Consider the Lobster.

Freeport, Maine: Ascensius Press, 2011. 4to, half green morocco with brown and green patterned paper over boards, red morocco interior hinges; housed in green cloth clam-shell box with red morocco title label on spine. [21] pp., 7 color digital photographs by Matthew Robbins (1 double-page, six others printed on 4 leaves). Colophon: “Consider the Lobster has been printed in an edition of twenty-six copies lettered A-Z. Design, typesetting, and printing by Scott J. Vile at the Ascensius Press, South Freeport, Maine. The typeface is Linotype Fairfield, designed in 1939 by Rudolf Ruzicka (1883-1978). The photographs, taken at the Rockland Lobster Festival in 2010, were digitally printed by Matthew Robbins on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Duo. Habent sua fata libelli.”.

Editon limited to twenty-six lettered copies signed in pencil by the printer and the photographer, this copy letter B. Bound by Gray Parrot of Hancock, Maine, with his label affixed to the lower left corner of the rear paste-down.

Consider the Lobster, a favorite essay among Wallace devotees, first appeared in Gourmet Magazine in August of 2004, and subsequently in a collection of essays by the same title—the last book Wallace published before his untimely death in 2008. Ostensibly writing as a typical correspondent for Gourmet, dispatched to the annual Maine Lobster Festival, an event described by a senior editor of Food & Wine magazine as “one of the best food-themed galas in the world,” Wallace subverts the gourmet reader’s expectation of an appetizing culinary excursion by serving up a critique of the Festival as well as American tourism, and, most notably, invoking both neuroscience and philosophy in an exceedingly close consideration of the ethics of boiling lobsters alive for our, and his own, gustatory pleasure. Matthew Robbins’ adroitly cropped and beautifully printed photographs complement Wallace’s ruminations with hints of the barbarism on display, which Wallace suggests might be regarded by future generations “in much the same way we view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments”—a gleaming, steaming row of efficient lobster cookers deployed for mass cooking, the claw-like hands of a husband and wife tearing at lobster meat, the great gut of an overweight man pushing up against a table of lobsters and fried food.

This handsome volume, printed by highly regarded Maine printer Scott Vile and bound by noted Maine bookbinder Gray Parrot, is a fitting tribute to a talented author and his probing and thought-provoking essay on the grim fate of a Maine icon.