Mental Travailers, or, The Battle of the Books

At Face Press, Mental Travailers: Or, The Battle of the Books: Blake & Latham in Subtle Congress on Peckham Rye (2022) by Iain Sinclair. A well-designed 20pp pocket booklet with screen-printed covers in gold and silver, with French flaps. A bijou grimoire: the novelist, book-collector and psycho-geographer’s oblique meditations on time, place and bibliomancy. Invocations of William Blake and of Sixties art happenings. ‘For me a book is outside of time’: perhaps, he speculates, ‘a dialogue can be initiated by the act of lifting random volumes from the shelf’, which he then proceeds to do, quoting the messages from the passages he finds. 

Also available from the Press, the High Modernist word-hoards of enigmatic magus J H Prynne, including Snooty Tipoffs, Sea Shells Told, Latency of the Conditional and the latest, Not Ice Novice. 

(Mark Valentine)