Item #81 in my Kerouac bookshelf curation project is this 2004 copyright Thunder's Mouth Press first printing of Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings by Jack Kerouac with text by Ed Adler. Weirdly, the copyright page is at the end of the book. 285 pages, it measures about 8-1/2" square and is in good condition. The provenance is that it was a gift from Crystal for Christmas 2016 (purchased from Friends of Duncan Library 2 on Amazon Marketplace).
If you didn't already know that Jack Kerouac the writer was also a visual artist, this book provides evidence of same. As the back cover indicates:
Jack Kerouac took himself seriously as a visual artist and on a number of occasions told friends he would have been a painter if he weren't a writer. His enthusiasm for art was omnivorous, he drew, he painted, he designed covers for his books, and as he sketched with words, so he sketched with images: organized and deliberate but spontaneous, and supported by typically Kerouac, methodically detailed theory.
This book includes 129 pages of Jack's notebook pages, sketches, and paintings as well as relevant pictures of Jack and others. The next half of the book is text, with a a preface by Douglas Brinkley, foreword by the late John Sampas, and then 17 chapters of informative exposition by Ed Adler.
Adler sums it all up nicely at the end, quoting Kerouac from Big Sur: "The world is too old for us to talk about with our new words."
Recommended.
Below is a picture of Shelf #2 of my Kerouac bookshelf showing the placement of this book (sideways on top of the row) on the day I started curating my collection. Next up: The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson (beginning Shelf #3).
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Shelf #2 of my Kerouac bookshelf
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