April 2020 I participated in my first online auction. The item I was after (and won!) was the original art used on the cover of Asimov’s Lucky Starr paperbacks from the late 70s. Today, I’m in the middle of another auction, this time for a beautiful portfolio of Barbarella prints signed by Jean-Claude Forest. No. 543 of 777 produced. It’s listed at €60 – €80, but based on how the first 70-or-so lots have gone so far (2 hours in) it will be much more than that. Auction started at 8 AM and at this rate my lot won’t come up until later this afternoon. I’ve set hourly alarms to remind me to check the progress.
Back in October of last year I started collecting different editions of the Barbarella comics. As my collection grew and my personal documentation–by language, year, format–expanded, I decided to create a public website to share all of that information, along with details from items I don’t own, and so created The Barbarella Library. The website is a work-in-progress because, as I’ve found while chasing various and more rare editions, Barbarella has an unexpectedly rich bibliography.
The comics, written by Jean-Claude Forest, first appeared in eight chapters from 1962 to 1963 in the French magazine Vand then collected and published in 1964 by Le Terrain Vague in oversized hardback. Eric Losfeld was the publisher of both the magazine and the book. The stories were first translated in English in 1965 and 1966 in the American literary magazine Evergreen Review–along with works by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Robbe-Grillet–then compiled in an oversized hardback edition. Both magazine and book were published by Grove Press.
Three books followed the initial one. Les Coleres du Mange Minutes (The Rage of the Minute Eaters) in 1974, Le Semble-Lune (The False-Moon) in 1977, and Le Miroir aux Tempetes (The Storm Mirror) in 1982. Most of these four have been translated into English, German, Italian, Polish, and Czech. The presence of the last two languages surprised me, however I’ve been unable to find any other translations so far. “Barbarella hunting” has become a weird pastime for me so eventually they’ll show up somewhere.
I continue working on the site because, aside from missing editions and some missing photos, there are a lot of features I’d like to add and bugs that need addressing. I had first thought of using Drupal or WordPress or Mediawiki to create the site, but building from the ground up felt more fun. And it was… also pretty humbling at times.
It’s weird, but Barbarella has stopped really meaning anything to me except for a concept. She’s become kind of an abstract space-lady separate from the somewhat nonsensical stories (the first book feels like it was completely improvved, almost from page-to-page), and I guess that’s what she was to the French public at the time? The closer I got to the nonsense, the more she rose above it and became an archetype despite herself.
A few long time ago (a little over 12 years to be whatever) several geek websites posted a link to a site where photos of a sci-fi convention called Westercon from the 1980 event were posted. The people in the photos were so 80s and earnest and lo-fi that you couldn’t help but be jealous of them and the time they were living in. The geek sites posted additional links to other relevant parties who had valuable/interesting additions to the conversation or who had actually lived through those halcyon days, and each site had their own discussion threads where yet more links were posted and memories from those who had actually been at that convention were retold. It was one of those moments that, meta-wise, made you wish you were a sociologist 200 years from now because there was just so much those photos and discussions revealed about a certain group at a certain time in history along with how they themselves remembered that history.
I thrive alone and so, even as the wife was not in her best place like most others in the world, though I was distraught by what the global “We” were going through, I could deal. Even before the pandemic I worked from home and spent many non-work hours in my office doing non-work things. Not necessarily a very guy thing but just a very introvert thing. I actually have fond memories of the isolation because within that isolation there was, without a better phrase to express it, a warm online camaraderie of artists who gave their time to create that warmth.
