A Gifts for Us All (or, Une Cadeaux pour le Geof Huth)*

The Lord Jeffery¹ Inn, Room 6, Amherst, Massachusetts

A little over a week ago, I received in the mail a copy of A Penny Dreadful by Gustave Morin. Until that point, I had known this book mostly from the pdf version of Morin’s Spaghetti Dreadful, which bills itself as a trailer to the full Dreadful.

Gustave Morin, “novel fragment” (2003)
A Penny Dreadful is better than its title tries to make us believe it is. The original penny dreadful was a cheap pulp paperback containing some lurid tale and selling for a penny. The original spaghetti western—though still extolled by many—was a film western produced by Italian artists, but it was a form that quickly devolved from the exuberant stylishness of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly into the full-scale campiness of the Trinity series. The spaghetti western was a film, so Spaghetti Dreadful serves as the trailer (the advertisement) for the book, A Penny Dreadful that preceded it.

All of which is some indication of the set of Byzantine connections that holds together Morin’s conceptually rigorous amalgamation of collages. The cover of the book is a striking and unexpected combination of orange and blue, and it includes a collage of a 1972² Canadian cent atomized into tiny bits that spray across the page.


Gustave Morin, “clang!” (2003)

The entire interior of the book is printed in a color akin to sepia, so that when we flip through each page we are almost subconsciously reminded of ancient photographs, times past. The first page of the book is emblazoned with the word “PULL,” so we pull the page towards us, then quickly push it away, revealing the word “PUSH” on the other side of the sheet. After a couple of opening collages (one of which includes a ticket that will “ADMIT ONE”), we come upon a stage curtain fringed on the bottom with tassels. After the title page, the book is divided into eight sections (from 9 to 2)—why? Because each section opens with an image of numbers, from an old reel of film, numbers that count down to the beginning of the film. The 1 never shows in the book because it never appears on the screen, so all this book really consists of is a particular series of subliminal images thrust into our minds before the real film begins.

The collages in this book are carefully constructed conjunctions of disparate images, none of them too modern in feel. Each of the collage scraps in this book appears to predate the early 1960s, and occasionally they have a definite Populuxe feel (as in the collage “disturbia”). But the images run the gamut from found photographs, to etchings, to ancient woodcuts. Morin is pulling together a universe of images into a sometimes disturbing and always disorienting panoply of life. Many of these collages are satirical in obvious ways, and others are carefully intellectual examinations of the structure of meaning, but most serve simply to push our awareness beyond the careful, explainable decisions we have already made about the world. These collages are simply about perception and the trap that it can be for each of us.


Gustave Morin, “translation” (2003)
Though letters or words seem to make appearances in these collages only occasionally, almost every collage includes some clear or obscured text. Morin is skating on the thinnest vispoetic ice through much of this “minor opus”³. He is clearly interested in language and in the surging power of text, even “meaningless” text—but he is even more interested in images and how they can serve as almost syntactic elements in a mise en page. Some of his collages resemble post-semiotic poems that use images to stand in for words (especially, for instance, in the startlingly simple “autobiography”). This is the point to which visual poetry always and inevitably leads: out of the land of observable words and into the land of visual ideas. And Gustave Morin is the talented guide every tourist among us should request for this trip.

The penultimate page of the book is emblazoned with the word “PULL,” so we pull the page towards us, then quickly push it away, revealing the word “PUSH” as the last page of the book.


Gustave Morin, “mean while” (2003)

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Morin, Gustave. A Penny Dreadful. Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2003.

* The parenthetical in the title is the note Gustave Morin wrote on the paper he wrapped around the copy of the book he sent me. The French isn’t perfect, but I like the slightly akilter manner of it, which reminds me of the book as a whole.

¹ When I arrived at this inn tonight, I discovered I had no reservation here—one of the least pleasant discoveries one can be made on a trip—but their system retained some evidence of my reservation. After seeing my name on her screen, the desk clerk did her best to recreate the spelling of my first name: She came up with “Geophry,” which I told her was close enough.

² Once I saw the date on this cent, I guessed that Morin was born in 1972, but I didn’t know how to determine this. Luckily for me, one of the last images in the book is of a laminated copy of Bruce Gustave Morin’s birth certificate, which verifies his year of birth as 1972 and shows he was born in Kitchener, Ontario.

³ His words, used in the inscription he wrote across the last page of my copy.

ecr. l’inf.