The last of the great gentlemen publishers, JL was also the most important avant-garde editor of the immediate post World War II period.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lavishly illustrated, The Way It Wasn’t offers an intimate firsthand encounter with 20th-century Modernism, from the extraordinary man who defined it for America.

The Way It Wasn’t

Literature by James Laughlin

James Laughlin––poet, ladies’ man, heir to a steel fortune, and the founder of New Directions––was still at work on his autobiography when he died at 83. He left behind personal files crammed with memories and memorabilia: in “M” he is taking Marianne Moore to Yankee games (outings captured here in charming snapshots) to discuss “arcane mammals,” and in “N” nearly plunging off a mountain, hunting butterflies with Nabokov (“Volya was a doll in a very severe upper-crust Russian way”).

With an accent on humor, The Way It Wasn’t is a scrapbook loaded with ephemera––letters and memories, clippings and photographs. This richly illustrated album glitters like a magpie’s nest, if a magpie could have known Tennessee Williams, W.C. Williams, Merton, Miller, Stein, and Pound. In “C”: “I wish that nice Jean Cocteau were still around. He took me to lunch at the Grand Véfours in the Palais-Royal and explained all about flying saucers. He understood mechanical things. He would advise me.” In “P”: “There was not much ’gracious living’ in Pittsburgh, where at one house, the butler passed chewing gum on a silver salver after coffee.” And: “The world is full of a large number of irritating people.” In “H” there’s Lillian Hellman: “What a raspy character. When I knocked at her door to try to borrow one of her books (hoping to butter her up) she only opened her door four inches and said words to the effect: ’Fuck off, you rapist.’” Marketing in “M”: “I think it’s important to get the ’troubadours’ into the title. That’s a ’buy-me’ word.” In “G”: “Olga asked Allen Ginsberg if he was also buying Pound Conference T-shirts for his grandchildren. She was most lovable throughout.” In “L”: “Wyndham Lewis wrote ’Why don’t you stop New Directions, your books are crap.’” And we find love in “L”: “Cicero noted that an old love pinches like a crab.” But in The Way It Wasn’t James Laughlin’s love of the crazy world and his crazier authors does not pinch a bit: it glows with wit and enlarges our feeling for the late great twentieth century.

Paperback(published Nov, 01 2007)

ISBN
9780811216678
Price US
25
Price CN
31
Trim Size
8x10
Page Count
288

Clothbound(published Nov, 01 2007)

ISBN
9780811216760
Price US
45
Trim Size
8x10
Page Count
288
Portrait of James Laughlin

James Laughlin

James Laughlin was the founder of New Directions and author of several collections of poetry

The last of the great gentlemen publishers, JL was also the most important avant-garde editor of the immediate post World War II period.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

James Laughlin, the fiercely independent publisher, editor and poet … who published many of the most consequential writers of his time.

New York Times

The wittiest and sexiest poet of our time.

Guy Davenport

Laughlin was more than the greatest American publisher of the twentieth century: His press was the twentieth century.

Eliot Weinberger, Nation