The BURIED Book Club discussion

Among those he published were Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Heinrich Boll, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, Tom Mallin, Hubert Selby and William Burroughs. His covers were awful, the binding was worse, but who else in Britain would have published those authors?

Thanks for the link Enrique. The books listed under the Calder heading are a bit atypical of Calder's publications, but Alma Classics have published a lot of the old Calder books in very attractive editions, including books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who I forgot to mention above.

Is there any chance of seeing a chronology of Calder publications, I wonder? I'm pretty thoroughly sold on much of their 60s catalog that i've run across, and I bet this would be an excellent source of further unburyings.

Now Nate, you make me wish I had kept all of the Calder catalogues I used to have. Every year I used to send for the latest and invariably the highlight was reading the very grumpy introductions by J. C. who was always lamenting the dearth of serious readers and the many ways in which stupidity was taking hold in society. Unfortunately I can't find a complete list of the books Calder published on any website.

Ah, too bad. I bet those would have been a treasure.

Thanks to Declan I took special notice of "John Calder" on the spine of an otherwise unremarkable small red book. It turns out to be Samizdat; twice BURIED, once Soviet style (nearly BURNED perhaps) and once again Anglo-style. Nobody: Or, the Disgospel According to Maria Dementnaya = Nikto: A Samizdat Text. I'll get a proper BURIED Book entry made up in the near future, along with its reading.

I'm glad I was of some help in bringing that one to your attention Nathan, although I have to confess that I never heard of the book which is odd because a Russian novel on the Calder list would have interested me very much. Calder does write about how the book came to his attention in Pursuit. He was told about it by the translator of Russian literature, April FitzLyon. "It did not do very well", he says, "but I sold it to an American religious publisher". Bokov, it seems, was 'white' instead of 'red'.