“I was trying out some things. Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work. I was trying to find a spatial coordinate to go with the music, but my ability to manipulate the spatial and visual side of the medium was so hopelessly amateurist… and the work also had to go through so many hands, that the visual business was only occasionally successful, and most of that was due to the excellent design work of Larry Levy, not me. Too many of my ideas turned out to be only ideas…One problem, for instance, is trying to get the sense (in print) of different lines of language being sounded at the same time, or alternately, or at different speeds or pitches, as in music” (William Gass qtd. in Tom LeClair’s Paris Review interview).
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife was published in 1968 as TriQuarterly Supplement #2, a student/faculty literary journal at Northwestern University that had transformed itself into a national publication in 1964. Four hundred hardcover copies were printed, one hundred of which were signed by Gass. In addition to the hardcover copies, softcover copies were printed and mailed to the journal’s subscribers. Two reprints followed: the first was released by Knopf in 1971; the second was released by Dalkey Archive in 1989. Since the book’s design is integral to the book itself, it is worth something of an extended description (with apologies to the contributors, who offer a variety of descriptions of the book as a book as well). The variations from one edition to the next are largely in their physical properties. Descriptions of those variations follow.
TriQuarterly Supplement #2 (hardcover) (1968)
The original edition has a black cloth cover. On the front, inserted in the upper right corner, is a photograph, approximately 2″x 3″. The photograph features the image of a woman with her arms at her sides, photographed nude, from her neck to a line just above her pubis. The back cover, in an insert in the upper left corner, features a woman, photographed nude from just above her waist to several inches below her buttocks. There is nothing on the spine. Inside each cover are endpapers of Italian paper, reminiscent, as Karen Schiff reminds us, of those found in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
The book is comprised of 64 pages, including the title page. They are divided by color into four sections: Blue, Olive, Red, and White. Blue, Olive and Red are published on “construction paper” of different weights (the blue and red papers are about the same weight; the olive is much heavier). The White section is printed on glossy paper.
According to Lawrence Levy, the book’s designer, “[Gass] had wanted a condom included with each of the 400 as a bookmark, with the following imprinted on the latex: ‘A Dirty Book is a Clean Lay. Support National Library Week.’ But that stretched our budget, as well as the university’s tolerance. As it was, they temporarily impounded the paperback edition threatening to not allow us to send it out.”[*] “The first TriQuarterly hardcover Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife won an American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books of the Year Award. That was, at the time, the premiere book design award.” — Lawrence Levy.[*]
Variations
TriQuarterly Supplement #2 (softcover) (1968)
The supplement enlarges what were the 2″ x 3″ photographic inserts on the hardback cover to fill the entire cover (both front and back). Here, however, the women’s belly button has been airbrushed out. “You’d think the nipples would go before the belly button,” writes Lawrence Levy.[*] The concern over belly buttons invites further comments. Ironically, the last image in the book in all editions not only has a belly button, but it is foregrounded by an encircling coffee ring. On the other hand, one cannot see a belly button in the image of the woman’s torso reclining on her side on pages 2-3 in the blue section of the either of the TriQuarterly editions, but one can see an ever-so-faint trace of it in the Knopf and Dalkey editions.
Like the first edition, the spine remains blank.
There are no endpapers.
Knopf (1971)
The Knopf edition is a hardcover, like the original edition. But Knopf adds a black dust jacket. It is on this dust jacket that the original front cover (with belly button) is reproduced—with the small, 2″ x 3″ image of the woman (arms at her sides, etc.) in the upper right corner. The back of the dust jacket, however, does not include the photograph of the woman shot from behind. The inside front fold of the dust jacket has standard promotional material with supporting quotes from critics and a brief description of the book and its author.
The spine identifies the author, title, and publisher.
The endpapers in this edition are black.
The Blue, Olive, and Red sections are flattened to a single gray, and printed all on the same weight “construction” paper. The use of one color instead of the three erases the sense that each section is indeed a section. The White section remains on glossy paper.
The images, text, etc. remain the same, including the use of brown ink in the coffee rings.
Dalkey Archive (1989)
The Dalkey Archive edition follows the TriQuarterly paperback edition in its covers (though there is a slight cropping from the sides as well as a slight loss of gray tones, presumably from the process of reproduction rather than by design). Like the paperback edition, the belly button on the cover is airbrushed out. There is also the notable absence of endpapers.
The spine identifies the author, title, and publisher.
The major difference in this edition is that for the first time all of the pages are printed on white glossy paper of the same weight, thereby effacing all internal, physical divisions between the sections.
The images, text, etc. remain the same, including the use of brown ink in the coffee rings.
* Levy, Lawrence. “Re:WMLW.” E-mail to Richard Henry. 4 March 2003.
