Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross.

Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time. 

Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier. 

I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty. 

(He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.) 

I’d sold most of his collection indiscriminately. Idiotically. I’d had only a long weekend to clear his house after he died. I was in a fugue state of grief and made decisions rashly. An edition of Animal Farm that I sold for five hundred dollars was listed by its buyer for twenty-five hundred the next month. I accidentally included a copy of Lysistrata that was illustrated and signed by Picasso in a grocery bag of detective novels I dropped off at a Goodwill. Now, four years later, I clung to the books of his I still had, afraid I would squander them, too.

But I couldn’t keep Borderline. It didn’t belong to me. I mean this metaphysically. I’d made a rule early on that, in order to keep one of my father’s books, I needed to be able to make it mine. A simple process: I would pick up a book, and, if it vibrated with magic, it was mine. Some did, some didn’t. I knew instantly. An early edition of Lunch Poems. A custom-bound Ulysses. Arion Press’s Trout Fishing in America.  

Borderline was inert. It’s less a book than a book-object. Published in 1989, its pages are filled with maps, charts, drawings of landmasses and planets. I think it’s supposed to be an atlas of an imagined universe, but it’s hard to say for sure. There’s no narrative; there’s nothing to read. It’s sixteen pages, about as thick as my pinky. The few words it contains are indecipherable, of no language. (The letters look Hebrew—if you don’t know Hebrew and have never seen Hebrew letters before.) The artist, Ely, created his own system of glyphs, which he derived from his studies of ciphers, cryptographs, hieroglyphs, calligraphy, alchemy, Kabbalah, UFO communications in sci-fi novels, and other synthetic languages. Flipping through Borderline, you get the sensation you’ve uncovered an artifact from another dimension, somewhere both ancient and futuristic. 

My father, I knew, responded to this type of artistic obsessiveness. He was drawn to the idea that Ely had spent years building a world that wasn’t really meant for anyone else: an exercise in absurdity and rigorousness and care. He also admired the book’s craftsmanship, how Ely had dyed the paper and tied the spine. The mastery appealed to him and he liked examining it with his own hands. But when I handled Borderline, my only thoughts were about how valuable it was and how careful I had to be with it. All it meant to me was that it had meant something to my father. This wasn’t enough, I’d learned, to make it magic. 

***

All weekend, as I took my daughter from playground to playground in Berkeley, I waited to hear if the sale had been finalized. Thoughts of my father popped in and out of mind.   

He’d been a private person, his interests had been solitary interests: reading, running, computer chess. I’d taken after him and was one of very few people who could share his privacy. We went running together and played chess together and read together, different books in the same room. But in my late twenties, shortly after finishing a graduate program in writing, I’d created a schism between us. I published a novella about him in a literary magazine, centering on his sexuality. It included what he’d told me about his first encounters with men, in his early forties; his ongoing relationship with my mother; his struggle to figure out why it had taken him so long to understand himself. It wasn’t a mean portrait, but I exposed him in ways he had no choice over; I turned his privacy public. We both lived in Minneapolis then and still got together every week for dinner, but he was more guarded after the novella came out, wary I would mine him for more material. 

One evening I went to his house and we played a few games of chess at his dining room table. He was a stronger player than I was and in one of our games he dismantled my position, removing pawn after pawn, so that my king was vulnerable to multiple lines of attack. 

“There,” he said, reaching across the board and tapping my king. “That’s about how I feel.”

“I know,” I said. 

“I know you know,” he said. “So that’s that. And now, we play again.” 

It’s a lousy thing to write about people you love. But I also understand my twentysomething self’s motives. I was a sophomore in high school when my father came out. Afterward, he often seemed like two people to me: the father I knew, and a new, independent—and suddenly sexualized—person who felt like a stranger. This stranger came with us everywhere: dinners, runs, museums, movies, chess. I found him unnerving. Who was this man? But I also sensed I needed to become comfortable with him, to reconcile him with the more familiar father. Writing provided the way. My novella, I suppose, was an attempt to chart out an atlas to the twin universes within him. 

***

“I am part pre-Gutenberg, part Victorian, and part Martian,” Timothy Ely has said of himself. “I was a stoker on the Nautilus. I swept up after William Morris.” 

Looking at his work from the past forty years, you might start to suspect this statement isn’t a self-description so much as a coded set of coordinates. Ely has made dozens of books in the course of his career, and each one of them is unique, a one-of-a-kind key to a one-of-a-kind place and time. They’re so meticulously constructed that it’s easy to believe he drew on firsthand experience of these spaces—even though they don’t exist. (Many of the books are kept in various terrestrial libraries, including the collections at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Texas, Austin.)

He’s traced the genesis of his career to a single day in graduate school, when he discovered the map collection in the basement of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington. There he found maps that broadened his worldview—or, more accurately, his universeview. Maps of air currents, the ocean floor, the solar system, Mars. Maps of anywhere you couldn’t actually go. He returned again and again. Over time, two ideas became central to his work: maps can be a means of expression; and it’s okay not to understand what fascinates you, and live instead within the fascination. 

“Discovering the Atlas was being touched by God or Rand McNally,” Ely has written. “It is about being awake and fully formed. The experience stands out for me as precisely how I see creativity working—connections are established, points connected and gelation occurs.” 

Every October, he celebrates the day he first visited the map collection. 

***

When my father became sick the distance between us collapsed. He lived with cancer for six years. I’d moved to the Bay Area by then—my girlfriend had taken a job in San Francisco—but I flew to Minneapolis frequently. I was with my father in the hospital for his first surgery and stayed with him as he convalesced, helping him around his house and picking up his prescriptions and groceries. I visited him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, a sepsis scare, more surgeries, more treatments, the cessation of treatments. Meanwhile I was developing my own life. In these years I got engaged, then married, and became a parent myself. I was aware this all may have been catalyzed in some way by my father’s illness; I wanted him to see, before he died, that I’d established a life for myself. 

I no longer wrote fiction; my time was taken up with parenthood and my career. I worked in tech marketing now, a job that paid well enough to support my life in the Bay Area. But by the end of most days I’d used up the energy that once went into more personal projects. I journaled and occasionally sketched out story arcs, but I never finished anything. Now and then I could see the shape of a narrative forming from my father’s ordeal—but whenever I began writing I felt guilty, and put what pages I’d drafted in the recycling bin by my desk. 

He spent his last year in Palm Springs, to be near a cousin he’d grown up with. There was no winter there. I would visit every month or so—every two weeks, toward the end. He would ask me to bring him books: Dubliners, Billy Budd, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He spent the year rereading great writers in the sun. On my last trip I took home all the books I’d loaned him. Penguin Classics editions, mostly. They’d been mine to begin with, but now they vibrate a little, too. 

***

The next Tuesday morning my book dealer emailed to say that Borderline had sold. I wasn’t surprised to find I was regretful. Another piece of my father gone, on some anonymous buyer’s shelf. 

I reminded myself I’d never connected with Borderline. But I had, at least, connected with my father. There were parts of him I’d never fully understand—but I would never be divested of my fascination with him. Not everything of his had to become mine.  

As we’d agreed, my dealer would get a 20 percent commission. Likewise, the buyer got a 20 percent discount, because he was also a book dealer. (I didn’t quite understand this, but apparently it’s industry standard.) Half of what was left would go to my sister, whom I haven’t mentioned because I’m forbidden to write about her. A chunk would go to taxes. The rest would go to my mortgage. Another sort of magic: Watch as I turn this library into interest payments. Poof. 

Max Ross is a writer and occasional bookseller.