This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.
Whole Grains is a book edited by Art Spiegelman and Bob Schneider that is composed entirely of quotes. Even the introduction is just another collection of quotes without any explanatory prose. The book is made up of four sections, “Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills,” “Earth Ship,” “Alienation Blues,” and “White Light” and the quotes come from every place imaginable. One page in the “Earth Ship” section has a quote from each Steve McQueen, Walt Whitman, Ronald Regan, the Whole Earth Catalog and a sign in a park in Barcelona. Although the book does include quotes from both Spiegelman and Schneider, for the most part, it is other people’s words curated by them.
Art Spiegelman was deeply involved in the underground comix movement and worked with famous cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith. He published many works including the comic anthology Raw. He also wrote comics for The New Yorker in the late 90s and early 2000s. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors and several of his works deal with this. His most critically acclaimed piece is Mous which deals with the Holocaust and his family history. Whole Grains is dedicated to his mother after her suicide. Bob Schneider is also a comic author and screenwriter who currently writes for McSweeny’s.
Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations is in the Santo Doming Collection available at Widener Library. Other books by Spiegelman such as Co-mix: a retrospective of comics, graphics, and scraps and Maus : a survivor’s tale are available in Harvard’s collections.
Thanks to Emma Clement, Santo Domingo Library Assistant, for contributing this post.