Sketches Comment

With Book of Sketches, Kerouac's main problem is being saddled with Penguin as the publisher, which is no longer in the habit of producing fine books. The best example of their decline in quality is the cheap paper on which they choose to print most of their Penguin Poets titles. They didn't really give Sketches much design attention, basically using a template: the typical Penguin Classics these days is set in Sabon 10.25/12.25; Sketches is set in Sabon 10/12.5. It's clear that, for Penguin, poetry is primarily seen as a money loser and hence something not to be taken seriously. From what I could tell, the attitude is not just shared by the higher ups, but by the design and production staff as well. The result is a kind of shabbiness, a McBook not much removed, as an object, from a mass market romance novel, but with a nicer cover (though the kerning has been adjusted nicely throughout Sketches which wouldn't happen with a mass market).

That said, matching the spacing and indentations to the manuscript present a moderate typesetting challenge which has been carried through about as well as it could within the constraints of Penguin's requirements. I don't have the book on hand, but as I recall there are at least a handful of instances where space breaks occur mid sentence. They belong there. It's too bad Penguin didn't elect to scan and include, say, at least a half dozen pages of the manuscript, so that readers could get a feel for the source document and judge for themselves whether the translation is successful.

An insightful introduction by someone like Clark Coolidge, or any number of other contemporary poets (Tom Clark or Dale Smith spring to mind), would have been a fine improvement, but the important thing is that the work, in all of its unevenness, is at least available.