Ulysses

This year marks the centenary of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, which was first published in Paris in 1922. The book was officially banned in the UK and the US for more than a decade, declared obscene by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. (The US ban even predated the novel’s Paris publication, as the editors of the literary magazine The Little Review were convicted of obscenity in 1921 after serialising it.)

Random House sought to publish an American edition, and imported a copy from Paris to test the waters in 1932. The following year, New York City District Court judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not obscene, leaving Random House free to publish it in the US. In his summing up, the judge argued that the novel was disgusting rather than titillating: “whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” (The same argument was made by the Appeals Court judge in the Oz obscenity trial almost forty years later.)

Despite having read only forty-two pages of the novel, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Archibald Bodkin, dismissed it as “a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.” All copies brought into the UK were therefore confiscated by customs, until Bodley Head—encouraged by the US verdict—released a British edition in 1936. No longer imported from overseas and seized under the Customs Consolidation Act, the book was henceforth subject to the Obscene Publications Act, which has a higher burden of proof. The Attorney-General, David Somervell, advised that such a conviction would be unlikely, and the Bodley Head edition faced no legal challenge from the government.

The next landmark cases in US and UK obscenity law both came in the late 1950s. Samuel Roth was jailed in 1957 after the US Supreme Court ruled that his quarterly book series American Aphrodite (vol. 1, no. 3), published in 1951, was obscene. The case set a precedent as the judgement redefined obscenity as material which “taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest”, thus preventing courts from convicting literature based on isolated extracts. Similarly, in 1959 the UK’s Obscene Publications Act added a stipulation that any material under scrutiny be considered in whole rather than in part. This led directly to the acquittal of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover in 1960.

Keep ’em in the East:Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance

Ironically, some of the greatest films from the so-called New Hollywood era (The Godfather, The French Connection, Annie Hall) were made on location in New York rather than in Los Angeles. New York City established a film commission in 1966 (the first in the country), leading to an immediate and dramatic increase in film production, which has since become known as the New York film renaissance. Richard Koszarski’s Keep ’em in the East: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance offers a revisionist history of the 1940s and ’50s New York film scene, arguing that the roots of the renaissance stretch back long before 1966.

Koszarski discusses the documentary-like police procedural thrillers filmed on the streets of New York (The House on 92nd Street, The Naked City, Boomerang!), demonstrating that, although this style evolved alongside Neo-Realism, it was not directly influenced by Italian cinema. Only one Neo-Realist film, Rome, Open City (Roma cittá aperta), had been released in the US during the peak period of the New York docu-dramas, thus their similar modes of production were largely coincidental.

The book’s final chapters alternate between the production histories of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, which (incredibly) were among only three films made in New York in the winter of 1953 (the other being Hansel and Gretel). Interestingly, he reveals that Killer’s Kiss (under its original title, Kiss Me, Kill Me) was censored by four minutes by the MPAA, and that a further three minutes were cut by either Kubrick or the film’s distributor, United Artists, before its theatrical release.

ลุกไหม้สิ! ซิการ์

ลุกไหม้สิ! ซิการ์ (‘burning cigar!’), a short collection of poems written anonymously by ‘Chatchon’ in 2010 and 2020, offers a literary commentary on Thailand’s political protests. The bulk of the poems are reflections on the red-shirt rallies that culminated in the May 2010 military massacre. Uneducated People! highlights the condescension aimed at the pro-democracy movement by the rival yellow-shirts. ความสงสัย (‘doubtfulness’) addresses the killing of protesters on 10th April 2010 (an event also memorialised by Tawan Wattuya’s Amnesia and Parinot Kunakornwong’s 10th April). เด็กหนุ่มในบทกวี (‘the boy in the poem’) is a remembrance of the final week of the 2010 massacre (as was Pisitakun Kuantalaeng’s installation Ten Year: Thai Military Crackdown [sic]).

Similarly, the poems written in 2020 address the student-led protest groups that have formed over the last two years. One poem is dedicated to Arnon Nampa, one of the protest leaders, who is himself a poet. Another is titled เก่งมาก กล้ามาก ขอบใจ (‘very good, very brave, thank you’), clearly evoking a comment made by the King to one of his supporters during a walkabout on 23rd October 2020—“กล้ามาก เก่งมาก ขอบใจ” (‘very brave, very good, thank you’)—which is also the title of a song by Paeng Surachet. This poem also quotes the protest chant “1 2 3 4 5 I Hear Too”, a pun on the Bottom Blues single 12345 I Love You. (“I Hear Too” is a homophone for ‘ai hia Tu’, an insult directed at Prayut Chan-o-cha.)

Pääministerin morsian

Matti Vanhanen, Prime Minister of Finland from 2003 to 2010, was largely seen as rather bland during his two terms in office. That reputation was briefly tested when a book by his former girlfriend, a caterer called Susan Kuronen, was published in 2007.

There was nothing scandalous about Vanhanen’s relationship with Kuronen—he and his wife were already divorced—so her somewhat tawdry kiss-and-tell book, Pääministerin morsian (‘the Prime Minister’s bride’), had no real public-interest defence. In fact, more than 50,000 Finns signed a petition calling on bookshops to refuse to stock it.

Vanhanen sued the publisher for invasion of privacy, as the book included personal text messages he had sent to Kuronen during their relationship. He sought $1,450 in damages (plus $83,200 in royalties and profits), and initially lost the case, though he won on appeal, a decision upheld by Finland’s Supreme Court in 2010. Kuronen lost her appeal at the European Court of Human Rights in 2014, seven years after Vanhanen’s lawsuit was first filed.

The case has interesting parallels with former UK prime minister John Major. Like Vanhanen, Major was perceived as grey and dull (a reputation caricatured by Spitting Image), and he also sued over reports of an alleged affair with a caterer. In that case, however, the allegation was false, though Major was having an affair with one of his ministers, Edwina Currie, at the time.

สงครามเย็น (ใน)ระหว่าง โบว์ขาว

Kanokrat Lertchoosakul’s book สงครามเย็น (ใน)ระหว่าง โบว์ขาว (‘the Cold War (in)between the white bow’), published last year, examines the roles of successive generations in the current Thai political protest movement. Kanokrat argues that the present government, which came to power in a military coup, is a remnant of the Cold War era, when authoritarianism was accepted by society at large. (Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul discusses this older generation’s submissive attitude in Thai Cinema Uncensored: “disruption of the flow and unity is a really big deal. Like my Mum... she is in the generation of Sarit [Thanarat], all these people who were very powerful.”) On the other hand, today’s students are much less tolerant of Thailand’s top-down culture, and in 2020 the Free Youth anti-government group encouraged high school students to wear white ribbons as a symbol of resistance.

What’s most remarkable about the book is its inclusion (on p. 57) of the Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) front page that sparked the 6th October 1976 massacre. (The newspaper falsely accused Thammasat University students of lèse-majesté, and vigilantes stormed the campus.) For more than thirty years, there was an unspoken prohibition against reproducing Dao Siam’s incendiary headline and photo. Sarakadee (สำรคดี) magazine broke the taboo in its June 2012 issue, though other publications have only recently followed suit. The front page has appeared in only three other books, all published within the last three years: 45 ปี 6 (‘45 years of 6th Oct.’), Prism of Photography (ปริซึมของภาพถ่าย), and Moments of Silence. Heavily obscured by overpainting, it’s also part of Thasnai Sethaseree’s new Cold War exhibition at MAIIAM in Chiang Mai.

“Conspiracy to corrupt public morals...”

Alfred Barrett’s lonely hearts magazine The Link, founded in 1915, was certainly ahead of its time. It published personal ads, though as its masthead proudly proclaimed, they were “NOT MATRIMONIAL” in nature. So if people weren’t looking for a spouse, what could they be looking for...? The Metropolitan Police pondered that very question, after R.A. Bennett—editor of another magazine, the moralistic Truth—sent copies of The Link to Scotland Yard.

Bennett suspected that some of The Link’s classified ads were coded messages written by gay men. One example, which he underlined with a literal blue pencil, was by someone “anxious to correspond with friend. Must be same sex, affectionate, and amiable”. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at the time, and the police seized not only copies of The Link but also letters sent to the box numbers advertised. Barrett was convicted of conspiracy to corrupt public morals in 1921, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.

Forty years later, in 1961, another publisher was convicted of the same offence. Frederick Shaw’s Ladies Directory, founded in 1959, was a catalogue of ads placed by prostitutes (the equivalent of the ‘tart cards’ left in phone boxes). Shaw himself had sent his publication to the Director of Public Prosecutions, seeking guidance on its legality. He got his answer when the DPP charged him with conspiracy to corrupt public morals, and after his conviction he served nine months in prison. The charge—which set a legal precedent—related specifically to issues 7–10 of the Ladies Directory. (My copy of number 8 is an undated and unpaginated A5 booklet.)

In 1965, Way Out led a revival of the lonely hearts magazine, and soon inspired imitators such as Exit and numerous others. In his authoritative Encyclopedia of Censorship, Jonathon Green noted that these titles “were not prosecuted, and more respectable magazines began to run lonely hearts columns that might have been indictable in earlier years.” H.G. Cocks, however, in his book Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column, demonstrates that these titles were indeed prosecuted for conspiracy to corrupt public morals: “The way the police in Britain investigated smalltime magazines like Exit and Way Out while their American counterparts merely shrugged as their own swinging industry exploded, tells us everything about the differences between the two countries.” (Classified’s coverage of the investigation into Exit and Way Out sets it apart from other books on censorship in Britain.)

The last major conviction for consiracy to corrupt public morals came in 1970, when three publishers of the underground magazine International Times received suspended sentences. In 1969 (issues 51–56), IT published a column of gay personal ads (Males), and this gave the Metropolitan Police the excuse they needed to prosecute the magazine, after several previous speculative raids on its offices. In an echo of the investigation into The Link fifty years earlier, and notwithstanding the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, the police seized hundreds of letters sent in reply to the ads. The editors of a more famous underground title, Oz, were acquitted of conspiracy to corrupt public morals in 1971, though after a prolonged trial they were found guilty of obscenity (a verdict later overturned on appeal).

The Greatest Movies of All Time

The Greatest Movies of All Time, published in 2016, features a list of classic films selected by Lorri Lynn, Melody Bussey, and Peter Murray. The number of titles (eighty-eight) seems fairly arbitrary, and there are no foreign-language or silent films on the list. The introduction, which refers to “a lifetime all best movie designation” [sic], could have been written by AI software.

Each film has a double-page spread, with a single paragraph of rather simplistic text opposite a glossy full-page photograph. The photos are the book’s only redeeming feature, though their quality is variable: the stills and posters are well-reproduced, though many are merely DVD covers and one (The Unforgiven) is from the wrong film. The book is not recommended, and is included here only in the interests of completism, as Dateline Bangkok reviews every greatest-film list available in print.

Heavenly Bodies:Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

Paul Koudounaris has written a trilogy of superb books on the display of human skeletons. The Empire of Death is a history of European ossuaries, while Memento Mori features secular and non-Christian memorials from around the world. Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs, published by Thames and Hudson in 2013, focuses on the skeletons discovered in Roman catacombs during the Counter-Reformation, which were distributed by the Vatican to churches in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

After the Reformation, replacement relics were required: “Large numbers of churches had been ransacked, ensuring that high volumes of new sacred bones were needed,” and the bodies from the catacombs became convenient “replacements for lost relics.” The skeletons were presumed to be those of Christian martyrs (though the wish was father to the thought) and were known as Katakombenbeiligen (‘catacomb saints’) to distinguish them from the saints canonised by papal decree.

The Katakombenbeiligen were decorated with gold and jewels and displayed in ornate reliquaries, venerated in much the same way as the relics of ‘real’ saints. That is, until archaeological evidence inevitably intervened, proving that most of the bodies dated from the time of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. These “glittering imposters”, as Koudounaris describes them, were eventually regarded as relics in that term’s pejorative sense, as obsolete. James Bentley’s book Restless Bones discusses holy relics in more depth, though it lacks the stunning photography of Heavenly Bodies.

Scene through Wood:A Century of Modern Wood Engraving

The technique of wood engraving was pioneered by Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century. Utilising more precise tools than woodcut printing, and using the end-grain rather than the side-grain, Bewick’s engravings were—according to Susan Doyle’s comprehensive History of Illustration—“capable of far more detail than earlier woodcuts”.

As William M. Ivins writes in Prints and Visual Communication, “the development of this technique under the hands of Bewick and others constitutes a very important part of the story of prints during the nineteenth century. It brought the wood-block back into books, and gave the greater public for the first time copious illustrations for its texts.” In A History of Book Illustration, David Bland agrees that the Bewick method “rescued the woodcut from oblivion and made it a suitable method of illustrating the mass-produced book”.

Scene through Wood: A Century of Modern Wood Engraving, an exhibition marking the centenary of the Society of Wood Engravers, was held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2020 (after a slight delay due to the coronavirus pandemic), and is now on show at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester. Curated by Anne Desmet, the exhibition features more than 200 wood engravings, organised thematically, from the Ashmolean and various private collections.

The exhibition (running from 9th February to 1st May) is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue featuring artist biographies and an extensive bibliography. The first book on the subject, A History of Wood Engraving by Douglas Percy Bliss, focuses largely on European woodcuts. A later book with the same title, by Albert Garrett, is more comprehensive. Arthur M. Hind’s classic A History of Engraving and Etching covers all forms of engraving, though makes only passing mention of Bewick’s innovation.

Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti: Hope Full, Hope Less, Hope Well

Rupert Mann’s Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti: Hope Full, Hope Less, Hope Well, published last month, is the first comprehensive survey of street art in Bangkok. (Alisa Phommahaxay’s more limited Bangkok Street Art was published in 2019.) The book contrasts the insular graffiti tagging scene of the early 2000s with the emergence of more character-based street art in the early 2010s. Similar divisions persist over the increasing commercialisation of street art, and Mann addresses the nuances of these debates and places them in historical context. It is also available in a Thai edition, titled สตรีทอาร์ตกับกราฟฟิตีในกรุงเทพฯ และ ณ โฮปเวลล์ ความหวังที่หายไป.

The book’s main focus is the artistic takeover of Hopewell, the site of an abandoned elevated road and rail line. (Hopewell’s huge concrete pillars now stand as monuments to overambition, lethargy, and corruption.) The most interesting chapter covers political dissent, led by Headache Stencil’s pieces denouncing Prawit Wongsuwan (the deputy PM with a suspicious penchant for luxury watches) and Premchai Karnasuta (the head of ITD—which secured some of the country’s most lucrative infrastructure contracts—who organised an illegal hunting party), and includes a discussion of censorship and its circumvention.

Bangkok Street Art: Regard sur la scène urbaine thaïlandaise

Alisa Phommahaxay’s Bangkok Street Art: Regard sur la scène urbaine thaïlandaise (‘a look at the urban Thai scene’) was the first book on Bangkok street art and graffiti. It profiles seven artists, including Alex Face (“probably the most well-known Thai street artist in the world”), though it also features work by plenty of others (there are six pages devoted to Headache Stencil, for example).

The pocket-sized Bangkok Street Art was published in 2019, as part of the Opus Délits (‘criminal works’) series of monographs on urban artists. A second and more substantial book on the subject, Rupert Mann’s Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti: Hope Full, Hope Less, Hope Well (สตรีทอาร์ตกับกราฟฟิตีในกรุงเทพฯ และ ณ โฮปเวลล์ ความหวังที่หายไป), was published this year.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World

A mining company has lost its libel case against a journalist who implied it had arranged the killings of several senior staff. In his book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World, Tom Burgis describes the mysterious deaths of former employees of the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, which was being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office in the UK. Burgis also wrote an eight-page cover story about the case for the FT Weekend Magazine—headlined “Silent Witnesses”—published on 2nd October 2020.

In Kleptopia, Burgis alleges that two former ENRC staff died in suspicious circumstances, describing them as “the deceased bearers of ENRC’s secrets”. James Bethel and Gerrit Strydom died in their separate hotel rooms on the same night in 2015, during a road trip. Malaria was recorded as the cause of both men’s deaths, though Burgis points out that their malaria parasites had different genotypes, making it impossible that they were both infected at the same time. As he writes in his magazine piece, this begs the question: “if malaria did not kill the two men, what did?”

A third man associated with ENRC, James Bekker, died when his parked car caught fire in 2016. His body was found on the back seat. In Kleptopia, Burgis implies that he was silenced: “Bekker knew... that the valuation must have been inflated. And he had started telling people as much.” In the FT Weekend Magazine, Burgis alleges that Bekker was the victim of a contract killing: “local crime gangs claimed to have a source who said a contract on Bekker’s life had been paid out.”

ENRC sued Burgis and HarperCollins, who published Kleptopia, though the case was dismissed at yesterday’s High Court hearing in London, and any potential appeal was denied. The judge ruled that ENRC was not defamed by Burgis, as a corporation cannot be held legally responsible for murder. Speaking outside court, Burgis said: “I’m delighted that this attempt to censor Kleptopia has failed.”

10 ราษฎร

Five plainclothes police officers made an unannounced inspection of the new 1932 People Space Library at Wat Thong Noppakhun in Bangkok today. They confiscated a copy of 10 ราษฎร (‘10 people’), which features portraits by Chalermpol Junrayab of ten activists charged with lèse-majesté.

One of the officers returned the book a few hours later, claiming that he had merely taken it for his young son to read. 10 ราษฎร is part of a series of eight children’s picture books investigated by the Ministry of Education last year.

The Monarchy and Thai Society

Thai police raided the offices of Same Sky Books this morning, looking for copies of Arnon Nampa’s booklet The Monarchy and Thai Society (สถาบันพระมหากษัตริย์กับสังคมไทย). (Its English title comes from an authorised online translation by PEN.) Around thirty officers searched the premises; they didn’t find any copies of the booklet, though they obtained a court order to confiscate Same Sky editor Thanapol Eawsakul’s mobile phone and computer instead.

10,000 copies of the booklet were seized from Same Sky last year, and their offices were also raided in 2020. Thanapol was one of many anti-military intellectuals subjected to ‘attitude adjustment’ in 2014, and he was also questioned by the military in connection with the distribution of Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra calendars in 2016.

The Monarchy and Thai Society is one of three booklets written by anti-government protesters, published in the colours of the Thai flag. The others are The Day the Sky Trembled (ปรากฏการณ์สะท้านฟ้า 10 สิงหา; also translated by PEN) and บทปราศรัยคัดสรรคดี 112 (‘speeches on 112’).

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations was first published in 1855, with expanded editions released every ten years or so. Its chief competitor—The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Alice Mary Smyth—first appeared almost ninety years later. (My first edition copy of Smyth’s book was published with corrections in 1942.)

Bartlett’s serves as a comprehensive cultural history, covering not only literature (Hamlet: “To be, or not to be: that is the question”) but also political speeches (the Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”), interview soundbites (Princess Diana: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”), and film dialogue (Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects”). The eighteenth edition, edited by Geoffrey O’Brien, was published in 2012.

I have a rather niche non-transferable skill: correctly predicting the pull quotes that will be reported by news organisations after interviews and speeches. It’s also highly satisfying, when conducting interviews for publication, if the interviewee says something that makes an ideal pull quote. Effectively, Bartlett’s collects the pull quotes that stand the test of time, and a new (nineteenth) edition will be released later this year.

Many reference books have migrated online, where they can be more easily searched and updated. But print editions of dictionaries of quotations remain necessary, as online quote databases are filled with paraphrases and misattributions. (This has been parodied in an online meme: a fake quote from Abraham Lincoln warning people not to believe what they read on the internet.)

In a 1993 Quote... Unquote newsletter, Nigel Rees described the problem of “Churchillian Drift”, whereby quotations are commonly misattributed by default to either Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw. But even when their attributions are correct, most quotation websites provide no context whatsover: publication dates and sources are rarely cited, making annotated dictionaries such as Bartlett’s essential resources.

#WhatsHappeningInThailand และแล้วความหวังก็ปรากฏ

#WhatsHappeningInThailand และแล้วความหวังก็ปรากฏ (‘and then hope appeared’) is the first book to document the anti-government protest movement that began in Bangkok two years ago. Journalist Karoonporn Chetpayark gives her reflections on covering the demonstrations, accompanied by Asadawut Boonlitsak’s photographs of the protests. The book covers a period of exactly a year, from the rally at Democracy Monument on 18th July 2020 to the first anniversary of that event last year, when protesters were met with a much more violent police response.

VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever 2021:The Complete Guide to Movies on All Home Entertainment Formats

VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever 2021: The Complete Guide to Movies on All Home Entertainment Formats, edited by Michael J. Tyrkus, is the final edition of the last remaining film guide in print. VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever first appeared in 1990 and was updated annually, though the 2022 edition was cancelled by the publisher. With reviews of almost 30,000 films released on video, and over 2,000 pages, the 2021 edition was approaching the physical limits of a manageable single-volume book. In fact, the total number of films in recent editions had been gradually declining, as obscure older films were deleted to make room for new releases.

The annual film guide format was pioneered in 1958 by Steven H. Scheuer, who reviewed 5,000 titles in his TV Movie Almanac and Ratings. A decade later, in 1969, came Scheuer’s first competitor, Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies, and after another decade Leslie Halliwell launched his Halliwell’s Film Guide. This triumvirate ruled the roost for another decade, until smaller guides such as Elliot’s Guide to Films on Video (by John Elliot) and The Virgin Film Guide were published in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (The Virgin guide was notable for its lengthy reviews of significant films. On the other hand, Elliot even stooped to reviewing some of the more outré ‘video nasties’.)

The next wave of film guides was dominated by major magazine publishers. The Empire Film Guide followed the Virgin formula, while the Time Out Film Guide and the Radio Times Guide to Films both aimed to be as comprehensive as possible. Time Out found room for more independent and arthouse titles, while the Radio Times adopted an even-handed reviewing style, perhaps to differentiate itself from the more opinionated Halliwell’s Film Guide. The Radio Times Film Guide also had a little-known predecessor: Derek Winnert’s Radio Times Film and Video Guide, which was pulped after a plagiarism lawsuit from the publishers of Halliwell’s.

After the boom came the bust, and—like other printed reference books—the annual film guide eventually became an endangered species. 1992 saw the final edition of Scheuer’s book (retitled Movies on TV and Videocassette). The Virgin and Empire guides ended in 2005 and 2007, respectively. The last Halliwell’s Film Guide came out—somewhat contentiously—in 2007, and the brand died an ignominious death the following year with The Movies That Matter. Maltin’s book was last updated in 2014 (retitled Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide). Time Out’s guide ceased publication in 2012, and the Radio Times’s followed suit in 2017.

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli:The Epic Story of the Making of ‘The Godfather’

There are six books on my shelves about the making of The Godfather: The Godfather Family Album, The Official Motion Picture Archives, The Annotated Godfather, The Godfather Notebook, The Godfather Book, and now Mark Seal’s Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of ‘The Godfather’. As Seal acknowledges in his preface, “The Godfather has spawned its own massive field of study, a trove of books, articles, documentaries...” Some familiar production anecdotes are inevitably duplicated throughout these six books, though each title also provides ample original material, and each has a different approach to the making of the film.

What distinguishes Seal’s new book? Firstly, it has an extended interview with Francis Ford Coppola (who admits that, “at the root of it all, I was terrified”). Also, one chapter quotes extensively from a stenographer’s transcript of a six-hour pre-production meeting. This document is a valuable primary source, as it accurately records exactly what was said at the time, such as Coppola’s explanation of the film’s opening line: “Just starting with, ‘I believe in America,’ because it’s what the whole movie is about.” Previously, Seal wrote a Vanity Fair article on the making of the film for the magazine’s 2009 Hollywood issue, and an oral history of Pulp Fiction for the 2013 Hollywood issue.

The King of Bangkok

The King of Bangkok, the English-language edition of the Italian graphic novel Il Re di Bangkok, was published last month. A Thai edition was released last year, retitled ตาสว่าง (ta sawang). The book was written by Claudio Sopranzetti and Chiara Natalucci, with illustrations by Sara Fabbri, and is the product of meticulous ethnographic and archival research into Thai political and cultural history. The English edition features several new appendices, including a timeline of political events giving extra context to the narrative.

There is also an extensive interview with the authors, in which they discuss their goal of counteracting the ‘Teflon’ effect, whereby Thailand’s violent political climate is so successfully expunged from its international image by the Ministry of Tourism, “one of the most effective propaganda machines in the country.” The interview also touches on the book’s slightly censored Thai translation: “The solution we finally adopted in Thai was to cover three particularly sensitive sentences with a black line, a strategy used by progressive Thai filmmakers to pass state censorship while indexing its presence and effects.”

Surrealism Beyond Borders

The Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition, currently on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will transfer to London’s Tate Modern next year. Curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, it’s the first exhibition to consider Surrealism from a global perspective. As the foreword to the exhibition catalogue explains, it “moves away from a Paris-centered viewpoint to shed light on Surrealism’s significance around the world from the 1920s until the late 1970s.”

The 400-page catalogue, published in October, includes essays on Surrealism in Egypt, Cuba, Japan, Mexico, Syria, China, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, and Thailand. (Apinan Poshyananda also covered Thai Surrealism in Modern Art in Thailand.) While not as definitive as Gérard Durozoi’s monumental History of the Surrealist Movement (Histoire du mouvement surréaliste), the Surrealism Beyond Borders catalogue is unique in its extensive international coverage of Surrealist art. (Maurice Nadeau wrote the first history of Surrealism in 1944, Histoire du surréalisme, though it was not translated into English until twenty years later, as The History of Surrealism.)

With its expansion of Surrealism’s geographical boundaries, Surrealism Beyond Borders follows in the footsteps of the Futurism and Futurisms (Futurismo e futurismi) and International Pop exhibitions and catalogues, which undertook similar internationalisations of Futurism and Pop Art, respectively. Earlier, Norma Broude’s book World Impressionism examined the worldwide impact of Impressionism, and Robert Rosenblum’s Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art considered Cubism from an American and pan-European perspective. (Incidentally, the first two editions of Rosenblum’s book, published by Abrams with tipped-in colour plates, are superior to the subsequent reprints.)