You are also quite right about the presentation. I improved it for the 2005 imprint, but it would’ve have benefitted greatly from a proper publishing house editor. I tried, for two years, to place it, but no one wanted to know. (Other than The Book Guild who were enthusiastic, but they require part-payment for publication and I was utterly skint). Colin Wilson, bless him, in his unending support for new writers, admired the ms enough to virtually insist upon writing the Intro.

As to the books…I simply ran out of room to cover them in detail. Also, again, they represent the man as he wishes to be seen / read, which was something I wanted to avoid throughout the research.

Anyway, thank you and all the other posters for the comments. They mean a lot. Mark Andresen.

Most of the ideas are familiar to me, althoughd given the artist’s philosophical leanings, it did strike me that for one confidently dismissing ‘a grand narrative’ somewhere in the 80s, his elaborate system(s) seem bent on recovering just that: what is the difference between this fundamentalist epistemology/ontology and another ‘grand narrative’?

The old answer used to be pluralism versus monism. But Ritchie’s careful taxonomies and subdivision seem to deny arguments about the incommensurate.

There’s also issues about the graphic style to Ritchie’s line – its source in a certain mark-making that it would interesting to take up with the artist in further conversation.

But this was a really first rate interview and Spike are to be wholly congratulated.