Friday, 4 March 2022

Vispo: The Machine Stops / My new bookshop job / Book: Collage by Herta Wescher

RTomens, 2022

O the irony! I'd chosen some text from EM Forster's The Machine Stops to use in a Vispo piece, carried The Beast outside to the table I work at, started typing and the spacer bar malfunctioned - the machine had stopped! 'O Machine! O Machine!' indeed. 

Get the Brother Deluxe 220. Unlike The Beast it offers little room for manipulating A4-sized paper, so I folded it, I made it have it. I typed, folded, typed, folded it into another shape and so on, seeing the mess emerge, the visible creases from folding - so what? I'm not adverse to some mess. I carried on and you can see the result. 

'She murmured and caressed her Book'. Appropriate, since yesterday was World Book Day, which I knew nothing about until someone mentioned it. I'm now working in the other Black Gull bookshop in East Finchley. On Tues a young man came in and asked if we were doing that half-price book deal for 'World Book Week'. Eh? No we're not! Half-price indeed. And World Book Week? What a chancer. Here I am in my new workplace...



...pretending (huh!) to read William Burroughs' Junkie...for a larf. This shop has a far greater selection than the Camden Market one, which now has new owners. Many good Art books, for instance. I have to show great restraint regarding bringing books home. You know, if I don't, The Cave will look like the bookshop, piles of books everywhere! On Wednesday and new batch came in and amongst them was Collage by Herta Wescher (pub: Harry N Abrams, 1968).




Tipped in plates? Irresistible! It had to be bagged. Tragically, the author, who put a lot of work into this, writing extensively about the history of collage, died before the planned second volume could be created. She and the publisher left the world a damned fine book though.

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