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An Enquiry into the Nature: Aloes Books and the Thomas Pynchon “Piracies”

April 17, 2025 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

Editor’s Note: This article, by Florina Jenkins, originally appeared on the UK Antiquarian Booksellers Association’s website but disappeared after a site re-design. Fortunately, I was able to find it here. I’ve “rescued” this article and another one, as well, so that the information remains available for the curious.

It was seeing one of our American colleagues recently describing them as “a group of bootlegged Thomas Pynchon chapbooks printed in the UK” that brought back to mind a delightful piece of original research carried out by Florina Jenkins for a London Rare Books School essay. To set the record straight, here is a pared-down version of her findings.

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In Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, starting with a pirated paperback, attempts to find and decode the definitive text of a mysterious Jacobean revenge play. Inspired by Oedipa’s labyrinthine investigations, I embarked on a quest in search of Pynchon’s own “pirated editions.” The Clifford Mead bibliography (1989) lists six “unauthorized editions” of early Pynchon stories – elsewhere calling them “piracies” – all published in England between 1976 and 1983. Four of these, the subject of the present piece, were published as pamphlets by Aloes Books, a London-based small independent press.

Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) is one of the most remarkable contemporary American novelists – the “most monstrous talent in the post-war West” according to Time Out. Famously, he shies away from the media, grants no interviews, no photo opportunities, and has made no public appearances beyond the celebrated bag-over-his-head cameos in The Simpsons.

With almost no clues, I started my sleuthing mission in a friend’s bookshop, where I was delighted to find some of the Aloes pamphlets. Originally published in American periodicals between 1959 and 1964, these stories were not readily accessible until the appearance of Pynchon’s Slow Learner in 1984, when the intensely private author accompanied their release with an extraordinary autobiographical introduction. He describes the painful experience of re-reading his earliest writing:

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Aloes Books, Jim Pennington, and the Thomas Pynchon Short Stories

April 16, 2025 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

Editor’s Note: This excellent article was originally published in 2017 as “Licking Up The Fun; Jim Pennington & Aloes Books” on the website “Ink Monkey,” but the site appears to have gone offline. The original article can be found here. I’ve “rescued” this article and another one, as well, so that the information remains available for the curious.

Ink Monkey salutes the genius of iconic publisher Aloes Books, and co-founder Jim Pennington, whose samizdat publications during the 1970s and 1980s included works by Thomas Pynchon, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Patti Smith and Kathy Acker.

In the mid-1960s a revolution took place in British publishing. This venerable industry, which had barely changed or needed to change since the setting up of the great publishing houses in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties suddenly found itself under attack as a number of maverick writers, radicals and alternative entrepreneurs seized the means of production and ushered in the golden age of the small presses.

Today, when much of our literary culture is shaped, defined and digitally delivered to us by large conglomerations, the notion of the literary lone wolf, sitting in a kitchen, or in the back room of a bookshop, or a rural or urban commune or squat and printing a book or magazine at a table is as remote as the 1960s itself.

One such press that set up was Aloes Books, founded by the printer Jim Pennington and two poets from the alternative poetry scene, Allen Fisher and Dique Miller.
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An October Surprise: Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel “Shadow Ticket” – Oct 7, 2025

April 9, 2025 by TPmaster 13 Comments

Twelve years after his previous novel, Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon will be unleashing his ninth novel, Shadow Ticket. The publication date is October 7, 2025. Coming in at 384 pages, it will be a tad longer than his 2009 novel Inherent Vice.

From Penguin Press’s press-release description it seems Shadow Ticket follows what has become a favorite Pynchon plotline: a detective who gets entangled in something much higher than his pay grade, including shady characters, damsels in distress, paranoia, and mystics.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Shadow Ticket is a sort of “placeholder” while he pounds away at a much larger and ambitious tome, but who knows?

Also, like previous Pynchon novels, the description appears to have been written by Pynchon himself (according to the New York Times, this was confirmed by Penguin):

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Hardcover | $30.00
Published by Penguin Press
Oct 07, 2025 | 384 Pages | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9781594206108

Thomas Pynchon – No Return on the V-Mail – Book Week 1964

February 17, 2024 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

I first came across a mention of Dick Schaap‘s 1964 article about Thomas Pynchon’s efforts to remain out of the public eye via a New York Times article “Pynchon’s Letters Nudge His Mask” (4 March 1998), which included a passage about to Pynchon’s success in avoiding the press after the publication of his first novel, V. (1963):

Although Mr. Pynchon apparently eluded those magazine reporters, he had a more difficult time with Dick Schaap, who in 1964 was the city editor of The New York Herald Tribune. Mr. Schaap was writing an article about Mr. Pynchon for Book Week, The Tribune‘s literary supplement. Mr. Pynchon was furious, assuming that the piece ‘will be riddled with the same lies, calumnies and all-around knavish disregard for my privacy’ as previous articles.

When the Herald Tribune article is printed, Mr. Pynchon buys the newspaper in Mexico. It makes him ‘sick, almost homicidal,’ especially the comments about a former girlfriend.

In response to Mr. Pynchon’s remarks, Mr. Schaap, an author and television commentator, said recently, ‘Nothing in my article was intended to be damaging to his life or his work, for which I have total respect.’

Although Mr. Schaap’s reputation rested firmly on his sports writing, here he was digging around to locate the whereabouts of a recently minted literary star. His article, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune‘s “Book Week” magazine, provides an interesting glimpse into Pynchon’s early efforts to remain out of the public eye. A colleague of mine believes that what might have most annoyed Pynchon was the article’s “chatty knowingness.”
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“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

November 25, 2023 by TPmaster 1 Comment

By Ali Dehdarirad

I hope I can steal a minute of your time to draw your attention to the publication of my book on our favorite writer: “From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy. The book brings together my passion for Pynchon’s work and my interest in urban and regional studies, dating back to graduate school. Ever since I came across The Crying of Lot 49, I’ve been fascinated by Pynchon’s intriguing fiction, and it is my hope that this book makes a useful contribution to Pynchon studies and the Pynchon community. It is available as an eBook (open access format) on the website of Sapienza University Press. The following is some background on how I came to write my new book. —Ali Dehdarirad

In “the City Region” with Pynchon

Let me start by sharing some bits of my “Pynchon experience.” I gave The Crying of Lot 49 as a gift to my wife eight years ago, but she hasn’t finished it yet. I think somewhere around chapter three she said something like “that’s enough.” As odd as it might sound, I myself never got to the end of the Italian translation either. On second thoughts, I’ve never read any Pynchon book in Italian because I believe no translation could ever do justice to the complexity and depth of his fiction. My first encounter with Lot 49 is abundant proof of this. I remember reading the first pages of the novel as an undergrad and wondering, What the hell is going on? But it was all exciting. Lot 49 gave me that rush of adrenaline you feel when reading a novel that offers all you need to sit down for long hours and not wanting to leave the book unless the Grim Reaper knocks on your door. Thus began my labor of love with Pynchon, as I stood with Oedipa “in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible” (CL, 1). By the time I got to the end of the book, I didn’t want it to finish, as if I had to “keep it bouncing” (CL, 112). Though the novel ended there (or perhaps it never did), it opened up a fresh horizon, enticing me to read Pynchon’s œuvre.

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Covering Planetary Pynchon – Tore Rye Andersen

September 7, 2023 by Tore Rye Andersen 1 Comment

by Tore Rye Andersen

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Illustration: Marc Getter

The Pynchon Wiki features a great little article by Linda Getter on her husband Marc Getter, the artist behind the striking dust-jacket of the first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. According to Linda, Marc “loved the idea of a single image being responsible for communicating the essence of a book.” This is a lot to ask of a cover illustration, especially when the book it adorns is as complex as Gravity’s Rainbow, where rockets, dodoes, and pigs intermingle, and where excruciatingly beautiful landscape descriptions and vulgar sex scenes appear side by side with cartoonish tales of the future and pointed political satire. Even though it can be discussed whether Getter’s image communicates the essence of Pynchon’s masterpiece, the cover is certainly iconic. The vibrant colors (which are notoriously prone to fading) make the jacket pop, and the three-dimensional blue letters of the title and the sharp black silhouette of the London townhouses form an arresting contrast to the soft, airbrushed orange and yellow sky.

I recently published the monograph Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book is in many ways a life’s work, a summation of thirty years of deep fascination with and research on Pynchon’s work. As part of this fascination, I have written quite a few articles throughout the years on the paratexts of Pynchon’s novels, including analyses of the covers of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Inherent Vice. While the paratextual dimension is not central to my new book, my interest in book design made the task of choosing just the right cover image for my book a daunting one.

Briefly told, my book argues that Pynchon’s three largest novels — Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day — can profitably be read as a trilogy, or one large megatext, which presents a coherent world-historical account of how the emergence and global spread of European modernity and resultant phenomena such as industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism have threatened and often eradicated alternative worldviews, peoples, and other lifeforms, all with disastrous consequences for the planet. In other words, Pynchon’s global novels show how the rise of modernity led to the current age of the Anthropocene.
[Read more…]

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	On the 1975 first edition of the French translation of the novel (incongruously titled Rainbow), the anonymous row of townhouses has been replaced with a more recognizable skyline that includes St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge.

Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Sample)

February 22, 2023 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

Luc Herman and John M. Krafft

The following list of small stylistic and substantive differences between the 1961 typescript draft of Pynchon’s V. (held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin) and the published novel (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1963) was originally intended as an appendix to our Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2023). It is only a sample of Pynchon’s many revisions, but we hope it may satisfy the curiosity of some readers and pique that of others.

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Diode

February 1, 2023 by Karen Hudes

Books are notorious for their outsized influence on young minds. For me, The Crying of Lot 49 and The Sheltering Sky acted as catalysts for a transformative state I experienced during college in the early 1990s. You don’t need to have read them to follow this story, though a few of their plot points are revealed.

[View/Print the PDF]

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Estación. Ida y vuelta, by Rosa Chacel, was a novel I found in a bookstore in Seville. “Ida y vuelta” means a roundtrip ticket, and it’s what you ask for at the station when the teller says, “Dime.” (“Tell me.”)

I adopted some of the Spanish directness that spring, in the way I ordered a glass of beer or described a bar covered in patterned tiles (“Qué alucinante!”). Back in high school, a friend complained I always said a movie was “good,” instead of “great” or “amazing.” No longer!

When my older brother and sister flew in to visit, they were impressed with the directions I gave the cab driver. “You do better in Spanish than English,” my brother said, and it made me a little sad about returning.

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I walked home from class over the river, passing the orange trees, eating plump green olives from a newspaper cone. The courses we took, despite being in Spanish, had a breezy, forgiving air.

It had been a long time since I’d really felt at ease with a friend. But I had a good friend there. I admired her—she could talk to anyone, even about soccer with strangers on the bus. But I also really trusted her. She listened, and she was curious about obscure topics, and just made everyone comfortable. That may have been all I needed.

The only real pressure as summer approached, in 1993, was to come up with a subject for my senior thesis by the fall. After reading The Sheltering Sky, I began thinking about female characters following signs to—where? And by the end, their realities disintegrating.

I’d read The Crying of Lot 49 twice before, and saw some parallels between the two books. Still I didn’t know how I’d fill 100 pages. I could probably fit what I had to say onto five. The 17th-century poet Basho said everything in three lines.

A still pond

A frog jumps in

The sound of water

Earlier in college, a group of us played a surrealist game, a variation on exquisite corpse. You were handed a piece of paper with a sentence written at the top, then wrote the opposite of that sentence below it, folded the paper down so only your sentence could be seen, and passed it to the next person. After the papers went all around the circle we unfolded them and read them aloud. The ending of the last line I remember: “when I walk on your mirrored ceiling.”

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Ray Roberts: Editor – and Collector – of Thomas Pynchon

May 7, 2022 by TPmaster 5 Comments

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.”

Candida Donadio — The Agent Who Discovered Thomas Pynchon

March 7, 2022 by Karen Hudes 6 Comments

Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio

by Karen Hudes

This profile first appeared in Tin House (Volume 6, Number 4), Summer 2005.

Candida Donadio was the most powerful, gifted, and beloved literary agent of her generation. She was the sixties maverick who discovered Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and William Gaddis. Her list of clients glittered with such writers as Mario Puzo, Robert Stone, and John Cheever.

“She had an unerring instinct for offbeat talent,” says Robert Gottlieb, the former editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, and the editor of Catch-22 — the book that made the careers of Heller, Donadio, and himself.

This luminary of the publishing world possessed not only an eye for genius, but also magnetism and warmth. “If she acknowledged your existence, it was like you were knighted,” says Juris Jurjevics, the publisher of Soho Press who was married to one of Donadio’s clients, the late Laurie Colwin.

Donadio was born on October 22, 1929 — a date that may or may not have factored into the naming of Catch-22, depending on whom you believe. Her lovely, Pynchonesque name (pronounced “CAN-dida,” meaning white or pure) made news beyond the literary scene in 1998 when it appeared in a New York Times article regarding a donation to the Pierpont Morgan Library — a collection of more than 120 letters from Pynchon to Donadio, which she had sold to a private collector in 1984. Pynchon’s lawyer took immediate action, ensuring that the letters not be made public until the author’s death.

Donadio’s sale of the letters came in the aftermath of a messy professional separation between her and Pynchon, and may speak to the volatility of her character.

“People tell a lot of contradictory stories about Candida, and they’re all true,” says Neil Olson, who began as her assistant in 1987 and is now the head of the agency Donadio & Olson. “I think her true nature really was a shy, self-doubting, very smart, very sharp person who was capable of having these operatic explosions into this figure who carried on and pulled her hair and shouted other people down… But these explosions were very seldom directed at anybody, they were just going on inside of her.”

Donadio was short and round, wearing her black hair in a severe bun. Most distinctive were her beautiful, dark, and deeply expressive brown eyes.

“She looked like a creature from a Roman fresco,” says Robert Stone, her client for more than thirty years.

By numerous accounts, Donadio could be frank and forthright, as well as an embellisher of tales. She had a rich, low voice and bawdy sense of humor, flavoring her conversation with both Yiddish slang and Sicilian hand gestures. Yet she was intensely private and, like Pynchon, disliked being photographed or interviewed.

Like many of her contemporaries, Donadio was fond of martinis at lunch and scotch after work. She was also a heavy smoker. While deliberating over business, she’d take a few drags off one cigarette before stubbing it out and lighting the next. She could often be seen at the Italian Pavilion, now Michael’s, where she held a regular table.

When Olson arrived, the agency was housed in a brownstone facing the back of the Chelsea Hotel. “You could hear the opera singers, hear people screaming, throwing glass,” he says. There were two cats and a working fireplace, and electricity that always went out. Donadio would toss notes to him from her mezzanine office, letting them waft down into his hands. “Like Juliet,” he says.

Cork Smith at Ticknor & Fields, 1984
Photo courtesy of Sheila Smith and family

“She acted spectacular, but she was modest,” says Corlies “Cork” Smith, Pynchon’s first editor and a longtime friend of Donadio. He adds, “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across.”

Among her many colorful expressions: “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off.” So remembers Harriet Wasserman, who was a secretary at Herb Jaffe Associates in 1958 when she befriended Donadio, and who later worked as her assistant. Wasserman went on to become a high-powered agent herself, representing Saul Bellow, Reynolds Price, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

She recalls her mentor pronouncing her name, “Candida Donadio, a pure gift of God.”
[Read more…]

An Enquiry into the Nature: Aloes Books and the Thomas Pynchon “Piracies”

Aloes Books, Jim Pennington, and the Thomas Pynchon Short Stories

An October Surprise: Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel “Shadow Ticket” – Oct 7, 2025

Thomas Pynchon – No Return on the V-Mail – Book Week 1964

“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

In “the City Region” with Pynchon

Covering Planetary Pynchon – Tore Rye Andersen

Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Sample)

Diode

Ray Roberts: Editor – and Collector – of Thomas Pynchon

Candida Donadio — The Agent Who Discovered Thomas Pynchon

Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio

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