Finding the Found Book: Whither Cultural and Individual Memory

I have put off writing this one for several weeks, because I kept re-framing what I wanted to say. Luckily, I have now forgotten most of those thoughts, so I am returning to my initial motivation. Unlike other essays, this does not begin with wandering the Internet, but with old media--books, book stalls, and libraries.

My local public library accepts donations of books and, with the Friends of the Library, generates income by selling these books at the library, but moving books, etc., that don't sell to a 10-cent cart sitting by the entrance. I am prone to looking at the 10-cent cart (and not the other sale books), and recently found this book with drawings by Art Spiegelman, which I did not know about. While a friend and owner of various Art Spiegelman's books,I was intrigued by The Wild Partyand bought it with my hard-earned dime.

Spiegelman takes Joseph Moncure March's poem and subtitles it "The Lost Classic," and this was my theme. For it turns out, just as I bought Spiegelman's book at a used book stall, so did he come across the original himself:

It was the spine that grabbed me. I'm like a drunk who is as attracted to bottles and their labels as to the liquid within. I mean, I once even bought a cookbook – cookbook! – because of its binding. I get the same pleasure from used bookstores as an alcoholic finds in bars. Both places, though public, make room for feverish solitude and both allow unhealthy cravings to be filled to excess. And just like a drunk who won't touch, say, rye, except as a last resort, I rarely stray for the poetry shelves; so it's peculiar that I ever stumbled onto The Wild Party. It was the twenties typography on the spine that first made me pick up the book in the early seventies, and it was a perfunctory frontpiece by Reginal Marsh that made me linger.

So, "art" made us both stop and look, typography for Spiegelman, Spiegelman's drawings for me. However, Internet wandering became my comeuppance. After my own perfunctory stop at Wikipedia to read about "The Wild Party", with not much new added, further idle searching led me to find a link to the June 27, 1994, issue of The New Yorker. So, what do I find but almost the same introduction that Spiegelman has in the book and excerpts from the poems and his drawings. So, the "lost classic" was lost not just to others, but to me, too, an almost lifelong subscriber.


So, how many times has "The Wild Party" been lost? And how many times has serendipity brought it back to life (for one person, or many). And, does this blog entry mean that someone future sole may also now stumble upon the poem--which is left completely undescribed by this entry--and is what is found the poem or Spiegelman's drawings, or both? Or, will they find a pre-Spiegelman found version of the poem, the "poorly received" 1975 movie of the same name?! For those that believe that all culture grafts into our collective memory, even if it is lost and never found, then it may not matter.