Laura Richie would soon become Ms. Webster's roommate at Howard Johnston's Blair House. They both waitressed at the Pancake House in Hillsboro Village — Nashville's hippy hang-out. One day, before my Euro-excursion began, Laura showed me an address and a photo of her and her friend Daphne Fraenkel who lived in London at
Daphne published and printed books for poets and playwrights. Carrefour Publications was what was called a vanity press. Today, we call it self-publishing. Everyone in London is a poet and an actor. It's built into English culture — like living in Nashville means you must play the guitar and write bad songs. She typeset the books on a special typewriter. Then printed each sheet on a small printing press. This was a decade before the MacIntosh and Quark XPress created digital desktop publishing. Books were stacked in every square foot of her small apartment. Somehow I found room under the printing press for my sleeping bag.
Daphne was born in Paris on April 8th 1900,
had flaming red hair, and always wore purple.
She had been married a couple of times.
Taught school in
Indiana.
Her maiden name, Moschos, was Greek. Gillam was her Tasmanian first husband's name.
Her full name in 1948 was Daphne Moschos Gillam. It appears on a Fine Arts program at Indiana University in 1948.
She was on a committee to present and interpret paintings being loaned to the university from New York's Metropolitan Museum.
http://fedora.dlib.indiana.edu/fedora/get/iudl:1186699/OVERVIEW.
So whatever happened to Mr. Gillam?
Witnessed World War I up close and personal,
and said it was much worse than the second one.
The Germans killed millions.
Well, yeah, so did the French and English.
And don't forget the Americans did their part to deplete the surplus population as well.
Daphne's first marriage in 1920 was to a Tasmanian farmer.
Her second marriage in 1953 was to a man of letters, Michael Fraenkel,
who was the inspiration for the Boris
character in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
Michael was a philosopher of death with the same attitude that Steve Jobs had — death is what forces us to live a fuller life.
When Michael died in 1957, Daphne inherited Carrefour Publications
and the correspondance between Michael and Henry Miller
which consumed two volumes and a thousand pages.
