Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Monkey's Marginalia No 17

Once again, I've collected enough random bits for another Monkey's Marginalia.

image from wikipedia.org 


1.  Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was first published in 1949.  Before Campbell wrote the work that became an inspiration for the likes of George Lucas, he had written A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in 1944, which, in part, was prompted by Campbell's finding parallels between Finnegans Wake and Thornton Wilder's play, The Skin of Our Teeth.  Originally Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson had written two articles for The Saturday Review about the Wilder play and Joyce's book.  The articles were originally published December 19, 1942 and February 13, 1943.
But back to Hero with a Thousand Faces.  Copyrighted by the Bollingen Foundation (which was named after the house of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Tower), the book was published by Meridian Books in 1955 which was a division of The World Publishing Company.  The Meridian edition comes with a volume number M22 with a cover designed by Alvin Lustig.  I found his covers for Summer and Smoke, The Great Gatsby, and Siddhartha in tune with the midcentury (20th century) design echoed in Ship of Theseus cover.

2.  The alternate version of chapter 10 found on Jen Heyward's tumblr blog reminded me of the Joseph Campbell book in this excerpt:

3.  Meridian Books published some other interesting titles such as: 
  • Codes and Ciphers, 1939
  • Secret Societies: Their Origin, History and Ultimate Fate, 1939
Additional titles from Meridian Books can be found through a Worldcat search and through the website on Lustig's work (link above).

4.  The Bollingen Foundation was set up by Paul Mellon initially to disseminate the works of Carl Jung; his wife was a great admirer of Jung.  It expanded to award fellowships to writers, artists and scientists; and it awared an annual prize for poetry.  In 1949, a firestorm errupted with the foundation when the prize was given to Ezra Pound.  The public in 1949 was well aware of Pound's political leanings and the poet, Robert Hillyer wrote a scathing rebuke of Jung, the Bollingen Foundation and Pound in the Saturday Review of Literature, as did Fredric Wertham, a pyschologist who was well known in the 1950s for his crusade against comic books, although later researchers would accuse him of cherry-picking picking his data to prove his theories.  In 1950, the prize was awarded to Wallace Stevens, but the damage was done.  The Bollingen Foundation became inactive in 1968.

5,  The Bollingen Foundation, in its initial focus to print the works of Carl Jung and disseminate them, published a large number of books before it was shuttered.  The I Ching and a second volume of essays regarding the I Ching were Bollingen series numbers 19.1 and 19.2.  Series 20 was the work of Carl Jung; volume20.19 in the series was the bibliography of Jung's written works. Series number 22 was a book of essays called The Science of Mythology.  Series number 42 was The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann which prominently featured an ouroboros on the cover in early editions.