‘Pataphysical Meditations, or A Bibliographic Prank



By David A. Jordan (comment to author)

In January of his senior year at Stanford, Mike Munger, Class of ’62, and two co-conspiratorial students from his fraternity, Dave Commons and Pete Richardson, hacked (in a pre-technological sense) Green Library’s card catalogue and thus launched a prank on the Libraries which went partially unnoticed for decades and wasn’t entirely understood until Munger recently sent a full explanation to University Librarian Mike Keller.



It began when Commons and Richardson wrote a little book, ‘Pataphysical Meditations, under the nom de plume of Dargoman C. Basquí and containing pseudo-Beat poetry in the style of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There was an explanation that ‘Pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics; the table of contents referred to material which didn’t exist in the book; and the final page was a woodcut of a boy standing in a barrel with an apple on his head as a portrait of the author. In place of the missing material was a handwritten note stating: “Dear Mr. Homecrafft – I’m awfully sorry, but I swep up eight (8) pages of that philosophy book and burnt them. Sincerely yours, James Bindlestaff, Janitor” Richardson’s father, Munger explained, had a small printing press and a quirky hobby of printing bogus letter-heads, as well as eclectic works such as GLB and the Bubble Machine; A Plethora of Pantoums; Northern Ornamental Deciduous Evergreens with Leaves Opposite, Alternate; Scurvy; and The Voyages of Nicolaus de Graaf. Over the Christmas holidays Richardson took the rough draft home with him and printed up on his father’s press a dozen or so copies, although each one stated “edition limited to one copy” and identified the publisher as “The Vanishing Press, 1961.”



“Now what?” Munger wrote. “I decided it would be a good idea to smuggle a copy of ‘Pataphysical Meditations into the Stanford Library. I purloined a couple of index cards, reversed them, typed entries both by title and by author, made up a plausible Dewey Decimal number, and put the cards in appropriate places in the card catalogue. A copy of the book went into the stacks. So far, so good.”



Linda Sallander, Munger’s friend and fellow Stanford student, was working then in the freshman reserved book room. At that time freshman English classes had several different sections, including one on the Salem witchcraft trials. Linda had helped with the card catalogue caper, but now she became more integral to the plot by putting ’Pataphysical Meditations on the required reading list and placing a copy of the book on the reserve shelf.



“At this point l’affaire ‘Pataphysique took on its own dynamic,” Munger continued. “A confused and outraged freshman began raising hell in the reserved book room, waving the book around and demanding to know if anyone could make any sense of it, if this were a reasonable source document for freshmen to have to work with, etc. His fulminations soon reached the attention of The Powers That Be."



Munger vividly recalls the card catalogue librarian frantically searching for other bogus entries, while the matter was (once again in a pre-technological sense) going viral: “Then the high weirdness reached the attention of the director of the library. He found the whole affair to be rather interesting and made mention of it in a specialized journal which circulated among west coast university libraries. This in turn got the attention of the media and soon a reporter from Newsweek was prowling the campus trying to learn more. Maybe it was NBC. I forget. [Richardson thinks it might have been the New York Times Sunday Book Review.] By now, however, late in the spring quarter, everyone was ramping up for dead week and finals, and certainly did not have time to help a reporter trying to track down what was probably an apocryphal bit of derangement. Nothing more came of it and there matters rested.”



As postscript to the story, Munger added: “Some twenty years later I happened to be in Washington, DC, and with time on my hands decided to see what the Library of Congress was all about. For some inexplicable reason I did a search on ‘Pataphysical Meditations and hit pay-dirt. The information given to me noted that the book was in the rare book room at the Stanford Library, that this was the only known copy, and that ‘others are suspected.’ So there you have it. I am sure that Linda, Dave, and Pete all have a somewhat different Rashomon take on the whole thing, but that is the substance of the story. Maybe ‘Pataphysical Meditations is still there in the rare book room, snuggled up, perhaps, to the collected papers of Bernard De Voto.”



Indeed, the volume does reside in Special Collections today, alongside an only slightly less mysterious 1962 edition of the same work, in an expanded version adding a second pseudonymic author, Pragnenton R. Nortz, additional texts, deluxe illuminated initials, and the following introduction: “This first edition of 250 copies appears as a sort of explanatory sequel to the Vanishing Press’s first ‘Pataphysical Meditations, which was fiendishly introduced to an overwhelmingly appreciative California public by way of its illegal insertion into the Stanford University Library in January, 1962. (So great was the merit of ‘Pataphysical Meditations that two of its sixteen extant copies are now legally preserved in Stanford’s Rare Books Room…).” Pete Richardson has provided for this story an explanation of the sequel: “The second book, in the larger edition, was The ‘Pataphysical Primer, which I think Dave and I printed one summer in Gurnee before school was to start—probably in August of 1961 or ‘62. T’PP included more poems. After that we hopped into his green Beetle and drove out to California via Colorado, I remember, when the high mountain aspens were in their glory. We had dozens of copies of T’PP that were still in loose-leaf form because we’d run out of time. In Palo Alto we arranged with a local printer to have the copies ‘stitched,’ and then we found to our dismay when we picked them up that ‘stitching’ to this shop (or perhaps to the trade itself, for all I know) meant just stapling with a big saddle stapler. Oh, well—nothing to be done at that point. We carted them over to the Stanford Bookstore, which had expressed interest in selling them as local products. I have no idea whether they sold out, but I think I remember that there was no big demand for a second printing.” “Quite clever,” commented Roberto Trujillo, head of Special Collections, when he learned of the prank. “Given their design, we’d probably like to think of them as ‘artists’ books’ now.” If the Stanford copy could be proven to be the unique proto-artist’s book, then the prank would be on the pranksters, as it would be of very great value to collectors. In his reply to Munger, University Librarian Mike Keller said, “The cards you placed in our old catalog must have gotten converted to machine readable form by a vendor and then sent algorithmically to the Library of Congress. The book shows up in our on-line catalog without a Dewey class number, but with a Library of Congress classification mark. I do not know our history well enough to identify the date the switch was made from Dewey to LC, so another minor mystery to be solved. More anon and really thanks for sending me the skinny on this prank. It is a good one & much appreciated. Perhaps you and the others involved would let this story be told in the Libraries’ ReMix newsletter. All best and still chuckling...”



Thus ends the prank unnoticed. Thanks sincerely to alumnus Mike Munger for sending along such an entertaining episode in the history of Green Library. The card catalogues are extinct, but ‘Pataphysical Meditations has endured.

