A Documentation by Florian Vetsch The Garden by Paul Bowles

UPDATED BELOW: Florian Vetsch speaks about Bowles on Henrik Möller’s podcast, based in Sweden. The podcast is in English.

“Paul Bowles wrote a short story called ‘The Garden’ in 1963 while staying in a picturesque Moroccan settlement on the Atlantic coast not far from Tangier. Three years later, in December 1966, Joseph McPhillips asked him to dramatize the story for students at the American School of Tangier. Bowles was in Thailand at the time, about to return to Morocco by ship. On his way back he wrote scenes for a play and airmailed them to McPhillips, who immediately started rehearsals.

“Following Bowles’s advice, McPhillip involved artists and writers such as Marguerite McBey, Ira Belline, Brion Gysin, and John Hopkins. The play was staged in Tangier in April 1967 but was never published. This documentation offers the original text of the play for the first time (translated as well into German) with illustrations that trace the play’s genesis from page to stage.” — Florian Vetsch

The volume published by bilgerverlag is a big, beautiful, hardcover production of 184 pages, bound in sewn folios, in a trim size of 8.25″ x 10.5″. Here’s a selection of two-page spreads showing the rich motherlode of evocative documents and a freestyle book design. — JH

Inside *front cover, at left, and endpaper.*

*Pages 6 and 7* (showing, at left, Joseph McPhillips and John Hopkins on his BMW R50 ‘White Nile’).

CLICK TO ENLARGE — *Pages 12 and 13 (Table of Contents)*.

*Pages 18 and 19* (showing a poster design by Marguerite McBey).

*Pages 26 and 27* (showing Bowles’s typed letter of Dec. 27, 1966, to McPhillips from Chiangmai).

*Pages 56 and 57 (showing a stage diagram sketched by Brion Gysin)*.

*Pages 66 and 67 (showing the title page of the original story — subtitled ”A Parable” — and, at right, the dramatis personae with the list of props for the stage production).*

Postscript: April 1 — Florian Vetsch speaks about Bowles on Henrik Möller’s podcast, based in Sweden. The podcast is in English:

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