Performative Reading

Once, at a cocktail party, I had an encounter—calling it a conversation is a stretch—with a creative director of a middlingly cool department store who was wearing an intensely sculptural jacket. When I mentioned that I work in book publishing, he proudly disclosed his collection of Grove Press first editions and Evergreen Review copies. Did I know them? I nodded. Undeterred, he proceeded to explain Grove Press was the legendary purveyor of mid-century literature by outlaws like William S. Burroughs. When I interjected that Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency had changed my life, his focus loosened, drifting across the room until it landed on a thinner, presumably more demure woman; the paperback edition, let’s say. Off he went. Whether he had ever cracked open his prized acquisitions remains a mystery.