The Calypso Craze: 1956-57 and Beyond is a boxed set compiled and annotated by Ray Funk and Michael Eldridge, released by Bear Family Records in August 2014. You’d think that six CDs full of music, together with a DVD and a 176-page illustrated coffee-table book, would sufficiently document what was, after all, a fairly passing fad. But as any obsessive or fanatic will tell you: for every item you include in a project like this, there are five others you’ve left out. You run out of room, you can’t find a good copy, you can’t afford the licensing fee, you discover something too late…or you realize that not everyone will find every last item you’ve stumbled upon quite as fascinating as you do.
The web, of course, effectively has no spatial or temporal limits. (For good or ill, it also tends to adopt a cavalier attitude towards questions of discernment—and ownership.) This makes it an exceptionally well suited medium for reviving the nineteenth-century practice of the “extra-illustrated” book, whereby (according to Necessary Errors author Caleb Crain) dedicated readers would take apart their favorite books and re-bind them, “so as to include lithographs, portraits, maps, original manuscripts, and ephemera.” Unkindly, Crain also mentions The New York Times‘s 1903 judgment that “[t]he extra-illustrator of books…[is] a pathetic figure.” We prefer to think of him or her as a proponent of book-nerd chic.
Anyway, over the coming months we’ll be posting here additional images, text, sounds, YouTube videos, and so on, all intended to augment the ink-paper-cardboard-and-plastic artifact that (we hope) you hold in your hands. Since each page will be a living project, you may want to check back periodically to see how it’s grown. Happy extra-perusing.
