@las Press

[Gray House]

What Atlas Press books do you own? My Atlas collection consists of:

The Head of Vitus Bering, by Konrad Bayer. Highly experimental, and successfully so. Strangely effective, but difficult to describe how. This book led me to buy...

Selected Works of Konrad Bayer. I have not yet read all these selections, but those I have read had the same appeal as The Head of Vitus Bering, and led me to buy...

The Sixth Sense, by Konrad Bayer. I have not read this one yet.

Liberty or Love!, by Robert Desnos. Rich in surrealistic imagery, in flowing, stream-of-consciousness prose.

The Man of Jasmine, by Unica Zürn. A well written autobiographical surrealist account of mental illness.

Malpertuis, by Jean Ray. Having read two of Jean Ray's short stories, I expect I will not be disappointed when I get to this.

Black Letters Unleashed - 300 Years of Enthused Writing in German. An interesting anthology.

[Jeff Coleman]

I'll play.

Atlas Press books I own:

The Doll by Hans Bellmer.

Adventures in Pataphysics by Alfred Jarry

Days & Nights by Alfred Jarry

Aurora by Michael Leiris

The Man of Jasmine by Unica Zurn.

The House of Illnesses by Unica Zurn.

Those are the ones I saw after quickly looking over my shelves, anyway. I haven't read any of them yet. For the last decade I've mostly read books from the library.

There are about as many Atlas Press titles that I've checked out from the library and read, but I can only remember a couple at the moment; Malpertuis by Jean Ray and The Night of Lead by Hans Henny Jahnn. I read Malpertuis a few years ago. I remember thinking it was a great gothic novel, but I couldn't remember the plot, even shortly after I finished reading it. I found a movie based on it (with Orson Welles!) a while after I read the book, which helped clear things up, somewhat. I read 'The Night of Lead' last month, and I highly, highly recommend it if you can find it. I was strangely elated after reading it. It's out of print, but I was able to read it through an interlibrary loan. I've head that it is an excerpt from a longer work, but the excerpt works quite well by itself. I'd love to read the entire thing. It reminded me quite a bit of Ligotti.

I'm glad you started this thread, because it reminded me that I've been meaning to try to track down and read some more Atlas Press books. I have a copy of Albert Ehrenstein's 'Tubutsch' out from the library right now. I've been meaning to read it for years. Karl Kraus said of Ehrenstein “He leaves behind him an agreeable stench of brimstone when he walks by.”

I also put holds on both of the Konrad Bayer books you mentioned + The Feverhead by Wolfgang Bauer & The Castle of Communion by Bernard Noel. All of which sound good.

[Sand]

When Atlas started, I subscribed to their series of pamphlets called The Printed Head. There were 12 a year (I think) and a slipcase at the end to put them in. It was a great pleasure to get some strange and obscure work through the post roughly monthly like this. And the very format of the pamphlets - well designed, hand crafted but still with a slight sense of the enthusiastic amateur about them, just added to the obscure allure. The works chosen didn't all appeal but there were certainly enough rare discoveries to make it worthwhile. Foolishly, I did not keep all these or the slipcases, but the ones I remember particularly liking were the prose poems by St Pol Roux, Jacques Rigout's Dada fantasy Lord Patchogue, and I agree about the delights of Robert Desnos. If I remember rightly, the introduction to the H H Jahnn one is particularly appealing because it describes the author's bookstrewn study and his habit of collecting old language books, always searching for new words and hidden meanings [edit - no, this wasn't the Jahnn, it was The Quest for Dr. U by H C Artmann]

[Siderealpress]

Hi all,

for what it is worth I own the Zurn works, the big book on the Viennese Aktionists (Schwarzkogler is VERY odd indeed- but in a brilliant way), Nitsches' 'Fall of Jerusalem', the Gunter Brus printed head volume plus the Atlas anthologies, and Conrad Beyer.

If I had to pick a book for someone new to the Press I would pick 'Black Letters Unleashed'; Subtitled '300 years of enthused writing from Germany' which is self explanatory. Its a mix of big names (Schwitters, Meyrink, Marx(!), Sacher-Masoch) and 'artists and weirdos' a lot unkown to me but including Trakl, Jahnn, Zurn and Brus. I like what is termed 'Art Brut', its an area of that catch-all term 'outsider art' so was very happy to read Adolf Wolfli (one of the big names of the genre) on New York. Needless to say he never visited New York- he spent most of his life in a cell.

As an art aside, Schwitters is mentioned somewhere else on this site. He lived outside Newcastle, and the Hatton Gallery has a section of his final Merz building which was removed from his house after his death. Its on permenant display there and is part of my mini tour of the city when we receive guests...

REGARDS!

J

[Jeff Coleman]

@Siderealpress,

This is a bit off topic, but when you mentioned Schwarzkogler & the Viennese Aktionists book, it reminded me to look at Martin Bladh's blog, he's a sort of modern Aktionist, and this is his latest post:

http://martinbladh-vf.blogspot.com/2...t-stories.html

... which features a portrait of Georg Trakl, among others.

Thanks to you & Sand for mentioning interesting sounding books that I'm going to look for.

[Sand]

The tour J mentions includes a visit to a vampire rabbit.

[Derek]

A quick survey of my shelves reveals:

Adventures in 'Pataphysics - Alfed Jarry

Oulipo Laboratory - Headwrecking wordplay and conceits from the likes of Calvino et al.

Marcel Duchamp: A Life in Pictures - Duchamp's life retold in the style of the Ladybird books.

The Golden Bomb: Phantastic German Expressionist Stories - Anthology of original translations by Malcolm Green. Ehrenstein, Meyrink, through to Ball and Schwitters with many a wierd turning from the beaten track in between. Recommended.

[Gray House]

Thanks for all the recommendations. I will be looking into many of them.

For anyone unfamiliar with Atlas, here is their website: Atlas Press - Publisher of Books - 150 Years of the Anti-tradition

Unfortunately, some of their earlier books seem to be somewhat scarce. I'm glad I bought the Desnos book when I did.

[Siderealpress]

Hi all, looking on the shelves I can scarcely believe that I forgot to mention the 'Book of Masks' which is an excellent survey of symbolist and decadent writings from the 1890s. Its a world away from 'Black Letters...' and highly recommended. Add it to the list! J

[Jeff Coleman]

Gray House,

For the out of print Atlas stuff, and rare books in general, it's always worth a try to put in an interlibrary loan request at your local library. I was resigned to not being able to read the Jahnn and Ehrenstein books until it occurred to me to do that. I don't know how useful this advice is if you live outside of the US, though.