Photograph of Jean Cocteau, inscribed to Richard Thoma; found in the "C" file, under "Cocteau."

Situated at the big wells of 20th-century Modernism, Laughlin (1914-1997) was a wildcatting publisher to be sure. But he was also a negligible poet, and so it's surprising to see—in sketches about Burma and Rapallo, about Cocteau and Céline and Edith Sitwell, about Aunt Leila and Frances Steloff, about his own father and his paterfamilias Ezra Pound, about women and skiing and cultural wasteland USA, and more—that his crazy scraps of ephemera dramatize something essential about how a literary alertness gets formed.

All photos, except for the Lustig covers, are from the collection of James Laughlin. Copyright 2006 by the Estate of James Laughlin and reproduced courtesy of New Directions Publishing Corporation.