In Which A Hermitage Within A Beacon Leads Us Back To The Rightful Path

Buy A Fucking Book

by WILL HUBBARD

Something important is happening in Beacon, NY, and it has nothing to do with drowsy minimalist art or the highly roller-bladable collossus in which the DIA Foundation has enshrined it. It is a thing that feels big despite bearing all the accoutrements of inconsequentiality; something concentrated and rare that New York City could never produce because New York City can only initiate diffusions.

If you live in New York and love poetry or printed matter, you may have already heard about Jon Beacham's exquisite Hermitage bookstore just off Main Street in Beacon, a town some 60 nautical miles north from the George Washington Bridge. And if you have made the easy trip up from the city by car or train you know what a singular pleasure it is to speak with Beacham about (and spend an hour or more perusing) his small but expertly chosen collection of poetry and art books.

The store itself occupies the first floor of a hundred-year-old house that once served as the business office for two now-decrepit coal silos that stand about ten feet downhill of its front porch. It is also, Beacham told me, the house in which Melanie Griffith was filmed topless in Robert Benton's 1994 Paul Newman film, Nobody's Fool. (One gets the sense that the 16 mm prints Beacham publicly screens in the backyard are different types of affairs.)

The first thing you notice when walking into Hermitage are two parallel walls bearing some thirty or so plastic-encased paperback books that I presumed (wrongly, as you will see) were the jewels of the collection. My eyes immediately fell on an original trade pocket edition of Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General at Big Sur—a delicious oddity for the die-hard Brautigan fan. First editions of Patchen, Rexroth, Nabokov, Lowry. On shelves below, and in the room adjoining, are less rare (but still almost impossible to find when you want them) paperback editions of indispensible Henry Miller, Apolinnaire, Gertrude Stein, Faulkner, and Valery.

Then there are books, (Jon will hand you recommendations, go upstairs and get alternate editions of what you like), that I never thought I'd see in waking life. A first edition of Robert Creeley's only short story collection, The Gold Diggers, printed for his own Divers Press in Palma de Mallorca by Mossén Alcover with original, breathtaking cover art by Dan Rice. A like-new copy of Cid Corman's Origin magazine (#2) that became the gathering place of Charles Olson, Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and others now remembered (however loosely) as the Black Mountain poets. Fairly complete offerings from small but important presses of the 1960's like Ron Padgett's Full Court Press, Jonathan William's Jargon Society, and the Donald Allen's Four Seasons Foundation. All of the original three seperate books comprising Joe Brainard's lyric (and comic) masterwork—I Remember, I Remember More, and More I Remember More.

The inventory is so delightfully rarified at Hermitage (Beacham's are the editions that you didn't know existed because everything from this seminal era in American letters is now either 'Collected', 'Selected', or out of print entirely) that I have a hard time thinking of it as a 'store' at all. A bookstore, in the senses I know it, is either a place you have a reasonably good chance of finding what you've come for (Borders, Amazon), or a place where you have a fairly remote chance of discovering something that validates your visit (most used bookshops).

At Hermitage, if you share Beacham's love of American poetry around the middle of the 20th century, the feeling is more akin to being in a small, well-curated museum. Books are either warmly familiar or a elicit the pleasant surprise that they've existed all this time without your knowledge. If something is completely unfamiliar it represents not an extraneity attributable to the infinite range and diversity of literature itself, but a gap in your own learning that is easily and happily filled. And what makes this proposition almost lunatic is that in this museum everything is for sale for prices that, given the circumstances, are jaw-droppingly low.

Of course, I also hate to call Beacham's shop a 'museum' because of all the implications of prohibition that such a classification entails. While the critically-acclaimed modern art museum down the street makes you feel privileged to observe its wonders in their 'natural' and 'intended' setting, the Hermitage goes a step further by encouraging the patron to take the ideas—whether or not a purchase is made—out into the world. While the DIA museum enthrones and fortifies its art against the pressures of historical perspective, Beacham's masterful curation offers up its treasures for perpetual and rigorous judgement, a communicative medium rather than a purported locus of knowledge itself.

Driving this point home is the fact of, in a third room at the front of the store, Beacham's own small but thriving printing press, Merit Publications. He showed me one of his first projects—an elegant and simple printing of Cleveland poet d.a. levy's can we hold hands out here—and all the while sat at his typesetting desk meticulously preparing a (fully justified) page of a book that will be available from Merit sometime later this year. (Another room is devoted to periodic exhibitions of the books and ephemera of historically relevant small presses; currently showcased are some twenty pieces of ephemera from Bay Area stronghold Zephyrus Image, 1970-1982.)

Zephyrus ImageAt first it felt like no small tragedy that there are people in my life who will never get to visit Hermitage. But I am reminded that not all readers enjoy the level of engagement with—for lack of a better word, (Lowell stupidly called it the "uncooked")—'alternative' vein of American writing that makes Hermitage such a sanctified desitination.

For $50, I walked out with a Four Seasons Foundation edition of Charles Olson's (in)famous Beloit Lectures called Poetry and Truth, a gorgeous Full Court Press edition of Frank O'Hara's Selected Plays, a copy of Ron Padgett's translation of the poetry of Blaise Cendrars (that despite being published by the venerable and large U. California Press I've never been able to find in New York), and, for a history teacher friend, a good reading copy of William Carlos Williams' In The American Grain.

On the drive back to New York I began thinking about the name Beacham chose for his enterprise: "Hermitage." The place is, to some extent, a retreat wherein to be alone with one's thoughts—certainly it thus for it's proprietor, who told me of his longtime on-and-off residence in the great city to the south. And certainly Hermitage's atmosphere lends itself to quiet apprehension and contemplation. But I suspect that there will be many for whom Beacham's project becomes something of the opposite of what its name implies: a place which tends not toward silence but toward a gathering of harmonious voices.

Will Hubbard is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He edits Cap Gun Magazine and Press with Alex Carnevale, and can be reached at whubbard at gmail dot com.

Hermitage (www.hermitagebeacon.com)
12 Tioronda Avenue
Beacon, NY 12509
Thursday-Sunday, Noon-6pm and by appointment
845-765-1650
hermitagebeacon@gmail.com

MUSIC 2 WHICH 2 READ 2

"Tokyo" - The Books (mp3)

"The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice" - The Books (mp3)

"There Is No There" - The Books (mp3)

"Take Time" - The Books (mp3)

"Don't Even Sing About It" - The Books (mp3)