A Kiss Is Just a Kiss - Rilegato

Jacket design by John Fontana

Letterforms by Tom Carnase

Jacket photograph: The Kiss by William Mortensen, c. 1926. Copyright C. 1989 the Mortensen Estate. Courtesy Paul Hertzman, Inc., and the Mortensen Estate.

Harmony Books

a division of Crown Publishers, Inc.

201 East 50th Street

New York, New York 10022

Printed in China

Smooch your bulldog if you're so inclined. Buss your sister, your brother, your grandpa, and anybody's bouncing baby. No kiss is ever wasted, not even on the winless lottery ticket kissed for luck. Kiss trees. Favorite books. Bowling balls. Old Jews sometimes kiss their bread before eating it, and those are good kisses too. They resonate in the ether. The best kisses, though, are those between lovers, because those are the consequential ones, the risky ones, the transformative ones, the ones that call the nymphs and satyrs back to life, the many-layered kisses that we dive into as into a fairytale frog pond or the warm whirlpool of our origins.

From the Introduction by Tom Robbins

Bruce Velick is a private art dealer, exhibition curator, and art management software developer living in Mill Valley, California. He curated the traveling exhibition that inspired this book.

Tom Robbins's fifth novel, Skinny Legs and All, is being published in spring of 1990.