Dibs

Lou Reed is a legend in his own time. One of the 20th century’s most remarkable songwriters, the author of such ’60s classics as “Heroin” and “Walk on the Wild Side” — a Brooklyn native who underwent electroshock therapy to “cure” his homosexuality as a boy — rose to fame with the Velvet Underground and, after the band’s demise, continued a resplendant solo career. (Among other milestones, Reed performed for Pope John Paul II in 2000.) A new book, Pass Through Fire: The Collected Lyrics, is indeed a compilation of Reed’s lyrics spanning forty-plus years, exactly as promised. (“I’m amazed that I can write them at all,” Reed muses in the introduction, “and I have no profound understanding of the process.”) But something — what??? — went weird and wild in the publisher’s design department, so that rather than appearing like normal text, line after straight left-to-right horizontal line, the lyrics appear in ever-more-bizarre formats. Some are wiggly. Some are blurry. Some are white type on black paper, but so fuzzy as to defy legibility. Some start out straight and then veer off in extreme directions. Some — and this is really pushing it — are blacked out, as if by a censor, so that you can’t read a word of them at all. Some are half in type, half scrawled. Some are sideways. Some go in circles. Some are upside-down. Some bear splotches meant to look like teardrops or coffee stains. As a collection, yes: The songs are all in here, safe and sound. But the desire to make the contents difficult and often even nauseating to read is troubling indeed. Was the intent merely to reflect the offbeat, iconoclastic nature of Reed’s poetry? Or does this design smack of desperation, as publishers flail to remain relevant in a world where books — as bound stacks of paper printed with type — are growing dangerously obsolete?