TALES. (With six original woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes)

Produced by Bernard Sachs. Foreword by Stephen Gray.

46 pages, 6 coloured woodcut prints, errata slip, pictorial (design by Skotnes) white card covers (paperback).

Published by the Gryphon Poets and distributed by Exclusive Books, 73 Kotze Street, Hillbrow, Johannesburg.

Stephen Gray writes in his introduction, ‘Sinclair Beiles is a legend that lives and accretes. I tried to find him in Europe, but each time he was frontiers in the other direction. Then he was in the doorway of a travel agent in Athens – his straw hat much deformed by wind and tide….He is extremely pleased that his collaboration with Cecil Skotnes had resulted in the woodblocks that illustrate the Tales….Here they are then. They will amuse South Africa coming from this prodigal, generous vagabond who’s never washed of his South African youth.’

In a later article in the Mail & Guardian Gray is more critical of Beiles who is sometimes called the only South African ‘Beat’ poet and a resident with William Burroughs and others at the famed Beat Hotel in Paris in the 1950’s.

See:

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-09-07-howling-to-be-a-beat

Also: Who Was Sinclair Beiles? by Gary Cummiskey:

http://realitystudio.org/interviews/who-was-sinclair-beiles/