OT: The Eccentric Otis Redding
Judith Fitzgerald
Otis Redding, the 1960's singer who penned the classics "(Sittin' On) The Dock
Of The Bay," "Respect," and "Hard To Handle," wasn't very famous by the time
his airplane crashed into Lake Monoma, Wisconsin, on December 10, 1967. Many
eulogised at the time that Redding had only begun to tap into his diverse
talents; that indeed the death of this burgeoning avatar of R & B -- who
scored his only No. 1 hit posthumously -- robbed the world of a vital talent
whose artistic breadth would go painfully unrealised. Others, however,
dismissed Redding's passing as the loss of a simple soul singer; another
nauseating pop music fatality worthy of no more than a larger typeface on the
obituary page.
Among these were his lawyers, who, when they struck his estate before
Christmas, came across a locked cabinet behind a closet wall. Hoping to find
a stash of valuables or money, they opened the cabinet only to find
"sixty-seven identical, hand-bound, hand-printed, self-published books" which
Redding had apparently constructed himself.
According to deceased L. A. Times reporter Daniel A. Carlin, "The books were
perfectly alike in height, width, and weight... each book measured 5.25 inches
by 7.33 inches and was 2.09 inches thick. The books ranged from 45 pages to
over 500, but he used different thicknesses of paper to achieve the identical
sizes."
The contents of these books were even more confounding. "[The author] seemed
to pay more attention to the aesthetics of words and sentences on the page
than any actual literal meaning," states UCLA lithography professor Edgar
Caquill. "And now they're the elusive quarry of crossword-crazy syntax freaks
and semantics aficionados." The books were sold off and separated at the
estate sale and they didn't resurface until 1983, when one was purchased by
rare books expert Steve Ebben.
"I bought the first one for ten bucks," claims Ebben, who now owns 31 of the
67 books. "I made the mistake of bringing it to a convention in Lausanne
where collectors and scholars fawned over it. It started a mad hunt for the
collection and the prices skyrocketed. Then the lawyers came out of the
woodwork and wanted them back, claiming that the books as individual entities
were never sold. But virtually no one surrendered their books, and it's
actually illegal in New York to own them now."
What few books leaked into academia have researchers puzzled. "We've coined
this style of writing 'cubist authorship' because of its similarity to the
bien collé style of Cubism typified by such paintings as Braque's 'Fox' and
Picasso's 'Still Life With Bottle,'" states Dean Travis, professor of semantic
pedagogy at the University of Texas. "Emphasis is on texture and a whole
formed from textural parts, each with their own definition. Redding's
attempts to infuse narrative structure into this syntax -- and to include the
construction of the book itself as part of the story -- have me flabbergasted,
especially considering the source. If only I could peruse the entire
collection, I may be able to extrapolate some greater meaning."
"We'll never be able to consolidate this volume," Ebben claims. "They are the
most frequently stolen of any rare book in the last half-century, so no one
wants to surface them. There's a guy on the web selling Xeroxes for $300.
That's as close as the average person will get."
Even if the books become worthless, Ebben's statement may always be true.
Redding's locked cabinet consisted of four rows, each intended to hold
seventeen books perfectly. Although there are leads and theories, it is most
likely that the 68th book, the book most capable of giving the body of work
some purpose and meaning, went down on a plane outside of Madison thirty-one
years ago, trapped in the mind of a simple soul singer.
http://www.thisishell.net/ecc/ecc_otis.htm