As a bookseller specializing only in Charles Bukowski, I spend a great deal of time cataloging his works for The Buk Shop. This is especially true when it comes to the hundreds of periodicals we carry.
In the beginning, I was fortunate to leverage the Bukowski Forum database for a lot of this information. It was created organically over several years and from that perspective it was also an interesting social experiment. And even though there were errors here and there, it was quite an achievement considering it wasn’t funded or associated with any institution.
Still, as an American History major myself, I often felt that a more scholarly approach was needed. Not because of errors or missing entries, but to add more legitimacy to a very important part of literary history.
So I’m happy (and relieved) to report this has finally happened with the release of Abel Debritto’s new book, A Catalog of Ordinary Madness: A Complete Bio-Bibliography of the Works of Charles Bukowski.
For those unfamiliar with Debritto’s work, he is unquestionably the preeminent Charles Bukowski scholar. Published in 2013 by Palgrave/MacMillan, his groundbreaking book Charles Bukowski. King of the Underground documented how literary magazines, underground newspapers and small press publications impacted Bukowski's early career. Debritto has also edited six major Bukowski collections for Ecco/HarperCollins, and his work and interviews have appeared in several literary and academic journals.
Published in July 2024 by Chatwin Books, A Catalog of Ordinary Madness is over 800 pages in length and is truly an invaluable tool for collectors, book sellers and academics alike. But it’s also great for Bukowski fans with over 400 unpublished stories about Bukowski from editors and publishers who worked with him. There’s also 112 pages of color photographs featuring images of various Bukowski works and magazines he appeared in.
Shortly after A Catalog of Ordinary Madness was published, Chatwin published a very important companion book, Every Piece of the Puzzle: A Comprehensive Index to the Published and Unpublished Writings of Charles Bukowski. It’s a fitting title because Debritto adds an important extra layer of detail for collectors and book sellers. The book is 213 pages in length, but it is printed in a small font, which saves a few trees while making it easier to handle.
Between the two books, there is an incredible amount of data that Debritto compiled at libraries and university archives over many years. This data can be used for many use cases, but let’s take periodicals as an example.
As both a collector and seller, my primary motivation when buying magazines is to find poems that were never collected in any books. I’m also interested in first appearances, especially when it comes to Bukowski’s most famous works.
I recently bought a magazine called The Blind Horse Review. The magazine states that issue “#one” of The Blind Horse Review was published in July 1992. Because it is a bibliography, Debritto lists all the periodicals in chronological order. So, you can skim through the book and find the magazine that way, or you can look up the magazine alphabetically in the index. This is handy because some magazines, especially in the mimeograph days, didn’t include a month or even a year in some cases.
Now that we’ve located the listing, let’s break down the information that’s provided:
That’s a lot of great information that would be helpful for many readers. However, as a collector and seller, I want to know more about the two poems themselves. That’s where Every Piece of the Puzzle comes in.
Now that we know the names of the works in The Blind Horse Review I, let’s look at the entry for the poem, Bad Number Time:
From the entry, I now know that this poem is not currently collected in any books and it was written on 4-15-1992, based on the manuscript date as noted by Bukowski. By the way, the poem Faulkner was uncollected too, so this magazine was a good find.
Although not relevant to these poems, when it comes to Bukowski, including the first few words of the work is very important. Bukowski was so prolific that he often unconsciously used the same title for different works. Let’s take the case of the title Fame, which Bukowski used twice for poems and two times for short stories between 1973-1993. Without knowing the first few words, you wouldn’t know which poem or short story the title actually refers to.
Now let’s look at how the two books help with first appearances. The poem Style is one of Bukowski’s most famous works and I’d like to know where it first appeared. So, first I look up the poem in Every Piece of the Puzzle:
I was surprised to find out there was a separate poem titled Style that remains uncollected, but it’s the second entry I’m interested in learning more about. The entries here tie back to individual entries in A Catalog of Ordinary Madness. The letters stand for different sections of the book. So far we’ve only looked at periodicals (section B), but we can see here that the poem also appeared in books (section A) and book contributions & anthologies (section C).
When I look up the entries in A Catalog of Ordinary Madness, I learn that the first book the poem appeared in was Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, which was published in 1972. I also discover that the first anthology it appeared in was Anthology of L.A. Poets, also published in 1972. It’s when I get to the periodical section that I find the answer: The poem first appeared New York Quarterly 9 in December 1971.
Sure, I’m a Bukowski geek and I love this stuff more than your casual reader. But the bottom line is that Debritto has made an invaluable contribution to literary scholarship with his new books. And Chatwin Books should also be commended for understanding the importance of these works and taking a chance in publishing them. In return, I think they can be assured that their imprint will be on the shelves of universities and libraries for many years to come.
