His Last Writes

Julie Grau is the vice president and co-editorial director of Riverhead, Claire Vaccaro the art director for Putnam. Their goal, in Grau's words, was ''to replicate the experience of going through the notebooks as closely as possible'' for readers.

In late April, Grau and Barber spent three and a half days at L.A.'s Chateau Marmont, sorting through a set of photocopies, devising a rough chronological order, and choosing what to omit. ''There were 800 pages of material,'' Grau says. ''A lot of it was either juvenilia or just not interesting, or it was done better elsewhere.'' By the time she returned to New York with a manuscript of about 300 pages, she'd begun to conceive of ''Journals'' as a narrative.

And once Vaccaro saw the notebooks themselves, she decided the book would be done in color and in-house. ''Really, Kurt designed it,'' Vaccaro says. ''I actually had big-name designers hunting me down, saying 'I should be the one to do Kurt's journal.' It shouldn't be that. It should be however Kurt kept these journals all those years.... I wanted to treat them almost like objects of art.''

Vaccaro assumed that she would send the notebooks to be digitally scanned at a facility accustomed to producing high-end art books. No one would take the job; assuming responsibility for the notebooks involved signing on for potentially crushing liability. In June, already behind schedule, Vaccaro had an epiphany in her kitchen: ''My husband is a photographer, and he was working on a project using this digital camera that cost $30,000. Every day, he kept saying 'It's sooo detailed...you can see the fibers in paper.' I thought, Oh my God, we could do it digitally and that would save all this... you know, my husband will sign that thing!'' Grau: ''The only issue was hiring an armed guard [to] actually watch.''

Nick Vaccaro shot the pages at his Manhattan studio over three days in June. Other than the removal of digits from phone numbers and street addresses, the pages went unaltered. Barber signed off on ''Journals'' in August, and it went to press in September.

Cross got a peek at the book in October. ''I didn't get the sense they kept a lot out,'' he says. The only imbalance he sees is a shortage of writings about Love.

Has Love seen the finished book yet? Barber: ''She actually, well, again, er, oooh, hmmmm. Off the record...'' Requests for comment made through Love's publicist went unanswered. ''Chances are I'm not gonna hear anything,'' her PR rep says. ''That's usually how it works.''

One major plank of Kurt Cobain's legacy is in place, and the next five years will bring more -- a Nirvana boxed set, an authorized Cobain documentary, concert videos.... ''I'm just about to begin the process that I went through with the notebooks with the tapes,'' Barber says. ''We're sort of systematically going through and seeing what we really have to make available to the fans.''

As for ''Journals'' and the charges of exploitation its release has inevitably drawn, Barber references the published notebooks of other artists: ''From Pablo Picasso to Leonardo da Vinci, people study these things.''

Grau says, ''I think that because so much of this is clearly written with a reader in mind and because it's a faithful and true rendition of not only a brilliantly creative person but also a person in pain and a person living an extreme life, that there's an intrinsic value to what he writes.''

Still, she's curious: ''I wonder if he'd be appalled.''