Saturday, March 21, 2020

We Are Gentlemen of Leisure by Dense Lens, Brian Marley and Asa Beneveniste (1975)


We Are Gentlemen of Leisure
Dense Lens, Brian Marley and Asa Beneveniste
Trigram Press
London, UK
(c)1975

I read a story online about a famous bookstore in Salt Lake City that was going to be forced to close within the year due to some downtown renovation project which happens all too often when a bookstore doesn't know the space they operate in, and so I did a bit of research and found that the bookstore, Ken Sanders Rare Books, had an inventory so I went through it, especially the poetry listing, and saw this item. Now, I have had a different item by Asa Beneveniste that I traded to a fellow poet for a book of poetry bumperstickers. Yeah, I am thinking about the cow and magic beans too. But at the time I felt like I should since I felt like I got that item under false pretenses. The seller had misspelled Asa's name..... and I scored the purchase for .99 cents. Anyway, I was familiar with Trigram and actually met Tom Raworth in Washington DC not longer before he passed away.

It's a great booklet. Unpaginated. The 3 poets wrote all the poems in this collection within 6 months of the publication of the book. Glassine dust wrapper. This is one of only 500 printed.

I suggest that you might want to check out Ken Sanders' online inventory before he's forced out of his foothold in the city.

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