A Dance with Fred Astaire is an extraordinary collection of anecdotes and rare ephemera from the life of legendary artist, filmmaker and bon vivant Jonas Mekas, featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream. Memories, diary entries, conversations, and insights into his work sit alongside collages of beautifully reproduced postcards, newspaper cuttings, film negatives, lists, posters and photographs, envelopes and letters, book covers, telegrams, cartoons and doodles. Mekas has kept and archived the artifacts of his life as a cultural touchstone down to the minutiae, all of which is brought together here in the form of a unique and fascinating scrapbook of a life lived with the highest artistic commitment. Guided by Mekas’ distinctive prose and suffused with warmth, A Dance with Fred Astaire is rhapsodic, poetic and funny as all get out. A revealing visual autobiography of a genuine culture hero.

The book will also be available as a deluxe limited edition of 50 copies signed by the author, housed in a plexiglass case, including a signed and numbered silkscreen print featuring original watercolor illustrations.

About the Author:

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Jonas Mekas has lived a uniquely influential life as a filmmaker, writer, critic and poet. He survived a World War II labor camp and postwar displacement before immigrating to New York in 1949 to embark upon an extraordinary career in the arts, playing an instrumental role in the careers of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and numerous other iconic artists and hanging out with everyone from Maya Deren to John and Yoko Ono, from Tiny Tim to Salvador Dalí, from the Kennedys to—yes—Fred Astaire.