Some pictures..

...I'm selling at the moment on ebay - culled from R's portfolio... all except one which is mine but no prizes for guessing which.

Recent Accquisions

Rolfe, Frederick. Amico Di Sandro. A Fragment of a Novel Privately Printed, 1951. Edition limited to 150 numbered copies.

This is a rather rare piece of Corvine writing. A fragment of a novel, never finished. I haven't had time to read it yet! This copy even has its original tissue paper cover. This is one of the advantages of becoming a Corvine publisher myself. This book was sent to me as a 'spare' by a collector as credit against future publications. Retail value £200-£250 :-)

Green, Leonard. Dream Comrades and Other Prose Sketches. Blackwell, Oxford, 1918.

A curious book. Much has been made of Uranian poets (see Timothy D'Arch Smith's Love in Earnest) but this is a book of essentially Uranian prose. Green writes little vignette stories which attempt to meld together the beauties of God, Gloucestershire and Adolescent Boys - with a fair smattering of pagan romanticism thrown in for good measure. This may well form the basis for one of my next publications. A bargain I think on ebay for £60 - retails at about £200.

Adair, Gilbert. The Holy Innocents. Heinemann, London, 1988.

A book about which I have already said far too much below. I won't bore you. £15 The Petersfield Bookshop - actual retail value somewhere in the region of £150. They don't often make mistakes like that!

Constantine, Storm. Crown Of Silence. Gollancz, London, 2000.

Finally completed my collection of the first editions of the Magravandian Trilogy by Constantine. This is the second volume in a really taut, complex fantasy drama which does so much more than most of the genre. And what's more, it's a signed copy. The first and third books I have are not signed but I'm rather proud of the my other Constantine trilogy of HB firsts, the Wreaththlu books, two of which are also signed. This one bought on ebay for £4.99

Just because...

...looking at him makes me feel so much better! Another quick voyeuristic moment with Trent Ford...

News Update

Well, I thought it was going to be a quiet weekend, except that on Good Friday R had to call an ambulance after a recurrance of that pain I mentioned before and then some. A weekend between hospital sheets later - and apparently I have gallstones: extremely painful but no life threatening. So now we wait to see when I can get an appointment for surgery to have my gall bladder removed - ouch!
In other news, this is my first blog post from home. Up till now I have been running my business and my internet life from a small room in a friend's house, using her internet connection and so on but yesterday the cables all joined up across the land to bring internet connectivity to my little flat so from now on I'm officially working from home. I'm hoping this will see a return to more regular posts here but we shall see...
There's exciting news, but as yet announcable, on the publications front and I think within the next month or so we may see a flourishing of new booklets and books, including a more into more recent 'gay-interest' work as well. Much looking forward to that.

Another Drawing

For those who liked the last one - and thanks for your comments and emails! Voila! a seond pencil sketch of the same model.

Louis Garell, incest, film and books.

My strange quirk for enjoying the eroticism of the incestuous... I've told the story in some previous notes of Gilbert Adair and his book, 'The Holy Innocents' which transmuted over time into a second book and a Bertolucci film 'The Dreamers'. The Book collector in me wanted the first edition of 'The Holy Innocents' - not least because, as the author's disliked first version of the story, it is never likely to be reprinted. But I resigned myself when I discovered that it retails for £100-£250. There is an American and a UK first edition, both published 1988, the US by Putnam, the UK by Heinemann. And I found one! The best local bookshop to me had a UK first - unavailable on the internet for less than £150 and they had it marked at £15. So for ten times less than any other copy I now have a UK first edition of 'The Holy Innocents'

The film of 'The Dreamers' features, of course, the lovely Michael Pitt but also a highly-charged, smouldering, gallic actor called Louis Garrel. 'The Holy Innocents' is genealogically related - as are a surprising number of books - to Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles' - there is the same enclosed, suffocating atmosphere in which brother, sister and third party play a 'game' which leads deeper and deeper into the darker corners of eroticism and adolescent power-play. The main differences between 'The Holy Innocents' and 'The Dreamers' are that the later version takes away most of the homoerotic charge between the two male characters as well as the 'actual' sexual relationship between the twins.

Then I discover that, at least in choosing his roles, Garell too has a penchant for incest. 'Ma Mere' is a film based on a book/novella of the same name by Georges Bataille in which a 17 year old boy, following the death of his adulterous father, finds himself for the first time as an 'adult' spending a lot of time with his mother and her coterie of femmes fatales. Again, the suffocating atmosphere, again the erotic charge (and again plenty of Garrel's dick on screen!) and it all leads in one direction... If you need any encouragement to go rent the film then these are a few of the Joe Public reviews from Amazon: "this film is debasing filth", "left feeling disgusted and faintly nauseous" and "the most disturbing film I have ever seen" -well it would make me want to see it!

[All pictures are screen shots from Me Mere]

Plenty more of Garrel here.