Tim Youd is copying out Kingsley Amis’s classic of academic life on the same typewriter it was written on, at the University of Leicester campus that inspired it – the 32nd novel he has recreated
American artist Tim Youd has found his own way of getting to grips with Kingsley Amis’s campus novel Lucky Jim: he is retyping the comic story, word for word, on an Adler Universal typewriter, the same model used by the late novelist.
Youd’s own particular brand of close reading began this week in the David Wilson Library on the University of Leicester campus. It is part of an art project to retype 100 classic novels that has already spanned three years, and seen the artist take on works from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury at the author’s home in Oxford, Mississippi, to Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, typed out in a rented pickup truck in the car park of the post office where Bukowski once worked.
Youd chose Leicester for Lucky Jim because Amis had visited his friend Philip Larkin – to whom the novel is dedicated – at the university, while the poet was working there as an assistant librarian. That visit was the inspiration for Amis’s much-loved tale of Jim Dixon and his bumpy career in the history department
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Youd’s own particular brand of close reading began this week in the David Wilson Library on the University of Leicester campus. It is part of an art project to retype 100 classic novels that has already spanned three years, and seen the artist take on works from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury at the author’s home in Oxford, Mississippi, to Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, typed out in a rented pickup truck in the car park of the post office where Bukowski once worked.
Youd chose Leicester for Lucky Jim because Amis had visited his friend Philip Larkin – to whom the novel is dedicated – at the university, while the poet was working there as an assistant librarian. That visit was the inspiration for Amis’s much-loved tale of Jim Dixon and his bumpy career in the history department
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