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  In Berkeley, Cody’s Books was establishing itself as a crucial institutional node in this network. Like City Lights in San Francisco, it specialized in paperback books, and its customer base was the faculty and students at UC Berkeley. In an account of his “Evergreen Salute” printed in Publishers Weekly on May 19, 1958, Cody claims he had “felt for some time that Evergreen Books make a special appeal to the University public served by the bookstore.” For three weeks, Cody devoted his entire front-window display to promoting Evergreen Books, which Grove had provided him on consignment. And he emphasizes that his discussions with his customers not only about Evergreen and Grove but also about the book industry more generally were a crucial component of the campaign. Thus, he notes that “talk of what Grove was doing in the Evergreen Series led customers to discussion of other paperback lines and to a discussion of the ‘revolution’ in publishing brought about by paperbacks.” He also notes that “new respect was gained for the store which had made the effort to organize a special promotion.” Local paperback booksellers such as Cody’s, which were cropping up in college towns across the country, became key nodes in Grove’s countercultural network.57

  Cody’s display features the Evergreen colophon as a sort of visual pun, emphasizing its similarity to an arrow pointing downward, thereby directing the eye to the titles on whose covers and bindings it prominently appears (Figure 3). But the colophon itself is only one component of the visual language Grove deployed to generate brand identity and loyalty. As the prominent photos of Kerouac and Beckett affirm, Grove put its identifiably experimental stable of authors in the service of its brand recognition. Photos of both Beckett and Kerouac are featured prominently in many of Grove’s advertisements over the course of the 1960s, as are images of Burroughs, Ionesco, Genet, and others. Unlike larger publishers, who worked to make their catalogs comprehensive, Grove acquired its authors almost exclusively from the avantgarde and the underground, providing a distinctive identity for its colophon that increasingly aligned it with the radical stirrings of the incipient student movement.

  Figure 3. Cody’s Books display in Berkeley (1958). (Photographer unknown; GPC)

  Kuhlman frequently incorporated the Evergreen colophon into his designs for this line. Thus, the cover for The Subterraneans, prominently displayed in the Cody’s salute, plays on the Bay Area location of the narrative with a recognizable silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge but then renders that silhouette as an abstract formal experiment in shape and color, distorting its symmetry and altering its hue. The off-balance green shades that bisect the bridge against the black background contrast with and foreground the blue lettering for the word by and the colophon that takes the place of the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner, obliquely reminding us of the mediating role of the publisher in the production of the text (Figure 4). The colophon is similarly situated in Kuhlman’s cover for Beckett’s The Unnamable, which reflects the isolation of the novel’s narrator with a central orange circle surrounded by concentric turquoise lines of uneven thickness against a black background (Figure 5). By the early 1960s, Kuhlman’s style had become so recognizable that readers could identify a Grove Press book by its cover.

  Figure 4. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen edition of

  The Subterraneans (1958).

  Figure 5. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen edition of

  The Unnamable (1958).

  The Quality Paperback Generation

  Grove organized its spring 1958 catalog around its new line of Evergreen Originals, announcing that

  though Grove Press has done some original publishing in paperback format before—most of Samuel Beckett’s works first came to the attention of the American public in original evergreen paperback editions—the launching of the new Spring list of original evergreens represents a new emphasis on original books in “quality” paperbacks … Up to now the emphasis in the “quality” paperback field has been on reprints of old works. We at Grove Press feel the time has come for a major effort to make new works of a high level available to a larger audience through the lower prices afforded by paper covers.58

  Grove launched the imprint as an experiment analogous to the avantgarde literature in its rapidly expanding catalog. In a 1958 circular to booksellers, boldly headed “An Experiment,” Grove notes the industry’s concern “over the shrinking market for new, original fiction” and attributes this shrinkage to “the wide gap between the prices of original hardbound fiction and paperback reprints.” The circular proposes that the imprint will “bridge that gap” and requests that booksellers “display these books, talk about them, and report them to your local bestseller lists.” The first of four titles listed in the circular is Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which in the wake of the publication of On the Road had become a bestseller. A mere six months later, Grove ran an ad in the New York Times Book Review trumpeting its Evergreen Originals imprint as “an experiment in book publishing that worked!,” listing The Subterraneans’ “best sellerdom” as proof of success and offering new titles by Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet as the latest additions to the line.59

  By 1962, the New York Times, in a special section of the Book Review dedicated to paperbacks, confirmed that the “quality” paperback revolution had, indeed, been a success: “Created only eight years ago to meet the curricular and extracurricular needs of academic communities, its popularity is now so widespread that it is being sold in virtually all the nation’s 1,700 bookshops.”60 In that same year, Rosset returned to the Bay Area to speak in a lecture series, “The Popular Arts in American Culture,” through the UC Berkeley extension. In his speech, he celebrates the paperback book for making reading “more popular, more voluntary, less dutiful” and specifies that the quality paperback has “done much to revitalize” bookstores, further noting that “many stores have opened just for them and new people trained in the craft of book selling. Certainly San Francisco and Berkeley are proof positive of these facts.”61

  The Evergreen Review in these early years was something of a “quality paperback” itself. It was identical in size and format, featured the same colophon, and was listed in Grove’s catalogs along with its books. According to Rosset, “We just melted that right into our paperback line … We just slipped the magazine in as a book. To get distribution.”62 In a rare interview, Allen affirms that “we really thought of Evergreen Review in terms of a paperback … a quality paperback.”63 Initially, it featured no advertisements, though it did list the titles in the Evergreen imprint on both flyleaves, which by the second number exceeded one hundred, including plays by Beckett, Ionesco, Brecht, and Genet; Beckett’s trilogy; Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double; Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur; and Olson’s Call Me Ishmael. With the sixth issue, it began to include advertisements, focusing most prominently on other journals, such as the Chicago Review and the Partisan Review; other publishers, including many university presses; and numerous book clubs, including Marboro and the Readers’ Subscription.

  The Readers’ Subscription, founded by Lionel Trilling, W. H. Auden, and Jacques Barzun in 1951 “to create an audience for books that the other clubs considered to be too far above the public taste,” became a particularly important early outlet for Grove.64 Reaching a mostly university-based membership of around forty thousand, the club was plagued by financial troubles and was sold off in 1963. Nevertheless, its influence exceeded its modest numbers; Marshall Best, writing for Daedalus in 1963, attested to the success of such book clubs, “which have not only increased the reading of better-than-average books among the existing audience, but also have brought to light a whole new public of sizable dimensions.”65 Grove made sure that this new public had access to the latest in contemporary avantgarde literature and drama, providing its members with an opportunity to join the underground.

  This new public was mostly young and mostly in college. Subsidized by the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), Americans entered college in unpreced
ented numbers in the postwar years. According to Louis Menand, undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 500 percent between 1945 and 1975, and graduate enrollment increased by an astonishing 900 percent. 66 Although the GI Bill has tended to receive more emphasis in the many accounts of this expansion, it was actually, as Menand affirms, the NDEA that “put the Federal Government, for the first time, in the business of subsidizing higher education directly.”67 Furthermore, as Menand crucially reminds us, “the strategic rationale for the postwar expansion of American higher education was technological and geopolitical … but the social policy rationale was meritocratic.”68 The NDEA was intended to broaden the talent pool in American colleges and universities, creating a student population that was not only larger but also more diverse than that of preceding generations.

  In The Marketplace of Ideas, the title of Menand’s chapter on this expansion (and the following contraction) is “The Humanities Revolution”; indeed, the humanities grew both in size and in cultural and social significance in the postwar era. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in English increased by more than threefold between 1950 and 1972, while the number of advanced degrees (MAs and PhDs) more than quadrupled.69 Modern languages, which the NDEA specifically targeted, saw comparable increases.70 If the actual number of degrees granted in the humanities remained tiny relative to the size of the general population, the canon of texts and the habits of reading promoted by their recipients disseminated much more widely as the humanistic disciplines took on the mandate of “general education” that was part and parcel of the NDEA program. Furthermore, as Stephen Schryer has recently shown, students and scholars of literature and the humanities in the postwar era increasingly saw themselves as the cultural educators and ideological arbiters of the expanding “new class” of professional elites being educated in American universities.71

  This generation is usually referred to as the baby boomers, but I prefer to follow Kenneth Davis in labeling Grove’s readership the “paperback generation.” As Davis affirms, the “‘boomers’ were the first generation to have paperbacks in the classroom. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they read their classics in soft covers, having been assigned reading lists filled with inexpensive paperbacks that they could own, not borrow.”72 Many of these paperbacks were so-called modern classics, illustrating and effecting the canonization of modernism in postwar American universities. For Fredric Jameson, this canonization was explicitly ideological, representing a cultural containment and domestication of high modernism’s subversive energies into an ideal of aesthetic autonomy. However, as Jameson concedes, “The affirmation of the autonomy of the aesthetic is a contradictory one,” and he offers Samuel Beckett as illustrating the late modernist exposure of “the failure of autonomy to go all the way and fulfill its aesthetic programme.”73 For Jameson, this is a “fortunate failure,” generating a more accessible form of “middlebrow late modernist literature and culture” whose public “can be identified as the class fraction of college students (and their academic trainers), whose bookshelves, after graduation into ‘real life,’ preserve the souvenirs of this historically distinctive consumption which the surviving high modernist aesthetes and intellectuals have baptized as the canon.”74

  If such souvenirs survive as reminders of 1960s syllabi, these paperbacks were, during the 1960s themselves, something more. On the one hand, individual ownership was only one component of this generation’s relationship to print, and in some ways a misleading one, since paperbacks were frequently shared as a form of collective property. On the other hand, assigned reading lists were only one delivery system whereby these books got into the hands of college students, whose loyalty to Grove Press extended into their “real life” outside the classroom. Indeed, the paperback generation was the last generation to identify itself by what it read; Grove Press nurtured a whole common culture of revolutionary reading in the 1960s. Here I follow Philip Beidler, who, in Scriptures for a Generation, affirms that the 1960s “was truly the last great moment of reading and writing in the West by an identifiable mass-cultural constituency, a moment of print-apocalypse, so to speak: materially, a true culmination of print production and distribution intersected with unprecedented consumer affluence and appetite; and spiritually, the last great moment of America’s own faith in the Word as its basic article of political and educational reliance.”75 If Beidler’s tone is a bit breathless here, he nevertheless indicates the degree to which private reading and public life were powerfully stitched together in the 1960s; to be in the Movement meant, at least partly, to be reading certain books, and many, if not most, of those books were published by Grove Press.

  In 1961, Grove launched a new imprint, Black Cat (named after a nightclub in Frankfurt), calling it “the new massmarket line with the liveliest look in the field.”76 Smaller in format and lower in price than the Evergreen Originals, the Black Cat imprint was nevertheless also promoted as a “quality” line, featuring titles by the same authors and marketed prominently to colleges and universities. With these two imprints, Grove was able to establish itself, according to a 1962 article in Paperback Trade News, as “the largest publisher of original paperbacks in the nation.”77 But Grove, as we have seen, was already much more than this. It had by 1962 become the communications center for the emergent counterculture. Any writers or readers who felt marginalized by the mainstream came to feel that Grove Press represented their aesthetic tastes, social sensibilities, and political convictions. In the 1960s, the Grove colophon meant more than just avantgarde quality paperbacks; it was a signifier of countercultural sympathies, increasingly drawing radical authors, readers, translators, professors, lawyers, and activists into its expanding network.

  Grove achieved this significance through focusing on a series of cultural and generic niches. Counterculture Colophon is therefore organized according to the categories in the company’s catalog. Thus, each of the following chapters covers similar chronological ground, with the exception of the last chapter, which focuses on the feminist occupation of the press in 1970 and its consequent decline in the following decade. Structurally speaking, this book is recursive, with each chapter spiraling back through the 1960s along the lines mapped out by the niches in which Grove developed a name for itself. Together, they document the creation of a countercultural canon and the achievement of a cultural revolution.

  The New World Literature

  In the summer of 1949, at the Goethe Convocation in Aspen, Colorado, organized by University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder proclaimed that Goethe, in predicting in 1827 that an epoch of world literature was at hand, had “spoke[n] too soon.” Wilder announced that “it is now during the second quarter of the twentieth century that we are aware of the appearance of a literature which assumes that the world is an indivisible unit.”1 Wilder’s examples of this world literature—T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound—are predictably modernist, and the location and occasion of his speech, a conference in the United States organized by an influential theorist of higher education and proponent of the “Great Books” program, indicate the degree to which high modernism had by 1949 been embraced by the American university, effectively institutionalizing Wilder’s version of Goethe’s vision. Over the next two decades, as the university population expanded exponentially, this revised vision of world literature would come to inform the reading habits and cultural sensibilities of a considerable fraction of the American public.

  Wilder’s modernist elaboration of Goethe’s romantic vision clearly implies a canon of texts based both in a certain idea of aesthetic value and in a certain consciousness of cultural diversity, but David Damrosch has recently reminded us that “world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading.”2 According to Damrosch, the category of world literature simply designates “literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin.”3 Wilder’s modernist definition, as illus
trated by the Grove Press catalog, is the object of my analysis in this chapter, but I rely on Damrosch’s more pragmatic definition for my method of analysis, which helpfully recognizes the importance of publishers, editors, and translators as crucial nodes in the network that enables this category to exist in the first place. Through close alliances with academics and translators across the country, Grove helped popularize a concept of world literature in the late 1950s that centrally informed the political investments of the counterculture in the 1960s.

  Barney Rosset and his team at Grove were, like Wilder, steeped in European modernism, and many of the major writers they made available in the United States—Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet—represented the final stages of the high modernism that had reigned between the wars and whose cultural capital had been Paris. But the political and cultural status of Europe had been transformed by the cataclysms of World War II. Grove’s vision of world literature was also inflected by the decolonization of the European empires and the inception of the American century. From its beginnings, Grove worked to provide an American venue for the literature of the “new nations” rapidly emerging from the old empires, and of the so-called Third World more generally, making available many of the authors who formed the initial core of what later came to be known as postcolonial literature. In this sense, Grove can be understood as a central participant in what Casanova identifies as the third major stage in “the genesis of world literary space,” which is marked by the entry of the new nations into international competition for literary recognition.4 The resulting canon can be formulated as a version of what Mark McGurl calls “high cultural pluralism,” literature that combines modernist formal experimentation with “a rhetorical performance of group membership.”5

  Grove’s embrace of an expanded canon of world literature was enabled by the postwar mandate for cultural exchange elaborated by UNESCO, whose imprimatur appears on many of the texts discussed here. UNESCO’s constitution, adopted in 1945, claims that “the wide diffusion of culture, and the education of humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity of man.” It affirms that “a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.”6 The perceived urgency of this mandate at the inception of the atomic age is well illustrated by Archibald MacLeish’s opening statement at the meeting of the American delegation to the organization’s constituent conference in 1945, which emphasizes “the crucial importance of its success if the civilization of our time is to be saved from annihilation.”7