Jungle Paper
So, how much is a first edition book worth? A mint condition, autographed copy of a famous book should carry a significant price tag, shouldn’t it?. That would be my guess. To confirm, I looked up the asking price for The Jungle, signed by Upton Sinclair. The asking price was $7500. Even an unsigned first edition should be worth something, wouldn’t you think?
I paid nothing for my copy, which may or may not have been signed. Had it been signed, which I doubt that it had, that portion of the book no longer existed. This copy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle looked as if it had been a dog toy.
It fell into my world.
The fibers I change into paper, often from well-loved clothing, always have personal meaning. This book held significance for me. I first read Upton Sinclair’s book as a sophomore in high school. It wasn’t assigned reading, more like recreational. I read it on the daily, one-hour, bus ride to and from school. The Jungle made an impact upon me. It became part of me, along with other literature I read on the school bus; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Animal Farm, and Silent Spring.
Although the text was printed on wood pulp, the paper in this particular copy of The Jungle was not yellowed or brittle. This indicated that the fiber quality had not been attacked by the drying and sizing agents within the paper. It meant that I had something to work with and that it might be possible to remove or neutralize the action of the chemical additives. At very least, I could probably flush out the sizing and add a buffering agent as I repulped the pages. This book came to my hands for reincarnation.
Let the fun begin.
I yanked off the cover and tossed chapter fragment after chapter fragment into my hollander, the large metal, grinding tub that digests cloth and reduces it to pulp. I let the pages run through the machine just long enough to break the pages into bits of words, chunks of letters, partial phrases, and random paragraph shards. In a manner of speaking, I let chaos determine the redistribution of each and every word written by Upton Sinclair. With the exception of what the dog tore up, the remaining story is there, the exact words, but in an entirely different arrangement. Conceptually, it is a new story, using letter for letter, from what the dog left of the old tale.
In the paper produced from this repulping, the book was fully there, but the number of pages greatly reduced, as the newly formed sheets were thicker and four times larger than the dissolved book. The new paper had feather deckles, in place of squarely guillotined edges. Conceptually, The Jungle was complete, just reformatted and rearranged. Literally, it now read as a puzzlement. It was non-sense. I prefer the conceptual reading.
Yet, while being both The Jungle and Not-The Jungle, simultaneously, it was in truth an entirely new support and artwork, a direct descendant of Robert Rauschenberg’s "Erased de Kooning Drawing". However, instead of "erasing" the story, as Sinclair had written it, and leaving the product as a conceptual statement; I elected to "write" my own story upon the new pages.
At some point in time, those who use paper took two divergent attitudes about
what happens upon a piece of paper. Artists tend to make images only on side of a sheet of paper, while book publishers found it economically beneficial to print on both sides. The text of The Jungle, like any other book, was two-sided. Why should my "writing", which is graphic, rather than literary, be on only one side of the new paper? It isn’t. Like the text that covered both sides in the book, my marks are on two surfaces. My lines, symbols, and dots are also mostly black and white, like text on paper. Beyond that point, everything else is different.
One particular, thoroughly trashed, first edition copy of The Jungle is now in a new form. It is a portfolio called The Jungle and Not-The Jungle.
One last thing, I just purchased a good condition, first edition copy of "The Jungle" for seven dollars.
This intact book wasn’t used as a dog toy.
Sandy Kinnee
January 1, 2010