John McCormick: Bullfighting: Art, Technique & Spanish Society

Bullfighting: Art, Technique & Spanish Society

John McCormick
New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (1998)
ISBN 1560003456

a review by Stanley Conrad
Webmeister, Mundo Taurino

MASQUERADING FOR DOLLARS

It's hard to articulate my reaction to this book -- hard because my reaction was a visceral one, not intellectual. I was nauseated, a nausea that gradually morphed into anger with every leaf I turned.

I had read, and re-read, The Complete Aficionado (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1967) by John McCormick and Mario Sevilla Mascareñas years ago, and looked forward to more of the careful thought and clear illustration that made TCA so valuable an aid in the beginning stages of my taurine education. And here was a new book by John McCormick.

I was excited. What further enlightenment might be waiting for me between its covers?

The answer was stupefying. None, absolutely none.

Bullfighting: Art, Technique & Spanish Society (BATSS) is nothing more than The Complete Aficionado (TCA) re-packaged to create the marketable illusion of an updated edition of the earlier classic. The entire text of TCA is reproduced in BATSS - seemingly printed from the original plates. The type face is the same, the illustrations are the same, the line drawings are the same, the page composition and pagination identical.

There is not a single new index entry (hardly surprising after comparison of the text of both books). There is no new substantive content. None. And no effort was made to trim out those parts of the original that have not withstood the changes of the last thirty years. We still read, "Among the countries south of Mexico, toreo is practiced only in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama." What? The chapter on "The Underside of Toreo" discusses - in the present tense -- periodicals that sold their last issue decades ago and taurine journalists long dead. Who?

The chapter on "The Bulls of Fiction" discusses nothing published after 1964. No effort was made to update any of this material.

The only obvious excision from the work as originally published is Mario Sevilla Mascareñas. Mascareñas was credited as co-author of TCA in 1967 - on the book's dust jacket, title page, and spine. His initials and McCormick's "signed" the Preface. Only TCA's chapter 9, "Conversations with Carlos: A non-collaborative coda by J.M." was claimed as authored by McCormick alone.

Original printing with both authors credited

Now, BATSS - and one must remember, this is not a new work -- is presented as McCormick's alone. Mascareñas' initials have been removed from the Preface and his name appears nowhere one might expect a co-author's credits to be placed.

The nausea is coming back.

Is there anything new in BATSS? What about the "new introduction and postscript by the author" promised on the title page and dust jacket? The two-page "introduction" contains little more than McCormick's I-liked-it-when-I-wrote-it-and-still-like-it-now self congratulation, and a brief description of his collaboration with Mascareñas, intended, one might suppose, to suggest why McCormick thinks Mascareñas no longer worthy of author credit. The five-page "postscript" is a brief lament over the changes in Spanish culture - and in the bullfight itself - wrought by the last 30 years of Spanish history.

Even this "new" content is of questionable value, however. I'm not sure who will care that, on his most recent visit to Las Ventas, gone were his "cheap-seats" compatriots, "… almost entirely male and working class, salty of speech and generous with wine, cigarettes, and chorizo," replaced, at least in half, by "wives" and "groups of unaccompanied young girls." I know I don't care.

The only real value added by the "new introduction and postscript by the author" may accrue to McCormick and Transaction Publishers themselves - a laughable, though likely legally sufficient, defense to any charges of fraud brought by purchasers taken in by this deceptive, misleading re-packaging job.

Used copies of The Complete Aficionado are in abundant supply. A search on the Internet's "Advanced Book Exchange" (http://www.abebooks.com/ ) done as this review was being written (4:40pm, Sept. 11, 1999) suggests they can be obtained for as little as $5.00. You'd be a fool to spend $32.95 (price today at Amazon.com and bn.com) or even $19.96 for the soon-to-be-published trade paperback (borders.com price).

If you have comments or suggestions,
please drop a line to Mundo Taurino

Pages maintained with HomeSite 4.0

Bullfighting: Art, Technique & Spanish Society

John McCormick New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (1998) ISBN 1560003456

John McCormick
New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (1998)
ISBN 1560003456