Gysin, Brion ~ The Process

First UK printing : Jonathan Cape, London: 1970

8vo.., black publisher’s boards lettered in gilt to spine with publisher’s device to foot; top-stained grey; together in the vibrant pictorial dustwrapper featuring designs by the Moroccan artist Hamri; The BOOK essentially a near Fine copy, just one tiny bump to the corner of lower board; the near Fine WRAPPER lightly rubbed along folds, with some minor darkening to the backstrip; some dark marks affecting verso only. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. The British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices Brion Gysin is perhaps best known today for his collaboration on the ‘cut up’ technique with William S. Burroughs. He was also the inventor (along with the computer programmer Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a flickering art device which was deliberately designed to be viewed with the eyes closed. The Process was his first full-length novel, and follows the story of a ‘pot-smoking professor’ named Ulys O. Hanson, who sets out on a pilgrimage across the Sahara Desert. On his travels, he is taught how to pass as a Moor, and falls in with the richest woman in creation and her seventh husband. Over the course of the novel, the reader becomes aware that what the protagonist is experiencing is a hallucination. Created using the same cut-up technique which he would later become known for, Gysin’s work was celebrated for its poetic descriptions of Northern Africa, as well as the history of Sufi culture, Gysin’s encounters with the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Sufi trance musicians from the mountains of Northern Morocco. Gysin had first hired the group to perform at his restaurant ​​The 1001 Nights, which he had opened in Tangier in 1954. The author himself described the book as "a wild tale of adventure in the Sahara, on one level, and the story of a search for self, on the other.” In many ways, the work was semi-autobiographical. Although set in the Sahara, the narrative is interrupted by evocations of the Canadian West in which he was born, and one of the central characters, Mya Himmer, remembers a childhood spent in Canada’s open spaces. “Each of the central characters in The Process is Gysin, and yet none of them is”, John Geiger writes in his biography of the author. “The novel is a cut-up of memory and pure invention”. A very fresh copy, scarce in the wrapper.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine