In 2002, photographer David Wilcox shot this picture of an old typewriter he and I stumbled across in an abandoned factory building in the Olneyville section of Providence. It became the cover image of my first book of short stories, Something Grand.
Here is a link.
https://www.amazon.com/Something-Grand-John-Flynn/dp/0967824222
Years later, it was re-released as an E-book. Here is the link.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Something-Grand-John-Flynn-ebook/dp/B008RYZ164
For the E-book cover, I used a photo I'd taken in 2004 of an art installation in Bryant Park in Manhattan. This installation featured cage upon cage chock full of typewriters of all kinds. Really quite something to see, though as one who learned to type on a manual without labelled keys, it made me feel sad to realize how completely a particular era that was once part of my life had, indeed, passed.
I haven't seen or spoken with David Wilcox for a couple of decades now. Back in those days, young, inquisitive, meddlesome, we had time enough to roam Providence as it was going through its last days with Vincent Buddy Cianci as mayor. We knew then the city was about to change and would never again be the inexpensive and sometimes rather twisted refuge for artists and miscreants such as ourselves. The two of us shot many photos of what we deemed "lost" Providence. Here are eight of them which I shot, processed and printed at that time.
Though we could have, we didn't pilfer that typewriter in Olneyville or anything else out of that old factory. Today, the brick building is part of a complex of shops and apartments, all refurbished. Olneyville is, in general, a bit more gentrified. Providence is too, but that can be said of most cities where I have paid rent.
David was managing a photo lab and decided to process and print some black and white images of the typewriter, both of us liking the way some of its missing keys looked like teeth that had been knocked out of its face. This battered look fit the nature of the stories in my collection. As I had already completed it, and had published a number of them in small magazines, I asked David if he would be interested in helping me lay out a book and act as my publisher. We formed B-Movie Press and hunted down a printer in Pawtucket who was willing to produce 200 copies by hand on a letterpress machine.
As I recall,the printer liked us, so he didn't charge us for his labor, only for the ink and paper,with the total cost coming to about $1.50 per book.
The neon above is part of a sign which I believe can still be seen in Olneyville.
What the Something Grand collection features is the first short story I ever published, The Tire, which appeared in Aldeberan magazine in 1980.
The title story earned an award in 1990 from the HG Roberts Foundation of Kansas State University.
This photo above, a reflection of the political climate at that time, was taken from a window display in the Downcity neighborhood of Providence.
David enjoyed laying out this book and designing its cover and overall look back when such work was not done easily, quickly, or with a computer. He did everything by hand with rulers, sharp pencils, a keen eye, graph paper and an Exacto knife. He shot and printed the photo in a darkroom after his usual working hours in a photo lab which no longer exists. It was situated on Weybosset Avenue just a block from Axelrod's Music shop, another landmark from that era which is long gone.
The back cover image seen here was taken on a London rooftop, specifically on Upper Berekely Street, by my friend, Rick Corbo.
I recall our inspiration for the photo came
after the night he and I went to see the midnight showing of the film that put David Lynch on the map.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead
It was in the Odeon, Kensington, I believe, (I could be wrong) where we sat in the balcony and audience members could drink and smoke, and we enjoyed a potent contact high while viewing Eraserhead for the first time.
Inspired by this film, raving about it as we walked the London streets back to our rooming house flat at four in the morning, we hatched a plan to sneak on to the rooftop so Rick could try his own hand at creating some urban black and white imagery. Little did I know that over 22 years later I would find the photo in a shoebox and decide to use it on a book cover.
We were entranced by Lynch's bizarrely comedic take on isolation and alienation, his use of eerie ambient noises and a black and white photography that was both poetic and dreadful in the way it captured an urban industrial landscape.
https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article-abstract/2/1/52/116593/Beautiful-If-You-See-It-the-Right-Way-David-Lynch?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I'm happy to say that this led to my discovery of Charles Sheeler.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edph/hd_edph.htm
That was quite a time for Rick. A few weeks later he met one of his heroes, Frank Oz, one of the original creators of The Muppets, during the intermission for the premiere at London's National Theatre of Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.
Rick was so excited by his good fortune that he arragned to meet with Mr. Oz later on that week and had a cup of coffee with him.
During that same week, he crossed paths with Orson Welles who, like Mr. Oz, was there to film or else promote the second Muppet movie.
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