Gass, William H. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. TriQuarterly Supplement Number Two (1968): n.p.
I recently bought and read the Dalkey Archive Press edition of Gass’s novella (the only one currently in print), but it does not replicated the colored pages of the original edition, so I was happy to find this copy for a reasonable price–$30.00–from one of amazon.com’s independent sellers.
It is a beautiful piece of printing craftsmanship. There are four sections: blue, yellow, red, and white, with the first three printed on something akin to construction paper and the last printed on glossy paper like the entirety of the current edition. The book does not have page numbers, but as can be seen in the photographs below, the pages are visually different from one another to the point where it would be fairly easy to describe which page one was referencing in scholarship on the novella.
Here are some photographs of this fascinating object:
The front cover–only $1.50!
A view of the book with the different-colored sections visible.
The beginning of the blue section.
Some visual playfulness from the yellow section.
The end of the red section and the beginning of the white section.
