Still Life with Woodpecker was published by Bantam Books in 1980 — notably as a paperback original (Bantam paid a record advance for the rights), though a hardcover edition followed. It is Robbins’s most concentrated novel: shorter than its predecessors, more focused in its questions, and organized around a single mystery — “How do you make love stay?”
Princess Leigh-Cheri is a redhead, a member of a deposed European royal family living in exile in a Seattle suburb, an environmentalist attending a care-about-the-planet conference in Hawaii. Bernard Mickey Wrangle (a.k.a. “the Woodpecker”) is a bomber — an outlaw who blows up the buildings of polluting corporations. They fall in love at the conference. Then Bernard is sent to prison for his crimes. Then Leigh-Cheri locks herself in an attic for years, staring at a pack of Camel cigarettes, waiting for him.
The novel’s structural conceit: Robbins wrote it on a Remington SL3 typewriter — and the typewriter becomes a character in the book, its limitations (no corrections possible) and its physicality (the clatter of keys, the bell at the end of each line) woven into the text’s self-awareness. The pack of Camels — studied obsessively by Leigh-Cheri in her attic — becomes a philosophical object: a pyramid on its surface leads to meditations on sacred geometry, on the relationship between cigarettes and fire and passion, on the mysteries encoded in commercial packaging.
The novel’s answer to “How do you make love stay?” — if it has one — involves redheads, the moon, the persistence of mystery within intimacy, and the refusal to let domesticity (which kills romance) or adventure (which kills stability) triumph over the other. The answer, like all Robbins’s answers, is paradoxical rather than practical.
Collecting Still Life with Woodpecker
First edition (Bantam Books, New York, 1980): Paperback original (first state); hardcover (second state, same month).
Market values:
- Bantam hardcover first edition: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $75–$200
- Bantam paperback first printing: $10–$25
- Without jacket (hardcover): $8–$15
Robbins’s most commercially successful novel at time of publication. The paperback-first publication makes the collecting situation unusual — the hardcover is technically a simultaneous rather than prior edition.