Sentimental Value

After the Garden by Doris Jean Austin, 1987. New American Library 1st ed. designed by Jacqueline Schuman After the Garden is about two imperfect people trying to love each other, so naturally it’s full of tranquil domesticity and high drama and disappointment and sex! It’s about wrong-side-of-the-tracks teenage romance and how it evolves over 20 years; it’s about a Black community in 1950s Jersey City; it’s about class conflict within a population often portrayed as homogenous; it’s about the completely normal, completely problematic contradictions of life: the eroticism of nonconsensual violence, sites of tenderness in seemingly predatory relationships, laughing at the most frightening aspects of people close to you. After the Garden is Austin’s first and only book; she died young of liver cancer. Apparently she was BFF with Terry McMillan and a member of the Harlem Writers Guild. I was so moved by this novel and am kind of shocked that no one has reissued it or made the effort to maintain this author’s legacy. At the same time, the story’s not primarily concerned with racism or familiar scenarios of Black tragedy, sooo….🤧 If you can find this one on eBay or at the library, I enthusiastically encourage you to pick it up. As always, if there’s a book close to your heart that you feel has been unfairly cast into the dustbin of history, recommend it here! . . . . . #bookaesthetics #vintagebooks #bookdesign #bookstagram #firstedition #vintagepaperbacks #bookmood #bookphoto #beautifulbooks #booksbooksbooks #blackauthors #blackliterature #bookcollecting #literaturelover #instabook #rarebooks #womenauthors #vintagebookcover #sentimentalvalue

Mr. Right is Dead by Rona Jaffe, 1965. Simon & Schuster 1st ed. designed by John Alcorn Mr. Right is Dead is a collection of 6 stories about single gals in the Madmen era, “sleek little New York ferrets out for a free night on the town,” for whom the champagne sparkle of the big city has begun to go flat yet who are ill -suited for the suburban split level, 2.5 kids, and husband who canoodles with girls like them. The title story, “Trompe l’Oeil,” and “Rima the Bird Girl” alone are worth the $3.99 on eBay. These stories are sexy and wise and a little sad, but never patronizing. Jaffe’s characters are “armed with the joie de vivre and desperation of the penniless,” which remains the special dignity of girls in their twenties. I think the girl about town novel is on its way back, at least in the indie lit realm—not unrelated to Eve Babitz’s renaissance!—so I don’t see why we’re sleeping on Rona Jaffe. It seems she’s been unfairly classified as mass market trash. Hopefully, as this new cohort of fun and flirty writers publish their books, we start reevaluating the chick lit that inspired them. PS- Yes, it’s the same Rona Jaffe as the Rona Jaffe Foundation Awards for women writers! PPS- John Alcorn is a really groovy, highly-acclaimed designer with a cool career (including designing a few Fellini title sequences). We’ll visit him in the stories 🌈🍭 . . . . . #bookaesthetics #vintagebooks #bookdesign #bookstagram #vintagepaperbacks #bookmood #bookphoto #beautifulbooks #booksbooksbooks #ronajaffe #bookcollecting #literaturelover #instabook #rarebooks #womenauthors #vintagebookcover #chicklit #firstedition #sentimentalvalue

A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell, 1951. Fontana Books ed., 1974, designer unknown. A Question of Upbringing is the first entry of the 12-book (!) series A Dance to the Music of Time. It hardly stands on its own as a novel, and barely anything happens, but I found it dee-lightful nonetheless. It’s very British, very early 20th century, very posh, very boarding school, very naughty lads. I’m actually shocked no publisher has tried to market this for the Downton Abbey crowd. The cover art is apt because the book itself is a sort of still life. It’s basically 200 pages of the narrator meticulously describing everyone he meets and how they interact with each other, although that interaction is mostly happening in a seated position. He extends and examines the seemingly banal moments that change everything, that signal the exit of a close friend or the growing influence of a tertiary figure. Y’know, the nonevents that make up a life. Do I know anyone besides @d.a.salinas who has read this “roman-fleuve” as they say on Wikipedia? I’m gonna go for it. Why aren’t series a thing anymore in literary fiction? Have we learned nothing from Elena Ferrante? Or are we too bored of our own characters to devote that much time to them? 🙈 . . . . . #bookaesthetics #vintagebooks #bookdesign #bookstagram #vintagepaperbacks #bookmood #bookphoto #beautifulbooks #booksbooksbooks #britishliterature #bookcollecting #literaturelover #instabook #rarebooks #vintagebookcover #classicbooks #sentimentalvalue

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, 1983. Bantam Books ed. designed by Jeff Adams, 1984. Pitch Dark is ostensibly about the end of a love affair between a woman and her married boyfriend, but it’s really about how heartbreak shades the most mundane parts of life, how it induces a consistent, low-level paranoia, how it reworks and resurfaces memories, how it’s a kind of apocalypse, how it makes our brains skip like a scratched record, replaying the same gesture or word, how it renders us incapable of handling otherwise quotidian soul-crushing bullshit. (There is so much bureaucracy, it should be discussed alongside The Trial and The Pale King and The Mezzanine… which we might visit later…) I love this insane cover which fashions the protagonist as the hood ornament of a car. It’s a surreal take on what I think is the most beautiful passage in the book, when the protagonist is driving through the dark Irish countryside, feeling “what every vandal must feel as he races through the night: dawning exhilaration... If not real joy, at least a waning trepidation.” I am more of a Speedboat gal, but Pitch Dark is worth reading if only to experience Speedboat’s sharp, meticulous consciousness in its blue period. What other books have a dark moon 🌚 counterpart? Also, thank you to @vjscarpa for helping me better appreciate this and so many other books!💙 . . . . . #bookaesthetics #vintagebooks #bookdesign #bookstagram #vintagepaperbacks #bookmood #bookphoto #beautifulbooks #booksbooksbooks #nyrb #bookcollecting #literaturelover #instabook #rarebooks #womenauthors #sentimentalvalue

Chéri (1920) and The Last of Chéri (1926) by Colette. Trans. by Roger Senhouse. Penguin Books edition designed by Walter Brooks, 1974. FSG edition designed by Jacqueline Schumann, 1976. Chéri and its sequel, The Last of Chéri, are about a May-December romance between Chéri—an unreasonably beautiful brat—and his mother’s friend and colleague, the renowned courtesan Léa. The book is sumptuous, with descriptions of interiors and clothes that give Edith Wharton a run for her money. It begins frothily, with Chéri draped in Léas pearls and breakfasts of strawberries and champagne, but when Chéri marries a more suitable girl, the loss of Léa sends him into a lurid, tragic spiral. I will say, the translation sucks. Most English translations of Colette were done in the 1950s, when Colette was first exported from France, by Antonia White and Roger Senhouse. I’m a fan of White, but Senhouse either translates too literally or over-poetically (“scanty cat-licks with the corner of a towel”). Relatedly, Stephen Frears made a truly terrible adaptation of Chéri in 2009. The book is about contortions of beauty and has a coherent plot, so I really don’t understand how he screwed up so badly. Have you guys fd with translation? I have grandiose delusions of retranslating Chéri but like, do you just go for it? Do you take a class? My even grander delusion is to readapt it; Timothée was born to play Chéri, but he’ll age out before I ever get any clout. 😫 . . . . . #bookaesthetics #vintagebooks #bookdesign #bookstagram #bookmood #bookphoto #beautifulbooks #booksbooksbooks #frenchliterature #literaturelover #instabook #colette #sentimentalvalue

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, 1978. Plume Fiction edition, 1986, designer unknown. To know me is to have endured my breathless recommendation of Dancer from the Dance. It’s a sexy, funny story of two gay men in pre-AIDS New York looking for love in the usual places: the disco, the bathhouses, the beach. Technically, it’s a tragedy, but what endure are its rambunctiousness, tenderness, and the vibrancy of its characters! It’s the only novel I’ve ever read that captures the transcendence of the dance floor, takes seriously its meritocracy of beauty and glamour, and elegizes its particular grace (“The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life”). Whenever I revisit this novel, I feel like it’s reproaching me for reading a book at all: Why sit inside when you could be dancing, when you could be making use of your beauty while you still have it? Truly the most noble lesson a book could hope to impart. If you know others that fall in this genre, drop your recs!

Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman, 1987. Designed by Irving Perkins Associates. I picked up this book because I read some party reportage from the 80s that name-dropped “the novelist Lynne Tillman” among other NYC glitterati, and I’m most interested in books by people who attend fab parties. Indeed, Haunted Houses reads like a precursor to the downtown fiction of today with its detached narration, matter-of-fact observations, and minimalist prose. Normally, this schtick annoys me—as a reader, I’m a maximalist, I want prose dripping in costume jewelry!—but Tillman’s portraits of her three characters in girlhood and young adulthood are so elaborate in psychological detail. She writes like an anesthesiologist, with compulsive precision that induces you to the novel’s uncanny dream state. I wonder if fiction is a good art practice for those who are really invested in an image of reticent cool. Being a novelist requires a certain amount of earnest curiosity about other people and the deranged drama of our interior lives. It’s kind of obvious when aloof prose belies an uneasiness with human volatility and vulnerability and corniness. Don’t get me wrong, I think writers should stop being such losers and attend parties and do uppers, but the writing shouldn’t withhold because the author’s afraid of looking uncool. If you guys can recommend any other books that transcend cool, do; they’re my most treasured literary form!

The Moths and Other Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes, 1995. Designed by Mark Piñón, original art by John Valadez. Not gonna lie, I’ve never made it through this collection (although I’ve tried). Each time I’ve been lured by the promise of the cover art, “La Butterfly” by John Valadez—I wanna read about girls with flyaways and Divine makeup and butterfly tattoos going braless! The characters in Viramontes’s stories don’t reflect the playful defiance of the girl on the cover; they are so suffocated by patriarchy and poverty, there’s no space for fun or pleasure or frivolity. I don’t want to say that marginalized people still experience “small moments of joy;” this has become a kind of condescending catch phrase, imo. What’s more descriptive is the coalescence of delight and grief and anxiety and hopefulness we see in Valadez’s paintings and pastels, how these states overlay and bleed into one another, how they fluctuate moment to moment. Maybe I’m ungenerous, but I find it kind of cynical and market-conscious to exclusively exploit your characters’ pain. Discussing his work, Valadez has said, “We’re all trying to find transcendence.” I think it’s an approach that not only better dignifies your subjects, but makes for more dynamic, complex, truthful art. 2. “Car Show,” 2001, oil 3. “Fatima,” 1984, pastel 4. “Viro Corona”, 2020, acrylic 5. “Dulces,” 1999 6. “Victor Clothing Company Wedding Shop,” 1985, pastel

The Complete Claudine by Colette, 1900-1903. 1976 ed. trans. by Antonia White and designed by Jacqueline Schuman. So much of contemporary lit is neutered, self-serious, and indulgent in all the wrong ways (where have all the editors gone?). But there is such a thing as being indulgent in all the right ways: Give us scandal, give us lighthearted cruelty, give us charisma in character and prose! I present the novels collected in The Complete Claudine: Claudine in School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie*, all naughty, funny, beautiful in image and sentiment. Claudine, our narrator, is a force unleashed: she seduces the teacher’s aid, beats her classmates, swings her cat by the tail, disfigures her cousin, gets all of Paris talking about her, and finds true love with, arguably, a pedophile! There’s such harmony between the novels and Schuman’s line drawings, languorous and suggestive, evocative of girlhood friendships in which sexual and emotional boundaries are drawn and transgressed and redrawn—all the hot, chaotic teen feelings, quoi! *Technically, Retreat from Love is a Claudine novel; dunno why it’s not in this collection, but we’ll address it later (along with Schuman’s other Colette designs; I am in the process of collecting them all, and there’s a lot, thank god).