Hyde Brothers Books, Fort Wayne, Indiana, a huge sprawling open shop and one of the highlights of my cross-America drive last summer. Reminded now of Sam Hyde's kindness (Dealer discount! Storeroom in the next building over promptly unlocked! Ethel Wilson American PBO with a racy cover, and stacks of Charles Williams crime fiction!) and the incredible maze of traffic I had to navigate to find the shop in the first place, by this Jack Spicer letter, which I just found on line:

"Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the capital of Nitrogen. All streets end there. No buses arrive there except those that carry direct mail or cargoes of Negroes en route on the Underground Railway. There has never been a city made up of so many arms.

You can see Troy, New York in the distance.

Christmas poems and lovers' holly branches grow there in the winter as well as stuffings of turkeys, memory pie, and little droppings of passing angels. It is not reached by air.

Fort Wayne, Indiana, has industries and tournament golf, and blocks and blocks of weeping buildings. It is built on high ground above the slough of utter unwinding. The birds which all look like seagulls or cormorants in its artificial sky finish singing when the day is over. At night they look like elephants. People watch them with telescopes as they hover.

In Fort Wayne, Indiana the trees are dying and you can see footprints in the rather wet snow. People take their motor scooters to bed with them. Come back to California, come back to California every map-maker, every map-maker is pleading to James Alexander.

'What do the sparrows eat in the winter?' I asked someone once in Minneapolis. He replied, 'They eat horse turds if they can find them.'

There are acres of cold snow.

Love,
Jack"

- posted by cjb @ 9:05 PM