Charles Henri Ford, on the cover of one of his books.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I plan to do a "Robert Shea Week" at this blog, sometime in May. In connection with that, I am looking for interviews with Shea, letters by Shea and essays by Shea that haven't already been posted at this blog or the official Shea website maintained by his son, Mike Shea. Mike Shea and I both have tried to preserve Shea's work, but it would be useful to have some help. You can search this website and look at the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of this page, and check to see what's posted at the Shea site.
I particularly wish I could find some leads on the correspondence between the two Illuminatus! authors. In Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death, RAW wrote that he hoped someday their correspondence might be published. That would be great, except that neither man apparently took steps to preserve it. I am still hoping for a break, but their literary executors apparently have nothing to report.
I don't read poetry as often as I read fiction or nonfiction, but I do read some, and I have a longtime interest in the American poet Charles Henri Ford, mostly for his surrealist poems written in the 1930s and 1940s. (Most of the Ford work I like is collected in a book, Flag of Ecstasy.) Ford was pretty obscure — I would be surprised if anyone reading this blog recognized the name — but as his Wikipedia article explains, Ford apparently took his work and legacy seriously. His papers and materials about him are collected and cataloged at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at the University of Texas, at Yale University and at the University of Delaware. There are no comparable collections of Wilson or Shea papers.
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