One in three million
When James Baldwin came to dinner at Leonard
and Lisa Baskin’s house in the early ’80s, Baldwin had seen
and been greatly moved by Baskin’s images of Othello. They
decided then that Baldwin would do a book with Baskin’s Gehenna Press,
and that Baskin would create a portfolio of etchings for the book based
on photos from different periods of Baldwin’s life. On its completion,
two years after Baldwin’s death in 1987, Gypsy & Other Poems
became a memorial volume.
In December, at what Lisa Baskin, the artist’s widow, calls a “sweet dedication ceremony,” the W.E.B. Du Bois Library celebrated the acquisition of the book as its three millionth volume.
Gypsy & Other Poems is a lovely object, the covers a repeating design in blacks and grays that resembles rows of winged creatures. The pages are a heavy, cream-colored, untrimmed paper, with the poems in an elegant, readable type. At the back, printed on papers of differing colors, are the Baskin portraits of Baldwin through the years – innocent, laughing, intense, tragic.
Two lines from “For Earl,” a poem to Baldwin’s younger brother, express the poet’s – or anyone’s – regret at an early death:
I wish I had known more
Than love ever knows, in time.
