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Double-Fronted Books (2003)

Double-fronted books are such a rich medium that I’m surprised that scholars of book art rarely notice them. In the 1950s and 60s, a mass paperback publisher named Ace regularly issued two titles back to back, even though they had only tenuous relation with each other. In 1953 William Burroughs’ first book, Junkie, published under the pseudonym of William Lee, appeared back to back with an abridged reprint of Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent (1941); the only connection between the two was the subject of heroin. As nearly all paperbacks at the time reprinted books initially in hardcover, the Helbrant text, now forgotten, became the pretext for issuing Burroughs’ fresh manuscript. In the 1960s, Ace issued five of Samuel R. Delany’s earliest books back to back with something else; so that even though “Double Books,” as Ace called them, were not as prestigious as solos, let it not be said that the medium was totally disadvantageous.

As Delany recalls, Donald Wollheim, a legendary sci-fi editor who worked at Ace, tied Delany’s first novel, Jewels with Aptor (1962), written while a teenager, to a book by a writer more prominent at the time. Delany’s second novel, The Towers Of Turon (1964), appeared back to back with a novel by Keith Woodcot, which was a fairly successful pseudonym of a yet more prominent science-fiction writer named John Brunner. Delany remembers that customarily one of the two texts in these Ace volumes was approximately 150 pages in length, while the other ran about 100. “The longer was generally read first. There was always an A side and a B side, as in the record business, from where Wollheim may have gotten the idea.”

By Delany’s third double-front book, the leverages of reputation were reversed, as his “name” carried an author less well-known. Ace tied The Ballad of Beta 2 (1965) to someone else’s Alpha Yes, Terra No with no common pretext greater than the names for Greek letters in their titles. Delany thought at the time of writing two novels to appear back to back, one referring to the other; but by the time he finished, Ace was giving him one-man shows. (Some of these early titles were later reissued solo, graduating in prestige, so to speak.) He was scarcely the only young author to begin in tandem. Tom Disch’s Mankind Under the Leash (c. 1966) began as the longer side of an Ace Double Book. Delany remembers that such books generally sold more than 90,000 copies.

The sci-fi publisher Tor revived the double-front format in the late 1980s, publishing one a month for several years, usually with two fictions that were too long to appear in magazines and too short to stand alone. Their editor, Patrick Neilsen Hayden, remembers, “The science-fiction field is filled with underappreciated novellas” Initially reissues, including a Samuel R. Delany text, books in this series later matched an original manuscript with a reprint—Gregory Benford and Paul A. Carter’s Iceborn (1989) with Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game (1981); John M. Ford’s Fugue State (1990) with Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island (1973). “We love the tete-à-tete format,” Neilsen Hayden added. “We tried artists and approaches we wouldn’t have used otherwise.”

Charm notwithstanding, double-front books have been a nightmare for publishers. “What side are we selling?” the salesmen would ask. “A bargain of two books for the price of one,” the editor would reply. Booksellers didn’t know which of the two fronts to display. Further complications came when back-to-back Ace authors discovered they had different sales figures for the same book.

New Directions ingeniously used the double-front form around 1966 to reprint two Kenneth Patchen chapbooks that had been done earlier in the decade by Jonathan Williams. On the book’s spine appears only the word Doubleheader not once but twice, the second side upside down. One cover has standard black letters on a white background, announcing Poemscapes (1953) for approximately forty unpaginated pages. The other side has white letters on a black background for Hurrah for Anything (1958) which are forty-seven single page texts underneath the author’s line-drawings. Here the double-front book was clearly a convenient way to get into a trade paperback two Patchen books that couldn’t have flown as well alone.

Functioning as the book’s designer as well as its author, I have used the form twice, perhaps with more cunning. When Lita Hornick at the Kulchur Foundation invited me in 1974 to do a book for her series of 128-page semi-annual volumes, I devoted 64 pages as I Articulatons to my visual poems and the other 64 pages to my Short Fictions and giving each its own cover. One concern I had at the time was marking the difference between poems that realized a concentration of image and effect while the stories, mostly visual fictions, moved from one place to another. The conceptual point of the double-front volume was demonstrating differences between poetry and fiction within my work. Otherwise, the book had two covers that looked alike except for different lettering and companion prefaces. (The mishap was that these prefaces were inadvertently reversed. Should the book ever be reprinted, they should be restored to their correct places.)

The other a double-front book I designed as well as wrote appeared in the wake of The End of Intelligent Writing (1974). On one hand, I had enough afterthoughs to make a 128-page book. For the other half I produced an experimental (precomputer) abridgement made by neatly pasting passages from the 480-page original as seamlessly as possible onto 128 new pages. While the former is called “The End” Appendix (1979), the latter is “The End” Essentials; and the covers resemble each other in design. In all my double-front books, I put both titles onto the spine in addition to my own name. What they share is the principle that the parts compliment each other, which is to say that, unlike Delany’s novels, they would lose if reprinted separately. Another double-front book of mine, Prose Pieces/Aftertexts (1987) was done by Harry Polkinhorn’s Atticus Press in San Diego.

Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (c. 1975) is a more ingenious double-front book of two sequences of several dozen photographs that follow one another in a roughly associational way until two pictures in the middle portray Snow himself turning over a book in the presence of a cameraman. Other book-artists have no doubt used this form.

Commercial obstacles notwithstanding, I am surprised that double-fronted books don’t appear more often. Consider that piggy-backing, where a book by a newcomer is tied to one by a more prominent author, might be appropriate in publishing poetry, where teacher/disciple loyalties are stronger than elsewhere. The moviehouse analogy is a double-feature where one film is more likely to attract an audience than another. (A colleague and I were once commissioned in Germany to make a twenty-minute film that would accompany a feature film for its tour. Unfortunately, since the feature didn’t travel very far, our short didn’t last either.)

Since any object with both a front and a back can have two fronts, it seems to me that the possibilities and implications of the double-front book have only scarcely been explored. First of all, it is quite different from the book in which two or more works appear in succession, as in the collected novels of a single author; for double-fronting lends itself to complimentary structures.

Consider as well extending the form to have one author’s text(s) appear continuously on right-hand pages and another author’s words appear on the left-hand pages upside down (though left and right obviously become reversed when the book is turned over). Whether for art or commerce, double-front book are finally about alternative opportunities.