I’ve just published a new article in postmedieval! It describes how pirates informally reproduced Jack Spicer’s long poem The Holy Grail in the 1960s; along the way, I explore how different physical manifestations of Spicer’s poem have shown medievalising impulses in different ways.
This article arrived serendipitously: I wanted to read The Holy Grail and called up the earliest edition in the library system, only to find that it was a pirated copy.
I suspect there’s a good project waiting to be written exploring how printed copies of Spicer’s work grew less and less mainstream, both during and after his lifetime, and perhaps tracing how this relates—or at least compares—to premodern textual circulation. Most of the codexical and archival material survives in the USA, so it’s not a project for me. But if anyone wants to take it on, I hope my article and its bibliography might become a stepping stone!
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