A Letter from Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem—author of ZE #005, Cellophane Bricks, and the writer who introduced ZE #001—reflects on the evolution of the series and the singular community of readers who’ve supported it.
by Jonathan Lethem
Dear reader, art and music lover, and book collector (I trust you are in many cases all of those things at once),
What luck there was for me, first of all, to have been in on the ground floor of the unlikely publishing phenomenon that is ZE Books. On the strength of my yellowing and tattered New York seventies street cred, I was enlisted to write an introduction to the legendary Glenn O’Brien’s Intelligence for Dummies, which became ZE #001. It could hardly have occurred to me then what a glorious object would be returned to my shelf for my trouble—the edition was lavish and sturdy and distinctive, a bespoke object entirely in keeping with O’Brien’s natty standards. Yet it was only when the Nick Flynn and Mary Gaitskill volumes showed up to join the O’Brien—I can still recall the pleasure of lining those first three books up to admire their congruence—that I felt myself helplessly, greedily thinking, I need one of those. All three were such splendid reading, made such generous enrichments to my understanding of the three writers in question, and were such delights to hold in one’s hand. Even luckier, soon enough my private scheming became a conversation with the ZE team. Not so long after that I entered into a sequence of image-sampling and self-archiving and brand-new writing, all inspired by the notion that I could place my words into the design-forward—and, in my case, heavily illustrated—format we’d planned.
The journey was long and strange and fun. It’s not only that I’ll never have a second book anything like Cellophane Bricks, but that, truly, there will never be a second book quite like Cellophane Bricks. I remain in grateful disbelief anytime I heft a copy or am handed one to autograph in a bookshop. It’s a beauty and a wonder. I’m delighted by one fact in particular, that my book turned out to be the first of the series with a dust jacket—since I love a dust jacket and this is a wonderful one—and yet there has been no sacrifice to the glorious binding underneath just because it is initially concealed. (I’m sure you share my pleasure in undressing a new book to see what its body is like beneath the clothes.) The books ZE has published after mine now follow this example, and the set expands in seductive power as the list grows. I’ve just laid hands on Lynn Hershman Leeson’s memoir Private I, not yet had time to delve in (and, lo and behold, it has fold-outs! Maybe there is a second book like Cellophane Bricks…), but I’ve already placed it on the ZE Books shelf of honor, to see it join in the company of marvels that ZE has spawned…
If you’re reading this, you may well have come across one or two of these—but I doubt you have the run. Which makes me, for the moment, a bit luckier than you.
Happy holidays,
Jonathan
