Housebook

Bob Dylan reading Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal
on November 3,1975 on The Rolling Thunder Review.
See a movie of Allen Ginsberg in
At Home: Elsa Dorfman, a movie by Ilene H. Lang.

In 1973-74, while I was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College I pulled together the pictures that I had taken of my friends in my house at 19 Flagg St and wrote a text to go with them. (There’s a long tradition of photographers photographing their families and friends. What could be more obvious and instinctual, except perhaps photographing your favorite tree or flower?)

While I was still working on the book, David Godine agreed to publish it. We had our struggles, mostly over the text, the format, the tone. Eventually, I convinced David I was on the right track, at least for me. The book was designed by Lance Hidy and he showed me his pencil mock-up over peking duck at Peking on the Mystic in Cambridge. I picked out the colors of a box of Kodak film for the cover. I figured if it was good enough for Eastman, it was good enough for me.

Up until the Housebook, everyone called me Ellie. But when I decided to call the book “Elsa’s Housebook,” because I liked the authoritarian sound of it, I slowly started to call myself Elsa and sign my name Elsa and answer my phone Elsa. Soon, all my friends were calling me Elsa. It still seems a little unfriendly and formal and I like when old friends from twenty-five years ago call me “Ellie.”

The Housebook went out of print in 1976 or so. The last ones were remaindered at bookstores in Harvard Square. Every once in a while someone would find one in a used book store. Now copies show up in bookstores in cyberspace. Try Amazon.com, Bibliofind.com, or Bookfinder.com. Giving the Housebook a new life on my web page seems like the right thing to do. Enjoy! Start right HERE!!!!

The Camera
Photography And my Head
Money
Flagg Street
Flagg Street II
Flagg Street III
Books by People in the Housebook

Webmasters Note:

Elsa’s housebook was first published thirty years ago in 1974. The original paper version did not have a table of contents or specific chapters, nor did it have an index. When we ‘digitized’ the housebook we were faced with a bunch of options and challenges. We didn’t want the book to be on one long web page, which meant that we would have to divide the book into parts. There were a few sections like “The Camera” and “Photography in my Head”, so we stuck with those, and added a few more in the Flagg Street part (See above). Making these series of pages was necessary in helping out with page load time; lots of images on a page with a slow internet connection can be painfully slow. I believe the best

List of poets in the House Book:

Arthur Dorfman
Elaine Dorfman
Jay Hutchinson
Bobbi Carrey
Brian Williams
Charlie Olchowski
Mike Mazur
Deborah Gordon
Lizzy Power
Jennifer Meader
Victor Bockris
Andrew Wylie
Andrea Dworkin
Nancy Meader
Harriet Rosenstein
Tom Pickard
Chris Long
Hannah Green
Molly&Ralph Hoagland
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Christina Whylie
Symour Simches
John Limon
Willy Williams
Alan Lelchuck
david and Patricia O’Connell
Anne Waldman
Ken Irby
Tova Vogt
Inger Grytting
Robert Bly
Robert Ducan
Charles Olson
Eila Kokkinen
Ed Lang
Fanny Howe
Robert Creeley
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Joanne Kyger
Mark Mirsky
Abbott Meade
RIlene Lange
Bail Mazur
Norman Gordon
Sail Gordon
Peter Orlovsky
Gregory Corso
Ed Sanders
Allen Ginsberg
Martha Davidson
Harvey Silverglate
Gary Snyder
Paul Blackburn

Elsa’s Living Room