‘Jack Elam’s Other Eye’ was one of a series of invisible booklets I produced myself, like gathering up scrapes and jottings from private notebooks kept during travels as a bookdealer and submerged novelist.
The original ‘Jack Elam’ booklet came in grey wrappers with a cover drawing by Gavin Jones. There were 26 special lettered copies with an additional holograph poem. The book was published in 1991 in an edition of 200 copies.
Some of this material reappeared in more accessible form in ‘Penguin Modern Poets 10’ (1996), which is probably out of print. And also in ‘The Firewall: Selected Poems 1976-2006’. Etruscan Books. Published by Nicholas Johnson in 2006. This substantial (and slightly reckless) gathering up of most of the earlier invisible books is still in print and available.
Iain
I enjoy dipping into the Firewall, but it is too dense to process or assimilate quickly. Whenever I have read a book of Sinclair’s poems I always get more from the original publication i.e. Jack Elam’s other eye, partly due to the illustrations, the effect of a discrete set of poems and completeness of that piece of work. I am almost a completist when it comes to Iain Sinclair’s work – after discovering him via Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor in the late 1980s – I am not crazy enough to search out the low volume originals. Now how about some facsimile volumes of the poetry? Am a proud owner of a signed copy of Dark Lanthorns, got via a casual Amazon purchase.