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Large Quarto. 24cm. Publisher's decorative illustrated boards. 720pp. Very light wear to the boards, a little denting of the laminate in places, strong and solid; internally clean, on glossy high quality paper. A near fine copy of a beautiful but unwieldy book. The work of rare book dealers, librarians, and archivists is often labor with a considerable portion of sadness baked in. We essentially deal mainly with the dead and gone, in a daily struggle to make them less gone than they were yesterday. Henry Darger, by trade janitor, but also writer, social exile, artist and lifelong dreamer, is one of the sadder of everyday stories. Born in 1892 in Chicago, his mother died when he was 4 in childbirth; his father, never a well man went into hsopital when Henry was 8, and the solitary child was put into an orphanage. Young Henry was obviously suffering, his creativity and intelligence were undeniable, as was his inability to co-exist alongside other children, it is almost certain that aside from physical abuse and hardship, on top of his mental health issues Henry also suffered sexual abuse whilst in the orphanage system. His father died in 1908, and 16 year old Henry made repeated attempts to escape before eventually finding himself free and alone in Chicago. He found work as a janitor in a Catholic hospital institution, moved into a single room in a boarding house, and it was there he dwelt; both in the real world and in the world's he created, for 43 years, until his death in 1973. The room itself, filled with Darger's enormous collection of found objects, pictures, and clippings, is preserved as an exhibit at the Intuit Art Museum. Unknown to everyone else, the majority of whom simply saw Darger as an unkempt, uncommunicative eyesore, he spent the decades alone, creating enormous literary projects, endless drawings and paintings, and attempting to navigate his life through a world which had neither space, time, nor any inclination to accept him either as a person, or as an artist until after he had died. His juggernaut of an illustrated 15,000+ page novel "In The Realms of The Unreal" with it's incredible main section entitled "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." was discovered in vast manuscript form after he finally had to be taken into hospital (the same one his father had died in 65 years earlier). Posthumously, he became the definitive example of the lucrative outsider artist, and his work, distributed by his landlord ended up in galleries and collections all over the world. The world that hadn't wanted to feed or look after Henry, had finally discovered a way to make money off him, and so he was found to finally have worth. Whilst most biographies of Darger utilize the title of his fiction in some way, it would perhaps be more appropriate to use the dying Henry Darger's words when informed by a fellow tenant that his life's work had been gathered up by his landlord; "Too late now.".
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