is knocked unconscious in a bombing raid and disassembled by a group of children who are less mean than inquisitive.
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Rocket Power – Gravity’s Rainbow Reviewed by Richard Poirier – 1973

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Illus. – Charles Shields

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.
By Thomas Pynchon.
896 pages.
Viking. $15; paperback, $4.95.

This review, by American literary critic Richard Poirier (1925 – 2009), which first appeared in The Saturday Review (1924 – 1986) on March 3, 1973, is one of the first reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s third novel. It is detailed and insightful and is, in fact, a great read before tackling Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time. What I find truly amazing is Poirier’s depth of understanding of Pynchon’s 760-page novel which he’d probably had for maybe a month or so, as it was published on February 28, 1973.

From The New York Times Obituary: “Mr. Poirier (pronounced to rhyme with “warrior”) was an old-fashioned man of letters — a writer, an editor, a publisher, a teacher — with a wide range of knowledge and interests. He was a busy reviewer for publications from The New York Review of Books to The London Review of Books, and his reviews could sting.”

Poirier also wrote excellent reviews of V. (The New York Review of Books), The Crying of Lot 49 (New York Times), and Slow Learner (The London Review of Books).

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The fantastically variegated and multi­-structured V., which made Thomas Pynchon famous in 1963 and the wonder ever since of anyone who has tried to meet or photograph or interview him, is the most masterful first novel in the history of literature, the only one of its decade with the proportions and stylistic resources of a classic. Three years later came The Crying of Lot 49, more accessible only because very much shorter than the first, and like some particularly dazzling section left over from it. And now Gravity’s Rainbow. More ambitious than V., more topical (in that its central mystery is not a cryptogram but a supersonic rocket), and more nuanced, Gravity’s Rainbow is even less easy to assimilate into those interpretive schematizations of “apocalypse” and “entropy” by which Pynchon’s work has, up to now, been rigidified by his admirers.

At thirty-six, Pynchon has established himself as a novelist of major historical importance. More than any other living writer, including Norman Mailer, he has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology so that in being historical he must also be marvelously exorbitant. It is probable that he would not like being called “historical.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, even more than in his previous work, history — as Norman 0. Brown proposed in Life Against Death — seen as a form of neurosis, a record of the progressive attempt to impose the human will upon the movements of time. Even the very recording of history is such an effort. History-making man is Faustian man. But while this book offers such Faustian types as a rocket genius named Captain Blicero and a Pavlovian behaviorist named Edward Pointsman, it is evident that they are slaves to the systems they think they master.

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The Daily Show – Thomas Pynchon’s Foreword for the 10th Anniversary Concert Program

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Daily Show 10-year Anniversary ProgramIn 2006, Thomas Pynchon wrote the foreword to the program for The Daily Show’s Ten-Year Anniversary Concert, held November 16, 2006 at Irving Plaza in New York City.

When Scott Jacobson, a comedy writer who put together the concert, was asked about working Pynchon, he replied:

I knew it would be difficult to get the writers to submit pieces for the program – they’re a busy bunch of folks – so I thought I’d improve my odds by getting a foreword from someone so unlikely that it’d capture the staff’s interest. I dug up the email of Thomas Pynchon’s wife, who’s a literary agent, and pitched her the idea. To my surprise and delight, it all worked out. Pynchon actually faxed in that piece. He came into the office one day, too, and stayed for a taping. I had a brief conversation with him about Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

And now… Here it is in all its glory!

The Evolution of the Daily Show — by Thomas Pynchon*

Actually, it all began with Death to Smoochy. The green light had been given to proceed with Death to Smoochy 2 on the strength of the first weekend grosses, as well as some unexpected merchandising feedback. It seemed that “Smoochy the Rhino” items weren’t selling nearly as well as those based on the evil network executive “Marion Frank Stokes,” played by Jon Stewart. This applied across the spectrum — mouse pads, lunchboxes, T-shirts, McDonald’s tie-ins (the Happy Meal being briefly eclipsed by the Anxious Meal, served in a takeout bag bearing Mr. Stewart’s likeness) — you name it. Kids started showing up at school in business suits and wearing the same peculiar fringe haircut as the Stokes character, provoking peer commentary and vice-principalistic perplexity.

In the course of reviewing star availability for DTS2, however, one of the producers suddenly recalled that toward the end of the first picture it was strongly implied that “Frank Stokes” had been done away with in a violent manner, rendering perhaps problematic his appearance in Part Two. Options such as resurrection, identical twins, and the extensive use of flashbacks were entertained and discarded. Meanwhile the Frank Stokes Armani Edition action figure was outselling G.I Joe, Darth Vader, and eventually even Barbie herself. Focus groups began to hint at the possibility of a class action suit if “M.F.S.”, as he had come to be known, did not appear in Death to Smoochy 2.

Well. Talk about dilemmas! Script development sessions became notable for long and gloomy silences, until one day, down at the far end of some all-but-forgotten conference table, a screenwriter, just back from a weekend seminar in Canoga Park entitled “Disrespect — Make It Work For You,” tentatively raised his hand.

“Yes, I forget your name, you had your hand up?”

“Let’s say that in life, in his career as a network slimebag, Frank Stokes accumulated a huge pile of truly horrible karma. So next time around, to work off this karmic debt, he gets to expose, mock, ridicule and otherwise invite contempt for the very behavior he was once guilty of in his former life. Lying, corruption, the abuse of power, so forth.”

“Hmm. If we could pitch that in shorter sentences…”

So it came about that, though the studio still owned the character of Frank Stokes, the premise of Jon Stewart as a reincarnated evildoer persisted somehow as a negotiable script element, passing from one corporate entity to another, undergoing mutation at each step, till it finally ended up at Comedy Central, Where it was welcomed with a scream of recognition.

And one thing led to another…

*Seriously, Thomas Pynchon actually wrote this.

NOTE: You can download a PDF of the entire program here.

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About ThomasPynchon.com

ThomasPynchon.com (formerly the HyperArts Pynchon Pages) came online in 1997. With the publication of Against the Day in 2007, the alphabetical guides to Pynchon's novels were migrated to the Pynchon Wikis.

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