Minneapolis Center Stage

A number of us have just returned from Minneapolis. There we attended the Preconference of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

The preconference theme was performance in special collections, broadly interpreted—from the refectory use of the earliest printed books to medical texts and the operating theater, to hip-hop archives, to “bibliography in action.”

It was an appropriately lively gathering, and we pay tribute to it here by an eclectic selection of Minneapolis-centric works from the Rare Book Collection: the city as setting for poetic expression, criminal doings, and collective action—all being varieties of performance. We begin with a nice segway from our last blog post, “Sisters Outsider.”

PS615.W67_no.28_cover
Beats Folio PS615 .W67 no. 28, cover art by Alex Katz
Beats Folio PS615 .W67 no. 28, p. 20
Beats Folio PS615 .W67 no. 28, p. 20

Diane di Prima, “Waikiki Room, Minneapolis” in  World, no. 28 (May 1973), mimeographed publication of the famous Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, New York. The Waikiki Room was a drinking/dining establishment located in a succession of Minneapolis hotels. Apparently, it made poet di Prima feel more at home in the Midwest; doesn’t everyone feel more at home in a Tiki room lounge?  St. Mark’s Church was, of course, the ultimate New York poetry performance venue of its era.

Mystery-Detective H921
Mystery-Detective H921

Ellen Hart, Death on a Silver Platter: (A Culinary Mystery) (New York : Fawcett Books, 2003), one in the series of mysteries featuring restaurant reviewer-sleuth Sophie Greenway, set in Minneapolis. The food in the fair city is a real draw: lots of farm to table, no scary servings as pictured on this paperback’s cover. In particular, French Meadow Café represented an outstanding dining act for some of us. And we didn’t feel threatened for one moment. Perhaps these Minneapolis mysteries are in the tradition of Scandinavian crime novels: safe societies longing for the drama of surprising violence.

William F. Dunne and Morris Childs, Permanent Counter-Revolution. The Role of the Trotzkyites in the Minneapolis Strikes (New York: Workers Library, [1934]), no. [8] in a vol. with binder’s title: Communist and Socialist Pamphlets. We all felt the power and plight of workers on Tuesday evening, taking in the exhibitions and film at the Mill City Museum, located in what was once the nation’s largest flour mill. This pamphlet on Depression-era strikes in Minneapolis pits the Communist Party of America against Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party and Trotzkyite leaders. Its card-carrying Communist authors are William F. Dunne, who grew up in Minnesota, and Morris Childs, who later would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Intelligence—in 1987—for his decades of work as an anti-Soviet secret agent. Although Childs was not working for the F.B.I. in 1934, the title of this writing—Permanent Counter-Revolution—ends our Minneapolis production with unexpected retrospective irony. As we’ve come to learn, however, rare books always bring us the unexpected.

HX40 .C6 no. 8
HX40 .C6 no. 8

 

Murder Off Miami

Working with rare books is a sort of detective work. Of course, our puzzles are usually of the bibliographical sort, but there is still the thrill of finding the unexpected. I felt like a detective recently when I came across Murder Off Miami, an unusual mystery novel in the RBC’s Mystery-Detective Collection.

Murder Off Miami
Front cover view of Murder Off Miami / Mystery-Detective W595

In the 1930s, British author Dennis Wheatley teamed up with travel writer and art connoisseur J.G. Links to write a series of radically original “crime dossier novels,” which continue to challenge our definition of the book. The novels take the material form of a police dossier file–complete with the standard tan British police folder, facsimiles of telegrams, police reports, photographs, and physical “evidence,” like a scrap of a bloody curtain or matted hair. Wheatley’s first dossier novel, Murder Off Miami (1936), takes place on a private yacht, where a police officer collects evidence in wake of the apparent suicide of the business magnate, Bolitho Blane. Wheatley introduces a number of unsavory and scandal-ridden suspects to satisfy the sensationalist expectations of the 1930s popular reading audience.

Evidence collected in Murder Off Miami / Mystery-Detective W595

Although the plot is a conventional whodunit, the novel lacks traditional narrative devices and challenges readers to solve the crime from the material evidence provided in the file. Much of the narrative suspense derives from the limitations of physical evidence: photographs that fail to capture key clues in the murder scene, delayed telegrams, and omitted pages. The rise of our own digital culture enables us to see Wheatley’s dossier novels as bibliographic products of their time. The unusual file format emerges out of the rapid proliferation of information and the bureaucratization of crime control in the early twentieth century. Gone, for the moment, is the archetypal Sherlock Holmes and the myth of the eccentric and brilliant detective. Instead, Wheatley’s “detective” is the bureaucrat paging through office files, and the “book” is transformed into an assemblage of material scraps. It is only in the wake of our own information revolution that dossier novels like Murder Off Miami seem to romanticize the office, archive, library and almost limitless unprocessed data.  What makes Wheatley’s detective novel so fascinating is that the files, scraps, invoices, and receipts we still encounter every day are given new meaning and interpretive power . . . if only we know how to read them.