Above: The author Lewis Hyde at home.
No doubt familiar to L&UL readers by now, one of my favorite books is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. (Here are at least five posts so far: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) Published in 1983, it is now being issued in a 25th anniversary edition by Vintage. This article by Jeffrey MacIntyre of the New York Observer, while it wanders a bit in the middle, does come to a satisfying conclusion on the book’s significance:
Though it’s always enjoyed a small cult following and word-of-mouth circulation […], The Gift was generally overlooked when it was first published. But what once puzzled critics about Mr. Hyde’s ambitious and complex thesis looks prophetic today.
He shines particularly in anticipating the issues of culture in the age of the Internet. The radical democratization of access to media of all forms, from the print newsstand to blogs, from user-pay Radiohead album downloads to the long tail of Amazon’s back catalog, has irrevocably shifted our sense of the cost as well as the shelf life of art. It’s now cheaper than ever, in most cases, to produce and disseminate art—as well as to curate, discuss and appreciate it. Mr. Hyde’s central idea about art’s social function—that the consumption (and enduring value) of art ultimately transcends any commercial transaction—is looking increasingly like an idea tailor-made for our present moment.
The 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle has been changed from Hyde’s slightly awkward original “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” to the closer (but blander) “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.” The cover has been changed too, redesigned here by Angus Hyland in the UK and here by Mark Abrams in the US. I admire both of these designers’ work, but unfortunately both covers lose Hannah Cohoon’s iconic apple basket in favor of clichéd graphic hearts. I fear that Hyde’s opening observation has come true:
At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research. […] Even the name of the series and the design of the cover has been tailored to the demands of the market.
Happily, the 25th anniversary edition also includes an expanded prologue and afterword by Hyde, both of which are valuable. (A PDF of the afterword is on Hyde’s own website here.) Like his introduction to the book, Hyde’s prologue deals with the marketing of books themselves, and particularly how it was difficult in the beginning for The Gift to find support from book merchants because its contents couldn’t be summed up in, as Hyde writes, “ten words or less.” By the end of the prologue he proposes a ten-word summary line anyway, which I think is fantastic: “Bad-boy critic takes on vampire economy.” The poetry of Hyde’s tagline reminds me of this little book by Eva Weinmayr of headline placards written for the Evening Standard. It’s another book that’s full of poetry and well worth picking up.