Lehrer’s job in putting this biography together was to present evidence of Bleu Mobley, the man and his books, side by side: “Now it’s up to each reader to decide whether Mobley is an important man of letters or a sell-out, a champion of the voiceless, or an elitist hypocrite, the conscience of America, or an ungrateful traitor. And if his story is a parable of the rise and fall of a culture, or a swan song for the book itself as a medium?”

A Life in Books is a bit like a Russian Matryoshka doll. Nested within the tale of Mobley's life are 101 book covers and 34 excerpts that read like short stories. “Mobley claims to have never written about himself,” Lehrer says, falling into his voice as third-party biographer. “Yet in this juxtaposition of memoir and monograph we discover him and the people he loves sluicing through all his books, however obliquely.”

Lehrer skillfully follows Bleu’s life as writer and designer. The fake author’s first book—which he composed and printed in the letterpress shop of his junior high school—is about a magical experience he had one day, watching the sunset with his manic-depressive artist mother at a marshland in New Jersey. Lehrer’s real-life wife, the actress and oral historian Judith Sloan, actually performs the whole text of that 14-page book during his live presentations. “It draws people in right away to the idea that Mobley creates books as a way of making sense of the world around him,” Lehrer says.

Since he cannot afford to tour with an entire cast, Lehrer has produced short video vignettes. In the filmed version of Bleu’s 1998 novel No More Mrs. Niceguy: Confessions of a Nice Catholic Girl, actress and performance poet Caridad de la Luz, a.k.a. La Bruja, plays Paula Martinez. A dutiful daughter, wife, mother, and church member, Paula is diagnosed with cancer and soon discovers her own voice through the transformative power of hard-earned rage. The novel grows out of the experience of Bleu’s daughter Frida being diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly blood disease. After three years—going to scores of doctors, dozens of labs, too many clinics, treatment centers, and hospitals—Frida becomes an expert at waiting her turn, but impatient when it comes to being bullshitted. “Paula isn’t Frida, just like Bleu isn’t me,” Lehrer says, “but La Bruja’s moving performance helps demonstrate Bleu’s use of fiction as way of getting at the truth.”

Other films include the music group Betty performing an excerpt of Bleu’s 2002 epic-length rant I Am Not an Issue, and beat box artist Chesney Snow reciting the poem If This Scar Were a Ladder from Bleu’s final book, Cell By Cell. He also created animations of some of the works like Bleu’s first children’s story How Bad People Go Bye Bye, a pull-out, pop-up book on the history of capital punishment. (The films and animations will be included in an enhanced ebook edition of A Life in Books currently in production with the help of a Film and Electronic Media grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.)

Who is Bleu? His Polish-born grandfather, Mordechai Jacobson, lived as a Jewish rag merchan on the Lower East Side and sometimes used an Anglicized name, Jake Mobley. Bleu was given his first name not because he was a particularly sad-looking baby but rather, according to his mother, because he was one-quarter French and was born with a distinctly blue complexion.