The DeCasseres Books

In 1936 Benjamin DeCasseres took it upon himself to try to publish as much of his own work as he could. He paid for the printing himself through “Blackstone Publishers.” In the following three years he published 23 booklets.

I have taken the titles and order from a bound collection of the books released at The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres. It was announced (see below) that there would be a total of 24 booklets in the series. There are, indeed, only 23 of the proposed 24 in the bound volumes, and I cannot find any resource that would lead me to believe any others were released.

A flyer promoting the booklets (seen above), found in a copy of Book No.11, has different titles for some of the booklets, and lists “Black Suns (Poems–Part 2) as the 24th booklet.

A postcard announcing “Book No. 17”, the third part of his Fantasia Impromptu was sent out in June of 1937:

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What follows is an index of the contents of each book. At some point each book will have its own page:

Exhibitionism: A New Theory of Evolution (1936, 32 pages)

Dedication:
Foreword
Numbered Sections 1-69

The Individual Against Moloch (1936)

Dedication:
Foreword
The Individualist
The Ideal Masquerade
Lullaby of the Molochs
“The Coming Slavery”
The Illusion of “Protagonists”
Pacifist Cant
The Economic Escape

Black Suns (1936, 68 pages)

Dedication:
Foreword
The Overlord
Walter
The Decoy
The Haunted House
Marche Funebre
Chimeras
Magical Night
Fantasia
In The Backyard Of Life
Man
Shelley
Imagination
Keats
Facts
The Tragic Bluffer
The Humorist
Dawn
Sleep
The Pickpocket
Vers Libre
A Son Of God
The Ideal
Miracles
Sea-Mania
Strayling
Ave, Zarathustra!
The Thief
Swinburne
The Vat
Masque of the Minutes

Minutes
A Pilgrim Minute
A Frozen Minute
A Desolate Minute
A Black Minute
A Brazen Minute
A Gray Minute
An Ironic Minute
A Murderous Minute
An Arcless Minute
A Mystic Minute
A Nameless Minute
An Anarch Minute
An Eternal Minute
A Passionate Minute
A Spectral Minute
A Narcotic Minute
A Twin-Born Minute
A Hypocrite Minute
A Cowled Minute
A Philosophic Minute
A Static Minute
A Super-Minute
The Final Minute

Salutation
Ingression

 

The Eternal Return (1936)

Dedication:
The Great Heresiarch

I. The Errand
II. The Temptation
III. The Heretic

The Frame-Up
Roman Numerals I-III
Masque A La Satan
Aristophanes On Calvary
The Culture Fete

I. Scene: The ABYSMAL HEIGHTS
II. Scene: HERE AND THERE
III.

The Eternal Return
Arcvad the Terrible

 

The Eighth Heaven (1936)

Dedication:
Foreword
(insert contents)

 

Jules DeGaultier & LaRochefoucauld (1936, 47 pages)

Dedication: To Maurice Maeterlink Poet, Mystic and Great Prosateur
Foreword
Jules De Gaultier: Magician of Knowledge
LaRochefoucauld: Anatomist of the Ideal

 

The Elect and the Damned (1936, 64 pages)

Dedication: “To BIO Effulgent and Elect”
Montaigne
Robinson Jeffers: Tragic Terror
Why I desired the Snark for the Boojum
The Space-Dream
James Branch Cabell
Cabell and De Gaultier
Back to Boyland!
Damn the Immortality of the Soul!

Saint Tantalus (1936)

Dedication: “To John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys”
Foreword
The Venom of Idealists
Good and Evil: The Ghastly Juggernauts
Dissolving Zeniths
Men and Women: Nature’s Folly
The Species-Ghost
The Unconscious
Hate

The Adventures of an Exile (1936, 56 pages)

Dedication: “To Havelock Ellis Conoissuer of Confessions, The Montaigne of the Modern World”
Foreword
The Exile
Bacchus
Helena

I Dance With Nietzsche (1936)

Dedication: “Dr. Oscar Levy, Editor of the First Complete and Authorized English Translation of the Works of Nietzsche”
Foreword
I Dance with Nietzsche

Broken Images (1936)

Dedication: “To Colonel Wilmot E. Ellis, U.S. Army (Retired), Cementing our Mutual Admiration for Jules de Gaultier”
Foreword
The Dynamiters
From the Cusp of the Moon
Demos: Creative Stupidity
“My Hypocrite Brother!”
The Necessity for Human Ignorance
In Praise of God

 

Raiders of the Absolute (1937)

Dedication: “To Leon Dabo, Master of Space, Raider of the Absolute”
Foreword
Charles Fort: The Puck of Mysticism
Lewis Carroll: Boojum Triumphant
Spengler: Obfuscated Thinking
Rabelais: God’s Belly Laughter

 

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 1) (1937, 52 pages)

Spinoza Against the Rabbis (1937, 58 pages)

Dedication: “To my Wife, Bio DeCasseres, a Spinizist Both in Thought and Action”
Foreword
Spinoza Against the Rabbis

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 2) (1937, 46 pages)

Chiron the Centaur (1937, 59 pages)

Dedication: “To Robinson Jeffers, The Tragic Centaur”
Foreword
Chiron the Centaur
Ouspensky: Raiding the Infinite
The Reversion of Pentheus
Shakespeare: Tragic Nihilist
The Freudian Year
Brand: Icarus of the Ego
Codpiece

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 3) (1937, XX pages)

The Last Supper (advertised as “Mirth-’o-God”) (1937, 62 pages)

Subtitled: “Serio-Comic High Requiem Intellectual Mass for the Repose of the Human Race”
Dedication: “To my friend Arthur Leonard Ross”
Foreword
The Last Supper

The Second Fall of Man
An Informal Autopsy
A Conference of Pessimists
The Mantle of Prospero
God, As Usual
Who Killed Cock Robin?
The Theory of Collective Suicide
Was it the Best of All Possible Worlds?
“Open, Sesame!”
The Dream of an Editorial Writer
Puck Confers
Demos-Machiavelli
The Penetrators
Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony
The Dilettantes of Paradises
The Flight to Saturn

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 4) (1937, 50 pages)

Sir Galahad: Knight of the Lidless Eye (1938, 64 pages)

Dedication: “I dedicate this book to the rare few who early in life have the good sense to rid themselves of the friendship of the many.”

– James McNeil Whistler in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”

Foreword

 

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 5) (1938, 47 pages)

Saint Tantalus (Part 2) (1938? [undated], 60 pages)

Dedication: To Carlo De Fornaro
Foreword
Philosophic Spleen
Nihilism: The Fatal Spite
The Root of the Spleen
Grinning Goals
Truth: The Mocker in the Mist
Happiness: The Invention of Momus
The Call of Dionysus
The Call of Maya
The Intellect: St. Elmo Fire

Fantasia Impromptu (Part 6) (1938, 53 pages)