Fancy Goods has traveled a long way to make it to the shores of American publication. Pushed from Paris to England by the admiring pen of Ezra Pound, these handwritten translations were subsequently lost for fifty years and finally resurfaced in a Virginian trunk entrusted to William Bird of Three Mountains Press. The pages were tucked next to lost correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway; between T. S. Eliot and others; the uniquely surviving manuscript of William Carlos Williams’s The Great American Novel; and Pound’s own A Draft of XVI Cantos. In this Olympiad time capsule of Americans, a curious corner was occupied by Paul Morand, the Frenchman whom Pound considered the voice of the post–World War I era, a modernist and an international, with “the first clear eye that has been able to wander about both ends of Europe looking at wreckage.”
