1969
Madras/New York: Hanuman Books, 1989. 1st Edition. 32mo, publisher's carmine cloth, original illustrated dust jacket.
"You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told." First edition of an early personal essay by American poet, novelist, and queer icon Eileen Myles. A chronicle of their adolescence, the work was issued as number 26 in art critic Raymond Foye and Italian painter Francesco Clemente's Hanuman Books series. Founded in 1986, the small press, whose administrative and editorial functions were housed in the Chelsea Hotel, produced all 50 imprints in their series of small handmade books in Madras, India. Notably, 1969 was optioned as a film (it never came to fruition) and was later collected in Myles’s seminal book, Chelsea Girls (1994). Cover photo by social documentarian Donna McAdams, who also captured images of fellow downtown figures such as Meredith Monk, Karen Finley, and David Wojnarowicz. This copy is bound in an unrecorded hardcover cloth variant (virtually all of Hanuman's books were bound in stiff handmade paper wrappers), possibly a binder's sample. Unclipped dust jacket with light chipping and rubbing. Very good. Item #11105
$275.00