Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several months ago I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing which operates out of London. Black Dog prints books on a variety of topics such as photography, architecture, film and design. They did a book on Independent record shops that I am dying to own. One of the publisher’s upcoming projects is a book on German rock, experimental and electronic music, and the 1960s counterculture. The editor contacted me for some images of Rhinozeros, a German little magazine published out of Hamburg, edited by brothers Rolf-Gunther and Klaus-Peter Dienst from 1960-1965. Klaus-Peter provided the iconic calligraphy. Burroughs appeared in four of the ten issues. I had Issues Five and Seven, which I purchased at the legendary Nelson Lyon Sale in 1999. I happily provided the images.

The request got me obsessed with Rhinozeros. I have touched on this remarkable little magazine in a piece I wrote about Burroughs’ early 1960s mag appearances in Germany and Belgium. There is not a lot of information on Rhinozeros in English, and I do not have much to add to what I wrote in that piece, but I did start digging around the internet looking to piece together a complete run of this visually stunning publication. A bookseller in Switzerland had several issues and a click to Powell’s website filled in the holes. Now I have all ten issues.

So here are the covers of all ten issues as well as scans of all the Burroughs appearances. The images make clear that some of the most exciting visuals in all of Burroughs’ oeuvre in any format, be it novel, broadside, magazine or painting, reside within the pages of Rhinozeros. The Dienst brothers were interested in the Beat Generation, concrete poetry, and the cut-up technique. Klaus-Peter knew Brion Gysin and would have been aware of the cut-up soon after its rediscovery. The Dienst brothers then discovered Burroughs through Gysin. In turn, Rhinozeros helped introduce the cut-up to a small German audience. Not surprisingly, Burroughs was a major presence in the magazine, but his influence spread throughout Germany during a renaissance in that country’s poetry and literature of the 1960s. German writers like Carl Weissner, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and Jurgen Ploog took immediately to the work of Burroughs, particularly the cut-up.

Issue Five usually gets singled out for special attention by American collectors. This is the Beat Issue and features Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Peter Orlovsky in its pages. The issue is also the only one in color which makes for some remarkable visuals. Peter Ellis Booksellers, operating out of London, has a truly special copy of this issue for sale. Tipped in with the mag are four T.L.S. from Rolf-Dieter Dienst to Whalen and David Meltzer requesting material for his magazine and a projected anthology. Whalen has doodled on one of the letters and has written: “How far off is our history” and “How far off our history is.” The letters makes this special issue of Rhinozeros even more so.

My copy is signed by Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Interested parties might be aware of Burroughs’ importance in German literature of the 1960s, but Corso’s equally important role might be less well known. After a trip to Venice in the Summer of 1960, Corso arrived in Berlin in July of that year and stayed there for several months. In that time, Corso performed readings, wrote poetry, and met with poets and academics. Two years earlier, Corso began work on a German anthology of Beat writers with Walter Hollerer, a professor out of Berlin. In letters from late summer / early fall 1960, Corso writes on the topic of Beat anthologies and he hoped his anthology would be published within the year. Junge Amerikanische Lyrik was eventually published in 1961, introducing the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology to Germany. So it could be argued that Corso was the face of the Beats for German poets at this time. Not coincidentally, Rhinozeros was started in 1960, possibly around the time of Corso’s sojourn in Germany. Without a doubt, Corso’s presence raised awareness of the Beats in Germany and helped spread the word about New America Poetry throughout the country.

Rhinozeros Covers

Rhinozeros 1
1960

Rhinozeros 2
1960

Rhinozeros 3
1961

Rhinozeros 4
1961

Rhinozeros 5 (View complete issue)
1961

Rhinozeros 6
1962

Rhinozeros 7
1962

Rhinozeros 8
1963

Rhinozeros 9
1964

Rhinozeros 10
1965 (?)

Burroughs Texts in Rhinozeros

Wind Hand Caught in the Door
Rhinozeros 5
1961

Novia Express
Rhinozeros 6
1962

Be Cheerful, Sir (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 7
1962

Der Doktor auf der Bühne (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 9
1964

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

When the topic of Burroughs and apomorphine arises in drug histories and biographies, it most commonly deals with the fact that in 1956 Burroughs took the apomorphine cure under the supervision of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and emerged a man reborn. The story goes that only after Burroughs overcame his addiction could he begin in earnest the work of transforming his Word Horde into Naked Lunch. The accepted tale about Burroughs and apomorphine ignores the fact that Naked Lunch had a form before the cure (“The real novel is the letters to [Ginsberg]“) and that major sections of Naked Lunch like The Talking Asshole routine were written a full year before the cure. After 1956 the apomorphine experience provided Burroughs with an overarching framework for Naked Lunch, but this would be a road not taken. In addition the road to recovery, if Burroughs truly ever walked that path, was a long and winding road. In fact, as the Deposition makes clear but as critics have ignored, Burroughs took the cure more than once between 1956 and July 1959, the date of Naked Lunch‘s publication. By 1958, he was nearly, if not completely, hooked on paregoric and shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch he would be implicated in a drug ring. The actual cure was a difficult experience (“The cure itself was awful” Letter to Ginsberg May 8, 1956) with side effects that lingered over a year later despite Burroughs’ assurances in retrospect that the apomorphine cure was quick and non-invasive. Yet the myth that the apomorphine cure effectively ended Burroughs’ struggle with drugs and jumpstarted Naked Lunch persists. Burroughs encouraged the development of just such a cover story in interviews and elsewhere, most famously in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” published as a preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

So what role did apomorphine play in this crucial period of development for Burroughs as a writer and individual? Why did Burroughs distort the facts regarding his experience with apomorphine, and why has that story remained unexamined for decades? Why has the “cure” in 1956 become the pivot on which Burroughs turned his life around? Why, however falsely, does the story of Naked Lunch begin at this point?

On one level, the development of this myth begins with Burroughs’ 1959 arrest on drug trafficking charges. Shortly after his arrest, Burroughs began work on the Deposition essay. In his letters of the period, Burroughs assured Ginsberg that the Deposition was sincere and represented his current beliefs on drugs and drug addiction.

“I am writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and in the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap. I am off junk in sickness or in health so long as we both shall live.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1959)

The Deposition contains an account of the cure and describes the role of apomorphine as an antidote to the “Sickness.” Ginsberg felt the Deposition went too far and wrapped up Naked Lunch too neatly. He also doubted the Deposition’s sincerity. Reading the letters of the period, one gets the sense that Burroughs protested too much in defending the Deposition as an accurate, honest account of his true feelings. By 1991, Burroughs retracted his statement that he did not remember writing the notes that became Naked Lunch. The con appears to be on, but as Oliver Harris demonstrates in The Secret of Fascination, generations of critics have been willing marks parroting the Deposition into the critical record verbatim. In some cases, they have even misrepresented the Deposition, in which Burroughs admits to backsliding into addiction after the cure. Apomorphine was far from the miracle drug that Burroughs made it out to be — and, as we will see, he also left out a key component of the history of its use. It all suggests that Burroughs’ championing of apomorphine as an effective cure may have stemmed, at least on one level, from a desire to portray himself as drug-free and thereby stay out of jail.

But there is more to the story of apomorphine and to Burroughs’ insistence of being clean than simple legal expedience. Burroughs felt the need to be drug-free before his trouble with the law in late 1959. As the letters demonstrate, Burroughs realized he was on the road to terminal addiction by late 1955. The depths of Burroughs’ despair and desperation were no con. The trip to London to seek treatment with Dr. Dent was necessary on the level of survival.

Yet the need to be clean was also closely tied to Burroughs’ strong desire to be a successful author published by the Establishment, i.e. corporate publishers. The letters from the mid-1950s are full of references to Burroughs’ desire to gain mainstream acceptance as a writer. At this time, Burroughs associated writing with respectability and social acceptance. By becoming a writer, Burroughs could redeem himself (for the death of Joan, for being a poor father, for not supporting himself financially) and give himself a place in society. Writing was a means to conform, and Burroughs felt the need to fit in strongly. The image of the opium-addicted writer held an allure for Burroughs from an early age. As he struggled with the form and content of Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs’ drug addiction not only hampered his ability to write, it also symbolized his sick creativity and his inability to write straight narrative and commercially viable material. Apomorphine, as a means of curing his drug addiction, was thus a way for Burroughs to free himself to write. In a sense, kicking drugs was a way of going mainstream and being respectable. First, the cure would facilitate the act of writing and then possibly open the door to writing of a less sick and more popular nature.

Apomorphine tied into getting straight in another, less obvious manner. In the early days of the 20th century, apomorphine was used by doctors as part of a treatment to cure patients of their homosexuality. In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell mentions this fact in passing and suggests that Burroughs would have been aware of this aspect of apomorphine’s history. Burroughs never discussed it. In the Deposition, Burroughs states that historically the only use for apomorphine was as an emetic for poisoning. Not true, and given the fact that Burroughs was briefly a medical student and that he was intensely interested in medical history, the assumption that Burroughs knew apomorphine’s full history is not far-fetched. Currently, apomorphine is being used to combat erectile dysfunction (Uprima). Clearly, there is a strong sexual aspect to apomorphine’s history and its side effects. Apomorphine’s sexual component coupled with withdrawal symptoms must be an intense shock to the system. Burroughs ignored these elements of apomorphine in his published writing on the subject, but not in his letters.

Immediately following the apomorphine cure in London in 1956, there are several references in Burroughs’ letters to changes in his sex drive. In his first letter after the cure, Burroughs writes, “The thought of sex with anyone gives me the horrors… Last night went to a ghastly queer party where I was pawed and propositioned by a 50-year-old Liberal MP. I told him, ‘I couldn’t sleep with Ganymede now, let alone you.’” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 8, 1956) A week later Burroughs reports to Ginsberg, “Still no interest in sex.” I am unaware if apomorphine was used by doctors as an aversion technique to combat homosexual impulses, but in Burroughs’ case the apomorphine experience did lead to a type of sexual conditioning. In the months after the cure, Burroughs’ sex drive returned as did his sexual activities with “boys.” However, as the letters show, a heterosexual element in his sexual make-up surfaced at this point. Burroughs writes, “Still no interest in sex. I am physically able you dig, just not innarested. When I look at a boy nothing happens. Ratty lot of boys they got here anyhoo. Maybe when I come around to it, I want women.” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 15, 1956)

Over the next year, Burroughs underwent a period of intense sexual questioning. For example:

So suddenly a wave of sex come over me and I have a spontaneous orgasm strap my vitals. Now a spontaneous, walking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made in Texas. And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It”s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old character find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out in the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “who you think you’re kidding with the queer act. I know you, baby.” What it is as Allah wills… (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 15, 1956).

One might assume that this quote is another Burroughsian routine full of irony and black humor, but the references to heterosexual impulses in the letters are too numerous to discount as mere joking. Clearly just after his apomorphine experience, Burroughs experienced a crisis of sexual identity. It may not be possible to say whether this can be directly attributed to apomorphine, but apomorphine, sexual identity, and the form of Naked Lunch will all be interrelated by late 1957. Burroughs’ sexual questioning strikes me as very similar to the crisis Ginsberg experienced just before the breakthrough of Howl in 1955. Famously, Ginsberg met with his analyst and openly discussed his desire to live as a poet and more importantly as a gay poet despite his attempts to play it straight. Ginsberg’s analyst stated that nothing was stopping him. This advice encouraged Ginsberg on the path to sexual freedom and the poetic vision of Howl occurred shortly thereafter.

Similarly the feverish development of Naked Lunch occurred during a period of uncertainty regarding sexual identity. As Burroughs questioned his sexuality, Naked Lunch poured forth “like dictation.” In addition the desire to go straight sexually paralleled a desire to once and for all straitjacket Naked Lunch into the form and themes of the conventional novel. In early 1957, Burroughs was seriously examining his homosexuality. Burroughs writes,

All the etiology of my homosex and practically everything spill right out of me. Quotes from last night majoun high: “So what’s holding him up? — homosex orientation — Some old tired synapse pattern won’t go to its home like it’s supposed. There must be an answer, I need the answering device. I think I can arrange but it will be expensive. Modern Oedipus.” This give me an out already, I can put down the old whore and hump some young Crete gash heat my toga like the dry goods of Nexus, you might say Nexus had the rag on.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Jan. 31, 1957)

In late 1957, Burroughs examined Naked Lunch‘s form and determined to make yet another effort to conform and contain Naked Lunch. As a result, Burroughs developed The General Theory of Addiction. He writes, “At present I am working on Benway and Scandinavia angles, also developing a theory of morphine addiction… Incidentally, this theory resulted from necessities of the novel. That is scientific theories and novel are inseparable. What I am evolving is a general theory of addiction which expands into a world picture with concepts of good and evil.” (Letter to Ginsberg Sept. 20, 1957). The answer to Burroughs’ sexual and literary questioning was the General Theory of Addiction. This theory was tied to Burroughs’ sexual crisis and the form of Naked Lunch. Burroughs writes, “Briefly, the novel concerns addiction and an addicting virus that is passed from one person to another in sexual contacts. The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on an assembly-line basis.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Aug. 27, 1957)

The General Theory of Addiction derived directly from Burroughs’ apomorphine experience and related to the pioneering work of Dr. Dent, Anxiety and Its Treatment. “The Theory of Addiction is, incidentally, correct, in essentials. I received a letter from Wolberg, quote… ‘Particularly interesting is your theory about cancer and schizophrenia. I have made no study of this, but telephoned a friend who works for a large mental institution. He said the incidence of cancer among schizophrenics is appreciably lower than among non-schizophrenics.’ The importance of this one fact is immeasurable. My theory contains the key to addiction, cancer, and schizophrenia. I have not yet heard from Doctor Dent.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 19, 1957) Keep in mind this theory developed from “the necessities of the novel.” Even at this late date, Burroughs strongly felt the need to subject Naked Lunch to the restraints of the novel. The desire for literary form was also related to his desire to conform sexually.

In a key letter written on October 8, 1957, Burroughs sent along a copy of his General Theory of Addiction to Ginsberg. Burroughs writes:

I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in a dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say. ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo, I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.

The concept and linking together of sickness and queerness related directly to Burroughs’ apomorphine experience. As this letter demonstrates, the emergence of his heterosexual personality started just after the cure in London. Soon after Burroughs felt himself cured of the Sickness, i.e. drug addiction, he sought to cure himself of his queerness. The time was ripe for Burroughs to conform, to get his life together, and to play it straight. Sickness and illness also refer to the sick, obscene nature of Naked Lunch and its failure to conform to the traditional novel form as well as Naked Lunch‘s troubling (for Burroughs) link to homosexual desire and obsession. The phrase “strait-jacket of flesh” creates a wealth of associations between madness, sickness, homosexuality / heterosexuality, and literary form. As Harris demonstrates, Naked Lunch germinated in Queer (Burroughs’ account of his obsession with Lewis Marker) and his letters to Ginsberg. Burroughs strongly felt the need to cover up those personal elements in Naked Lunch. According to Harris, the junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction did just that. It not only provided a form to the novel, it shifted the focus from homosexual obsession to drug addiction. In a sense, apomorphine provided a means to cure Naked Lunch of its queerness.

By April 1958, Burroughs instructed Ginsberg to include the Benway section and to exclude the theoretical material. In final publication, Burroughs abandoned the General Theory of Addiction framework for Naked Lunch but traces remain in the Benway section. As Harris demonstrates, the General Theory and the related “The Conspiracy” were Burroughs’ last attempts to straitjacket Naked Lunch into the traditional form of the novel. By late 1958, Burroughs realized that his desire to be a writer did not depend on toning down his radical experimentation in literary style and drug use. In fact, those elements were what made Naked Lunch a profoundly obscene masterpiece. Burroughs’ change of heart cannot be separated from his tentative success in getting selections of Naked Lunch published to wide acclaim in little magazines beginning in 1957 and onwards into early 1959. Yet the decision to tone down the elements of homosexual desire remained. On one level, this was achieved by eliminating references to the epistolatory origins of the novel. That said, the novel as published by Burroughs in 1959 was a radical one, as much anti-novel as novel.

Yet Burroughs’ troubles with obscenity laws in 1959, in addition to his problems with drug laws (discussed above), would lead to a reassessment of Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ re-insertion of apomorphine into the text. Burroughs strongly desired the publication of the complete Naked Lunch in the United States. Concessions had to be made to render Naked Lunch palatable to American courts and the reading public. The Deposition and to a lesser extent the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” serve this purpose. In a sense, Burroughs reintroduced the General Theory of Addiction into the novel. According to Harris, this paradigm completely overshadows the other more transgressive aspects of Naked Lunch, in essence de-radicalizing it, de-sexualizing it, and de-toxifying it. First, the Deposition de-radicalizes the text by providing a means to analyze and to interpret the book. Burroughs provides a blueprint (whether con or not) for critics and readers to approach the novel. In addition, the Deposition de-sexualizes the book by taking the focus off of the homosexual obsession that formed the basis for the novel. A framework based on drug addiction replaces the sexuality of the letter economy. In the various obscenity trials surrounding Naked Lunch, doctors testified that the novel presented an accurate portrayal of the junk / drug problem. With the introduction of apomorphine, Burroughs could not be accused of immorality since he provided a solution to the problem he presented. The book was no longer obscene but instead was a public service message on a major problem facing contemporary society. The account of apomorphine effectively cures the novel of its Sickness (queerness, obscurity, immorality, and drug abuse). In essence the novel itself undergoes Dr. Dent’s cure and emerges reborn.

As the opening pages of APO-33 Bulletin: a Metabolic Regulator make clear, the Deposition and other writings on apomorphine of the Naked Lunch era left a bad taste in Burroughs’ mouth. The accepted reason is that Burroughs did not make the case for apomorphine strongly enough, since he did not implicate law enforcement and the medical community in the blackballing of his miracle drug. That may be true, but I cannot help sensing that Burroughs also felt that these writings came on much too strong and revealed too much. In APO-33, Burroughs explains his failure regarding apomorphine as an overestimation of his popularity potential. In essence, Burroughs tried to be respectable and mainstream. He played to the audience, so he watered down his beliefs about apomorphine. Yet he also pandered to “popularity” in another manner. Burroughs altered and molded the popular perception of himself and his troublesome novel for the benefit of the legal system in drug and obscenity trials. Burroughs may have realized that these pieces discussing apomorphine attached to Naked Lunch diminished the diabolical power of his novel.

By 1965, the time to kow-tow to popular and legal opinion was over. By being the most notorious author in the world, Burroughs had paradoxically achieved an element of respectability. He was a financial and critical success. The legal battles were basically over. Maybe Burroughs felt apomorphine had to be rescued from the squares and injected with the radical spirit. In the work of the 1960s, apomorphine no longer just embodied and played a role in a junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction. It represented a new theory, but a theory grounded in process: the cut-up technique. As I demonstrated in my earlier column on apomorphine, the drug became symbolic of this experimental technique. Works like APO-33 returned to the radical nature of Naked Lunch. Radical in form and in process of composition. The apomorphine experience was no longer utilized as a straitjacket. Given its non-commercial and disorienting nature, Burroughs’ work of this period was once again considered unreadable and beyond the forces of readerly control. And for Burroughs, apomorphine once again became a cure, this time for the sickness of Language and the Word.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There are times in your reading life when you dabble in a book, dip into it periodically, put it down, and come back to it. Your experience with the book is leisurely, casual. You are chipping. The book does not have a strong hold on you. Then one day you turn to the book again, and next thing you know, you are hooked. The book has become essential, an obsession, a part of your daily thoughts and life.

This series of events just occurred to me with William Burroughs’ neglected cut-up APO-33 Bulletin, A Metabolic Regulator. I wrote about APO-33 before, but I focused on its printing history, especially the aborted Fuck You Press edition (entitled Health Bulletin: APO-33, a Metabolic Regulator). I see the book in a different light now, and I see why Ed Sanders and Fuck You Press had to have a crack at it. I have read it much more closely and examined it in light of Burroughs’ publishing activity in the mid-1960s, the period of his most sustained relationship with the mimeo revolution. As a result, APO-33 and the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period are now key Burroughs texts for me. I believe they are pivotal for understanding Burroughs as a writer.

So what changed? Why did APO-33 suddenly rush into my head with all the force of a crashing wave? In a word: speed. Yup, amphetamine. Not taking it, but reading about the history of it. A few months ago I picked up two books on drug history. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine by Nicolas Rasmussen. Shroom is the more reader-friendly book. It is written for the casual reader in an engaging, welcoming style. Timothy Leary is in there. Allen Ginsberg is featured. Aldous Huxley plays a role, as does Robert Graves who wrote The White Goddess. There are a few minor mentions of Burroughs.

Letcher briefly discusses Yage as another example of a natural psychedelic, but no Burroughs, Ginsberg, or The Yage Letters in this context. Letcher talks of the influence of Carlos Castaneda, Graves, and Huxley in bringing natural psychedelics to the masses. But surely the 1963 City Lights edition of The Yage Letters was another bible for the burgeoning psychedelic generation. Not to mention the fact that Burroughs was exploring this terrain, geographic and psycho-pharmacological, in the early 1950s along with, and in some cases alongside, the pioneers in the field: Richard Evans Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson. Ginsberg and Leary captured a lot of the headlines in the 1960s and dominate much of the cultural history of the psychedelic era, but Burroughs, despite his dismissal and distrust of drugs like LSD, and maybe because of his critical eye on hallucinogens, must be at least the equal of Leary and Ginsberg in cultural importance. No doubt he was their superior in theorizing about the significance of psychedelics.

On Speed also mentions Burroughs only in passing, but reading this book helped further my appreciation of Burroughs and turned APO-33 into a key text for me. Most people do not associate Burroughs with speed. His son Billy Jr. wrote the book on amphetamine, but, as with psychedelics, Burroughs was at the beginning of speed culture in the United States. The proto-Beat group of Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker, and Herbert Huncke were early users and abusers of speed in the mid-1940s. Vollmer was the first woman with a reported case of speed psychosis in New York State in 1945. Much has been written on the importance of speed in Kerouac’s writing in terms of style and process, but it was Huncke who played a key role in speed culture in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s that involved writers such as Alex Trocchi, Peter Orlovsky, and Janine Pommy Vega. This circle probably helped spawn more creatively productive scenes, like Warhol’s Factory and the Second Generation New York writers who gathered around Ted Berrigan.

I have always found these amphetamine scenes to be extremely important, and the key role of speed on the creative output and thinking of these groups ought to be examined. Can the writing that we know as distinctly Kerouacian be separated from Kerouac’s use of speed? The same goes for Warhol. For example, the movie Sleep becomes much more complex when viewed in light of amphetamine use. These topics are treated in Rasmussen’s book, but his focus is really on speed’s relationship to the history of the pharmaceutical and medical industry. It was this discussion that seemed truly Burroughsian.

Amphetamine was one of the first drugs developed and marketed by the modern pharmaceutical industry. At its beginnings, speed had no true medical value. Early on, companies tried to market it as an anti-asthma drug (Benzedrine inhalers). Speed never really worked in that capacity, however, and the inhalers were abused to get high. For decades the drug companies and doctors knew of amphetamine’s addicting qualities and its dangers for abuse. But the drug was patented, and the patent was purchased cheaply. As a result, speed was very profitable for the manufacturers, who colluded with the medical industry to champion speed’s benefits and to downplay its dark side. Speed became the first anti-depressant, a weight-loss drug, and a potential cure for addiction.

From Speed to Apomorphine

Clearly, this is right in Burroughs’ wheelhouse, and Rasmussen’s discussion of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession applies directly to apomorphine. In The Job, a series of interviews with Burroughs conducted by Daniel Odier, Burroughs bluntly states why he believes apomorphine is not being used as an anti-addiction medication.

Q: What is the opinion of pharmaceutical researchers on the merits of apomorphine?

A: Pharmaceutical researchers are told what research to pursue by vested interest, which gives orders to the American Narcotics Department. Billions for variations on the Benzedrine formula, for tranquilizers of dubious value, not ten cents for a drug that has unlimited potentials not only in treating addiction but in handling the whole problem of anxiety.

Burroughs also states why the companies that produce apomorphine fail to promote and market it on a large scale: “They can sell all the products they produce in any case. Remember, these pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in illness. Drugs that strike at the very root of illness are dangerous.” These two statements get to the heart of the history described in Rasmussen’s book. After finishing the book, I returned to APO-33 in earnest and started to dig into the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period.

Burroughs contributed two cut-ups to Aram Saroyan’s mimeo mag, Lines, in 1965. Issue 5 features “Chlorhydrate d’apomorphine chabre” and “Rex Morgan M.D.” The latter presents two scrapbook pages that contain the fragment of a short story. (This prose piece does not appear in Maynard & Miles or Shoaf.) In the scrapbook Burroughs includes a single frame from a Rex Morgan comic that deals with the topic of addiction, namely alcoholism. Not coincidentally, Dr. John Yerbury Dent, who treated Burroughs with apomorphine in 1956, first used the drug to treat alcoholics. Burroughs portrays Morgan as forward-thinking and searching for better drug solutions. When he receives a new tranquilizer, Dr. Morgan dismisses it as not treating the problem and as having “doubtful value.” Along with a sample of apomorphine comes a “circular… in blue print with some passages in red for emphasis.” The packaging for the apomorphine describes its uses and its benefits as an anti-anxiety medication and a metabolic regulator. As Dr. Morgan settles in his office, he becomes aware that a beatnik suffered a bad trip on LSD. Dr. Morgan gathers his things and leaves to treat the patient. He takes the apomorphine with him. The story abruptly ends there but one suspects that Dr. Morgan used the apomorphine to successfully regulate the beatnik metabolism. Burroughs provides a feel-good story here, but Rasmussen describes how the pharmaceutical industry flooded doctors with drugs samples of “doubtful value” and encouraged doctors to push them on patients. Similarly, the literature that accompanied the samples was often inaccurate and hyperbolic. APO-33 combats what Burroughs saw as the false information spread by the pharmaceutical companies.

A progressive doctor such as Rex Morgan is opposed by the most famous fictional character in the Burroughsian universe, Dr. Benway. In Naked Lunch Dr. Benway pontificates on drugs, addiction, and anxiety. Also interesting in light of apomorphine is Dr. “Fingers” Schafer the Lobotomy Kid. In Naked Lunch, Dr. Schafer creates the “All-American De-Anxietized Man” with disastrous results. Dr. Dent, the model doctor, wrote a book on the use of apomorphine to combat anxiety: Anxiety and its Treatment. As the promotional literature received by Dr. Morgan makes clear, Burroughs (and Dent) felt apomorphine was a more progressive cure for anxiety-related illnesses than other treatments such as tranquilizers or lobotomy. The promotional literature recommended apomorphine for “grief, anguish, anxiety states, acute drug intoxications and chronic addiction.”

On one level, APO-33 is Burroughs’ enlightened rewriting of the promotional literature of the pharmaceutical companies. In addition, APO-33 provides what Burroughs felt was the real story that the medical industry would publish if it did not need to perpetuate addiction, illness, and anxiety. The back cover and first page of text features the name Chabre, a French pharmaceutical company that produced apomorphine. The front cover posits APO-33 as a report (“A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula”) and a bulletin. Like Time, published by C Press in 1965, the covers of APO-33 reproduce the look and feel of a “circular” that Burroughs believed would be issued by enlightened pharmaceutical companies.

With its incorporation of handwriting and its illegibility, APO-33 also serves as a prescription pad of sorts, prescribing apomorphine as a cure for society’s ills. The various meanings of script would not have been lost on Burroughs. He realized that doctors were pressured to overprescribe dubious medications and in a sense were legal pushers. In addition, he was aware of the power of written language to perpetuate order and rationality — Control.

A Treatment That Cancels Addiction

The opening of APO-33 as published by Beach Books refers to a lost text that served as an appendix to the Italian edition of Junkie published in 1962 (the edition was translated as La scimmia sulla schiena or Monkey on the Back). According to Maynard and Miles, the text was the original version of an essay titled “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.” Burroughs declares in APO-33 that the manuscript was lost and that the text can only be found in La scimmia sulla schiena. Ultimately Burroughs rewrote the essay to publish it in the Fuck You version of APO-33. The entire APO-33 Health Bulletin section of the Fuck You edition was reprinted in the Beach Books version. However, the Beach Books edition excluded “Locked Out of Time” and “Apomorphine Statement 2″, both of which had appeared in the Fuck You edition. (For a complete discussion of the differences between the various editions of APO-33 see Maynard & Miles.) The final version of “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” appeared in the New Statesman (March 4, 1966) and was eventually reprinted in the British edition of The Soft Machine published by Calder in 1968.

Burroughs felt this article was a compromise and a failure. In APO-33 he writes, “I geared [the Italian appendix] to popular appeal being younger you understand I over estimated my ‘popularity potential.’ I did not criticize the American Narcotics Department officials nor the Public Health center at Lexington.” Burroughs laments the fact that his beliefs regarding the corruption of the medical profession were not stated more forcefully and aggressively. Burroughs writes, “My attempt to attribute good will where it patently does not exist proved ill-advised. I see no reason at this point to pull punches in the expectation of popularity.”

Few readers of the various editions of APO-33 would be aware of the original “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” essay. Yet readers of APO-33 might be aware of some other appendices that discuss apomorphine: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” and “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” both of which appeared in the 1962 Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs believed these articles also failed to present the case for apomorphine strongly enough. Burroughs writes, “Feeling that the articles I had written on apomorphine treatment (British Journal of Addiction January 1957 vol. 53 no. 2 page 119, Evergreen Review 1959 reprinted in the American edition of Naked Lunch) were not adequate… ” These failures prompted him to write “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.”

In all these pieces, Burroughs toned down his views and presented his arguments straight. He played nice — nowhere more so than in the British Journal of Addiction. In that venue Burroughs did not expose what he saw as the conspiracy — in which academic journals played a role — against apomorphine. In addition, deliberately or not, the British Journal of Addiction effectively pigeonholed Burroughs as an addict and outsider and thus not truly trustworthy. The requirements of academic writing made Burroughs water down his views and his style, although as Carol Loranger points out, Burroughs’ hip and radical attitude towards drugs and literature comes out.

In spite of the fact that the British Journal had published his views, Burroughs felt that academic journals continued to censor the facts about apomorphine. As On Speed makes clear, articles on amphetamine were in many cases written by doctors and researchers sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. Those companies only released reports that supported their agenda. By the mid-1960s, Burroughs understood that the medical industry was not going to share his and Dr. Dent’s optimistic view of apomorphine. A drug-free, anxiety-free society was unthinkable in the present system. According to Burroughs, the financial and political stakes were too high.

For Burroughs, the academic medical journal was just one more weapon in the hands of the drug establishment. As such, the power of these publications had to be subverted and diminished. Critics have mentioned that Burroughs cut-up his letter from the British Journal of Addiction and incorporated it into APO-33. Burroughs more likely incorporated “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” to greater effect than the letter, but the medical journal, as represented by the British Journal, was very much on Burroughs’ mind in APO-33. This becomes even clearer in the fifth issue of Lines. “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” contains the citation for the issue of the British Journal of Addiction in which Burroughs appeared: Volume 53, No. 2, along with the date of its publication, January 1957. The manuscript page of “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” was printed by offset, so in a sense the text in Lines served as an alternative to the fifty offprints of the “Letter from a Master Addict” that Burroughs received in 1957.

The Dream Police of Poetry

Given the debacle that ensued with the aborted publication of APO-33 by Fuck You Press in 1965, one wonders why Burroughs entrusted Ed Sanders with such a difficult project that tested the capabilities of mimeo as a medium. Clearly the mimeograph was poorly suited to recreate the intricate scrapbook nature of the APO-33 manuscript. Burroughs published another scrapbook piece, Time, with C Press, also in 1965. Ted Berrigan was more successful in pulling off Time by resorting to offset printing, but again Burroughs submitted the manuscript to a mimeo press. Interestingly, much of Burroughs’ writing on apomorphine also appeared as mimeo (usually offprinted copies of original mansucripts). His texts were printed by Fuck You Press, My Own Mag, and Lines. Fellow travelers in the mimeo revolution, like Beach Books run by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, also published apomorphine-related texts. Burroughs’ understanding of the importance of apomorphine cannot be separated from the publications, culture, and spirit of the mimeo revolution in several key respects.

For Burroughs, the suppression of apomorphine was not just the fault of censorship and corruption in pharmaceutical literature and academic journals. He believed the mainstream press was in collusion with the government and medical community in censoring information on apomorphine. In The Job Burroughs states, “The press is working with the Narcotics Department to publicize and spread the drug problem. It is not in their interest to stop this source of copy and circulation by advocating measures that would control addiction and reduce it to a minor health problem. What is the press selling? Violence, sex, and drugs. These items are sure copy. That is to say, effective measures to eliminate criminality or drug-taking are not good copy.” I have discussed elsewhere how the C Press Time represents Burroughs’ attack on the Time-Life media empire and how it was his rewrite of Time magazine, particularly the November 30, 1962 issue that savagely reviewed Naked Lunch. Burroughs saw the suppression of apomorphine as another of the evils perpetuated by corporate media.

The mimeo revolution arose in the post-WWII era in opposition to the consolidation and bureaucratization of print media. Large, corporate, mainstream publishers stifled innovation and radical thought in creative writing in much the same way the medical establishment controlled information about addiction and apomorphine. The mimeograph, as well as the letterpress and cheaper offset printing, allowed writers to take control of their own work and its distribution. Clearly, Burroughs saw the mimeograph and the publications of the mimeo revolution as ideally suited to present the anti-authority and anti-establishment message of APO-33. According to Maynard & Miles, the Fuck You edition features, “a drawing by Sanders built on the Egyptian hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus; at the top is an ankh, the hieroglyph for life, at the bottom a mimeo machine, a hookah, and an ejaculating movie camera.” This was Sanders’ “TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE.” The mimeo press subverted and provided an end-around the corporate media that Burroughs felt was suppressing apomorphine.

Yet the relationship between apomorphine and the mimeo revolution goes deeper than that. In Burroughs’ mind, apomorphine was ideologically similar to mimeo. In The Apomorphine Times, a newspaper supplement edited by Burroughs and included in My Own Mag Issue Twelve, Burroughs writes of apomorphine: “Like a good policeman, apo-morphine does its work and goes.” APO-33 contains a picture of Burroughs with the caption “in a policeman’s bed sitter.” The “Rex Morgan, M.D.” cut-up also contains a reference to the good policeman as well as the phrase “So he takes over newsmagazine… The way we like to see.” The concept of the good policeman deserves a little explanation. To those familiar with Burroughs’ distaste for the law, his belief in a good policeman can be confusing. On one level, the phrase refers to an effective policeman. In that sense, like a policeman, apomorphine would rid society of addicts and pushers and help wipe out the junk paradigm. But Burroughs realized that the police (as force of control, as bureaucracy) were also part of the problem. In this light, the good policeman refers to the ideal or beneficial policeman in the Burroughsian universe. The ideal policeman is not intrusive; he does what business he has to do and goes. He does not attempt to increase or perpetuate the power of an established entity. Ideally, society and its members would mind their own business and tend to it without a bureaucratic police force. That Burroughsian ideal may be impossible. “The police are a necessary evil,” as Gregory Corso writes in his poem “Police.”

Apomorphine was a drug that steadied the system and then left no trace. It was not addictive. Burroughs went to great pains to state that apomorphine was not an aversion therapy and was non-invasive. The key term is metabolic regulator. Like the ideal policeman, apomorphine regulated without attempting to exert control or to extend its power or influence. Methadone was addictive and thus not a good policeman. Likewise, LSD altered the consciousness and thus left a trace on the system. Burroughs makes clear apomorphine’s role as ideal regulator in APO-33. He writes, “Like a good policeman apomorphine does its work and goes. Yes we of the Nova Police do our work and go.”

Burroughs links the “policeman” concept to mimeo productions. This becomes clear in a magazine like The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs edited this magazine-within-a-magazine that appeared in issue 12 of My Own Mag. The Apomorphine Times includes a four-square fold-in text. Burroughs writes, “(sexless providence supported by the rich. Policemen jumped out on them.) From Afternoon Ticker Tape My Magazine published by J. Nuttall of London Not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues after which it sank under the dead grey sludge of its own prose. The cadaver was has been however resuscitated in New York under the name I believe of The National Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Buckley…”

Therefore a close reading of The Apomorphine Times reveals that Burroughs viewed the products of the mimeo revolution, be it a little magazine or a scrapbook like Time, as “good policemen,” a print version of apomorphine. Like apomorphine, mimeo mags did their job and disappeared. Mimeo is generally a guerilla strike on the literary, social and political landscape. They only last a handful of issues (two in the case of “The Burrough”) and they fade away. In addition their ephemeral, fragile nature ensures that they will not last although their effect lingers on. For Burroughs, the alternative press of the mimeo revolution was a good policeman that combats the Time-Life machine.

For quite some time Burroughs had seen a strange relationship between law and the little magazine. In 1958, Burroughs dreamed of starting his own little magazine with Gregory Corso. They were going to call it Interpol after the international police organization. In a letter of September 28, 1958 cowritten by Corso and Burroughs, Corso writes that “‘the poet is becoming a policeman.’” This idea is clearly Burroughs’ own as Corso places this phrase in quotes and attributes the policeman / poet idea to Burroughs later on (“like Bill says we’re policemen”). Burroughs writes, “When the Human Image is threatened, The Poet dictates the forms of survival. Dream police of poetry protect us from The Human Virus. The human virus can now be isolated and treated. This is the work of The New POLICE-POET.”

What we see here is Burroughs and Corso subverting and complicating terms and organizations like the police and Interpol through a creation of and takeover of media. This is a process known as détournement. This idea was the most used weapon of the Situationists. In the mid-1960s Burroughs was on the fringes of this group with his work with Alexander Trocchi and The Sigma Project. Works like Time and APO-33 are textbook examples of détournement.

This technique was particularly productive for Gregory Corso at the time. This is the period of poems like “Power,” “Army,” “Marriage,” “Hair,” “Bomb” and, particularly interesting for this discussion, “Police.” Corso explored the fascination / repulsion of these charged concepts and attempted to turn them to his advantage and make them hip. In APO-33, Burroughs similarly examined the word fix. Burroughs was clearly ambivalent about the police. He attempted to join the OSS and he was intrigued / repulsed by agents and operatives. He wrote in a private eye style in Junkie. In addition he examined the role of the police as part of the junk paradigm and as agent of control throughout his writing life. Possibly like Corso, Burroughs realized that the “police are a necessary evil.” But an enlightened / ideal / hip police, i.e. a good policeman. Thus the concept “Police-Poet. Given Corso’s reverence for Shelley, we can see links to Shelley’s concept of the poet as the Legislator of the World which itself is an old concept that dates back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. Interpol as magazine would be the publishing outlet for “Police-Poets”, i.e. hip policemen.

In “Police” Corso writes, “My father’s indifference, Rosalind Russell’s stardom / the great, big circulation of the News, the Mirror / I praised the police their backing, their fame —” Corso here acknowledges that the police derive their power and authority from patriarchy, apathy, and the mass media. Poems like “Police” and a projected magazine such as Interpol would explore and “detourne” those relationships. Burroughs took the idea of Interpol into the 1960s. He titled his newspaper supplement to My Own Mag, “The Burrough.” The title suggests the FBI or the Bureau, another reference to a policing organization. Little magazines enacted the concept of the good policeman, an ideal regulator that monitored the cultural, political, and spiritual aspects of society as a whole from a position outside the existing system. Mimeo and the little mag helped keep society honest and straight. Burroughs saw that the little mag and apomorphine served the same function.

Cut-Ups: The Complete Picture

It seems obvious to me that a full understanding of Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique is in the infant stage. With almost all the focus on the cut-up trilogy as published by Grove Press and with nearly a blind eye to any cut-up published in little mags, the picture of Burroughs’ experiments cannot be completed. Oliver Harris has started to dig into Minutes to Go (as well as some of the little mags), but The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, and the material in the more obscure little mags, particularly the mimeos (ones not included in White Subway, The Burroughs File, or Ports of Entry) are largely unexplored territory. Even a collector runs into seemingly insurmountable obstacles in attempting to tell the cut-up story. The Fuck You edition of APO-33 apparently differs substantially from the Beach Books version. But copies of the Fuck You edition are so rare that they are as good as lost. The Burroughs scholar must be an archeologist of sorts. Library holdings need to be opened up and utilized. The completely untouched manuscripts of and letters on the cut-up in the New York Public Library and elsewhere must be made available to interested readers.

Previous scholarship, such as that by Christopher Land and Timothy Murphy, would greatly benefit from taking these under-studied cut-ups into account. In “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control,” Christopher Land outlines Burroughs’ theory of language and the role of the cut-up in subverting the control of the Word. Other critics, such as Timothy Murphy, have done the same. For Burroughs, the cut-up subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened up the potential of space. The cut-up was an attempt to break down the apparent coherence of language. The experiments published in little mags best represent this aspect of the cut-up and best demonstrate the cut-up in practice. The cut-up trilogy straightjackets the cut-up into the form of the novel. The block paragraphs force the reader to approach the cut-up from left to right onward down the page and forward through the codex. This is precisely “the trap of linear, narrative time” that Burroughs hoped to explode with the cut-up. APO-33 provides much more freedom for the reader. The three-column format can be read across columns or from top to bottom. In addition, columns on a page connect within the page or across to other pages thus introducing several options of approaching the text. “Rex Morgan, MD” can be read like a painting or a projective verse poem. APO-33 and the Apomorphine Times present cut-ups in a grid format. The reader can process these texts “any which way” or even take the scissors to them and reenact the process of the cut-up. Such texts challenge the format of the book in ways the cut-up trilogy does not. It can be argued whether the cut-up as practiced by Burroughs successfully enacted his theories (as Oliver Harris does in “Cutting Up Politics,” published in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization). Yet the final judgment on the cut-ups cannot be handed down without moving away from the novels and digging into the magazines and, even more importantly, the manuscripts and letters.

I want to closely examine a single page of the Beach Books edition of APO-33 to highlight the critical potential of this unexplored material. The back cover of APO-33 contains the phrase “pellets sublinguaux chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine.” This refers to a tablet of apomorphine to be taken orally, dissolved under the tongue. The suggestion of dropping APO-33 highlights a link to LSD. In Lines 5, Burroughs also draws parallels between LSD and apomorphine. Like LSD-25, APO-33 is a consciousness-expanding drug of sorts, but according to Burroughs, apomorphine is the more beneficial drug and does not contain LSD’s baggage. Burroughs distrusted psychedelics. As demonstrated in The Job, Burroughs viewed LSD as physically dangerous. It was engulfed in vague theorization and lulled users into a sense of peace, love, and complacency. In contrast, apomorphine is to Burroughs a “good policeman” and a metabolic regulator. It reduces anxiety, clears the mind, induces sanity, and is non-addictive. It does its job and goes. No flashbacks.

More importantly the word “sublinguaux” suggests Burroughs’ theories of the sub-vocal and sub-language. Land writes, “At one level, Burroughs focuses on our everyday subvocalizations, the internal monologue that provides a narrative sense of personal, subjective continuity which we think of as ‘our self.’ These subvocalizations simultaneously come from outside, hence the notion that they are a viral infection and constitute an inside: the subject ‘I’.” The French word allows Burroughs to get across these ideas in a creative manner. In addition “sublinguaux” conjures up the idea of subverting language. Burroughs viewed the apomorphine as the cut-up in drug form. In “Rex Morgan M.D.” in Lines 5, there is a picture of Burroughs with the caption Dr. Zeit. Zeit is German for Time. The picture and caption in a cut-up about apomorphine highlights Burroughs’ belief that the drug subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened the potential of space. For Burroughs, apomorphine regulated the human body just as the cut-up regulated the power of the word. Land writes, “[A]pomorphine was the perfect way of regulating the addict’s metabolism and silencing the screams of his inner demons. Within the context of Burroughs’ concerns with control and language, the idea of ‘apomorphine silence’ seems suggestive of a balanced state of self-governance without a governed self that is itself the product of control.” The miracle drug cured the addiction to subvocalization. Apomorphine provided silence. Therefore Burroughs felt apomorphine acted in a similar manner to that of the cut-up technique. It was the cut-up in the form of a pill.

According to Burroughs, mimeo was another metabolic regulator. APO-33, as radical anti-establishment text, was ideologically compatible with mimeo. The back cover of APO-33 by Beach Books captures this dynamic. The page triangulates Chabre, Beach Books, and City Lights Books. Chabre is a French pharmaceutical company that manufactured and distributed apomorphine (in pellets sublinguaux) for the European market. It should be noted that “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine chabre” in Lines 5 has been mistitled “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine cham bre” in Maynard & Miles. The mistake is crucial and covers up some of the associations that can be made from this valuable and unstudied cut-up. The reference to Chabre provides Burroughs with a realistic touch to make APO-33 look like establishment medical literature. It functions like the cover of Time that takes the image of the November 30, 1962 edition and cuts it up. The presence of Beach Books and City Lights as distributors of APO-33 twists and subverts the corporate associations of Chabre. APO-33 is truly anti-establishment, a product of the alternative press. For Burroughs, the presses of the mimeo revolution serve as alternative sources of information and correctives to the establishment.

I hope both casual readers and critics will come around to experiencing the power of Burroughs’ cut-ups outside of the cut-up trilogy. In my opinion, much of the negative reception of the cut-up is due to the fact that most readers have only experienced the technique in the form of a novel. The cut-up is used to best effect in short pieces, particularly the offprints of scrapbook pages, like those published in the presses of the mimeo revolution. In addition, the ideology of the cut-up as Burroughs saw it is more in line with the ideology and spirit of the mimeo revolution than that of corporate publishing and the form of the novel that it promotes. Readers need to explore beyond the cut-up novels published by Grove. In support of that goal, APO-33, as published by Beach Books in 1968, is reproduced here in its entirety. I also encourage readers to go to digital archive run by Craig Dworkin, Eclipse, to view the apomorphine texts in Lines. (Lines 5 | Rex Morgan | Chlorhydrate d’Apormphine Chabre) Of course, the complete My Own Mag is available on RealityStudio. These resources will provide enjoyment for the casual reader, valuable information for the scholar, and encouragement for libraries and institutions.

Postscript: Wouldn’t You

Just after finishing this piece, I stopped by the Baltimore Book Fair. You never know what might turn up. By and large it was a wash for Burroughs material but I talked to Tom Congalton of Between the Covers for a bit and browsed through his booth. As usual he had the best books in the finest condition. He had a signed Grove Naked Lunch, but a lesser known Burroughs item caught my attention. Tom had a slightly beat up copy of LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug. The book was edited by David Solomon and published by G.P. Putnam in 1964. Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Humphry Osmond contributed essays. Clearly, the book had some problems: some rubbing, a large chip, some creasing — but the timing was dead on. This anthology contains Burroughs’ text “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs.” The essay was later reprinted in Evergreen Review 34. In this article, Burroughs mentions apomorphine as a means to increase the psychedelic experience and decrease anxiety. It was Burroughs in “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” mode. Yet another go-around with the straight press before Burroughs turned to the mimeo press in 1965 for his apomorphine crusade. For me, it was the perfect book at the perfect moment.

One of the benefits of a book fair or a bookstore is that you can see the book for yourself. You are not dependent on the bookseller’s descriptions. In this case, handling the book was key. The book had an ownership inscription by Jack Ward, MD. That sold the book for me. The signature captured the culture that I was describing in my apomorphine piece. A doctor’s copy of an anthology of academic articles by progressive medical researchers and literary explorers — it was Rex Morgan, MD in real life. The idea that practicing doctors were aware of Burroughs’ work on drugs (be it Naked Lunch or more academic pieces), and particularly apomorphine, was fascinating to me.

And then it got better. I googled Dr. Ward and LSD, and lo and behold, it turns out Dr. Ward was the American equivalent of Dr. John Yerbery Dent. Dr. Ward practiced at the Carrier Clinic in New Jersey. Founded in 1910, this clinic treated mental disorders and drug addiction in a private setting. While I found no connection between Dr. Ward and apomorphine, he was at the forefront of experimenting with LSD for medical uses such as curing alcoholism. Dr. Ward personally met with Humphry Osmond, a pioneer in LSD research in a medical setting (Osmond contributed the article “Psychopharmacology: The Manipulation of the Mind” to the anthology). Ward himself contributed “A Case of Change and Partial Regression Following One LSD 25 Treatment” to The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, an anthology like Solomon’s published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1967.

So the book was chipped and creased. On that level it was far from the ideal collector’s copy, but like all great collectibles, this book captured a moment and told a story beyond its pages and dust jacket. I could not have had a better ending to my research into Burroughs, apomorphine and APO-33. I had to buy it despite the condition. Wouldn’t you?

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

To be blunt, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair is the shit. Prior to the fair, I went to the Morgan Library to see their Gutenberg Bible and soak in the atmosphere of J.P. Morgan’s study. The display at the New York show was even more impressive to me, Gutenberg Bible aside. To be honest, I would not be surprised to see the most important human achievement of the second millennium sitting under glass at some rare book dealer’s booth at 66th and Park. This show is that big on the rare book scene. As one dealer told me when I expressed surprise on seeing him, he would not miss this event for the world. He referenced bankrobber Willie Sutton: New York is where the money is.

The Morgan did have one Beat jewel on display amongst the gem-encrusted bindings and the illuminated manuscripts. On the second floor of the Library there was an August 22, 1959 letter from Allen Ginsberg to John Ciardi defending Jack Kerouac against Ciardi’s attack on Maggie Cassidy. There was also a September 3, 1959 postcard follow-up to Ciardi’s reply. Ciardi, the editor for The Saturday Review, wrote a review of Maggie Cassidy in July 1959 entitled “In Loving Memory of Myself.” Critical attacks on Kerouac of this nature were common in the mainstream press. Ciardi follow that up with a larger swipe at the Beats titled “Epitaph for the Dead Beats.” Ciardi is an interesting figure in Beat and Burroughs history. More on him at a later date. The Ginsberg letter includes three paragraphs on William Burroughs. This makes sense since Naked Lunch was published just one month earlier in late July and critics were finally able to assess Naked Lunch as a whole. Ginsberg writes of the relationship between Burroughs and Kerouac as writers, “Burroughs working along similar lines different personal angle shorthand transcription of visual image archetypes encountered in total spiritual exploration.” Ginsberg continues, “Indivious comparisons between Burroughs and Keroauc is the sort of speculation which Jealousy will substitute for happy appreciations. They are old friends and fellow workers and learn from each other.” Ginsberg also quotes the line about Burroughs not imposing plot or story: “I am a recording instrument.” The letter concludes with a handwritten line: “New art should not arouse hostility among the learned, but does and alas always has.” it is a fitting epitaph for the Beats and the lively Beat spirit. All in all it is a remarkable document and an example of the type of treasures on hand at the Morgan.

The New York Book Fair had similar jaw-droppers. The one item that caught my eye was a poster announcing the March 9, 1959 reading with Frank O’Hara and Gregory Corso at the Living Theatre. This reading is legendary and shows the sometimes contentious relationship between the Beats and the New York School. David Lehman provides details of this reading in The Last Avant Garde. At the reading, Keroauc famously yelled to O’Hara, “You’re ruining poetry.” O’Hara quickly returned with “That’s more than you’ll ever do.” The poster documents this important moment in literary history in a material and ephemeral way. Such objects never fail to catch my attention.

Yet I was distracted to say the least. I am sure there were several other great items at the fair but the 2008 New York show was all about one thing and that was the Burroughs Archive of photographs and ur-collages on sale from Brian Cassidy and Ken Lopez. Sure there were other Burroughs items, but they were like the opening band than everybody in the audience struggles to sit through before the headliner. In a show crowded with incredible items, this collection held its own and cast a spell over an audience of jaded spectators who have seen it all. One hour before I got to Ken Lopez’s booth, the collection sold to a gallery owner who plans to exhibit them, but I did get to see the items briefly. Seeing them in person I could understand why the Berg would pass on the items. They were not visually spectacular in the way the scrapbooks from the 1960s are. Those items appeal as art objects and examples of avant experimentalism like mail or Fluxus art. The material in Lopez’s possession was small, unassuming, easy to overlook given that libraries, particularly the Berg, are awash in snapshots of and by Beat figures. That said, this collection exuded an aura. I see these items like I would a fragment of text on a scrap of papyrus from Mesopatamia. Or a glyph on a weathered stone. A portal into beginnings. Could these photographs function like a Rosetta Stone allowing interested parties to get uncoded the genesis of Naked Lunch? Scholar as archeologist. I was reminded of Charles Olson describing himself as an archeologist of morning. From what I could see they have the potential be incredibly useful in just such a project as it relates to Burroughs. The images reveal Burroughs in the process of contructing a composite city, a proto-version of Interzone. These pieces are primitive collage, cut-ups, mosaics, cut and paste from a very early date. Pre-Gysin. Nailing down the date of their creation is crucial. The potential implications are far-reaching. These images tie back to the Yage visions and the Composite City section that so fascinate scholars like Oliver Harris and provide a key to his recent scholarship with Yage Letters and the Latin American notebooks. Thankfully they sold as a collection. Once the Berg passed on the collection there were discussions of selling the collection piecemeal.

Ken Lopez and Brian Cassidy are no strangers to the Bibliographic Bunker. (See Burroughs Literary Archive and Brian Cassidy Bookseller and a Rare Burroughs Letter) So as soon as I heard about the collection I fired off some questions for Brian Cassidy to consider. Instead of writing on all the side acts at the fair (though bookseller Peter Stern’s copy for $6000 had one of the finest, brightest dust jackets that I have seen in a while, how many Olympia Press Naked Lunches can you see?), I present Brian Cassidy’s thoughts about the headline act along with a link to the collection.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this archive was where it came from. Who is Richard Lorenz and how did he get these items?

Lorenz was a noted photographer as well as a photo collector and scholar; he authored several books on the medium including one on Imogen Cunningham. He purchased the WSB items from a New York photography dealer named Sol Lowinsky, who we gather purchased them directly from WSB. They came to Ken Lopez and me through a photography dealer representing the Lorenz estate.

Given that so much of Burroughs’ archives are already in institutions, how rare is it that Burroughs material of this magnitude is still in private hands?

Material like this is certainly scarce. How much remains in private hands, however, can be tough to gauge. For example, Burroughs sold this material probably in the late 1980s to early 1990s. How often he partook of similar “extra-archival” sales to dealers and collectors is unclear. He was certainly not a rich man and it wouldn’t surprise me if he occasionally (if not regularly) raised money by divesting himself of stray pieces of his archive. Also unclear is what remains in the hands of friends, editors (particularly, to my mind, of small magazines), and other acquaintances who had contact with Burroughs.

I think there’s an image of WSB as sort of remote and distant — both intellectually and physically (Kansas, Tangier) — but in fact he maintained an extensive correspondence, had numerous warm and close friendships, hosted many visitors (even in his later years in Lawrence) and was — esp. during his him time in NYC — very much “of the scene,” hanging out with Warhol, Lou Reed, various punk rockers, etc. It seems likely that many of these people over the years retained Burroughs material — whether it be letters, art, etc. — that will find its way to market someday. So one must be careful to differentiate between absolute rarity and market rarity. My guess is in absolute terms there’s probably substantial WSB material yet to worm its way into the public eye (indeed just this past year I’ve purchased a small typescript and a pair of early letters). But from the perspective of the market right now, good primary material from Burroughs remains uncommon.

That said, early and substantive examples such as this archive are exceptional.

What were your first impressions going through the material?

My first impression came via images emailed to me. I was certainly excited about the material and recognized its importance, but the full impact of the work wasn’t clear until I saw them in person for the first time. The collages in particular are smaller than the online catalog probably suggests. As such, they have a strange and awkward delicacy that is difficult to convey in reproduction. Coupled with the wonderful materiality of the aging scotch tape and the aggressive and disjointed nature of collage, the overall effect is quite powerful. They’re extraordinarily effective at conveying both a sense of place and time while simultaneously suggesting the mindset of Burroughs. There’s an immediacy and significance about them that goes beyond their being — perhaps to some eyes — a simple Beat relic.

Are these items mere curiosities or do you see scholarly value in them? Do they provide a port of entry into Burroughs as a writer or person?

Building off what I said in the previous answer, I think the material is of supreme importance to WSB. As I say in my description, the work most obviously echoes his collage experiments (I’m thinking in particular of the C Press Time) and his career-long cut-up work. That said, what I think is far more fascinating (and again, I’m not saying anything my cataloging doesn’t) is how Burroughs seems to be doing in these collages what he was doing in his writing of Naked Lunch and the other Interzone books: remaking in visual form the melding of time, place, and person he was attempting via verbal methods in those novels. In other words, we see the beginnings of the conflict that would occupy the remainder of Burroughs’ career: the tension between word and image.

I am particularly struck by the image of Burroughs in the distance on the beach in Tangier. Was there an image that stuck with you from the collection?

I’m partial to the collage that incorporates Ginsberg’s portrait of Peter Orlovsky from their trip to Yosemite in 1950s. What I like about this is how Burroughs took his friend’s (Ginsberg’s) picture of his (again, Ginsberg) lover in an American landscape and married it to his own image of Tangier. For me at least, I think this reveals a lot about Burroughs’ feelings toward the country and his time there.

I also really care for the images of Billy Burroughs. These would have been his father’s pictures of him from his own scrapbook. And given what happened not only to Billy, but also obviously his mother, I find them quite poignant and a little sad. Doubly so when you consider WSB then subsequently sold them. I think Billy was a part of his life he was never able to fully incorporate or resolve. And I may be reading too much into them, but I think you can see something of their relationship in the rather stern faces Billy reveals in these images.

What are the comparables with an archive of this nature? Do you value these with Burroughs’ scrapbooks in mind or with original photographs by literary figures like Ginsberg or the recently passed Jonathan Williams?

Hmmm. Well, there aren’t any good ones. The most obvious though would be later Burroughs artwork, which in my mind at least created a floor for how these might be priced. Ginsberg’s photos were a useful benchmark in thinking about the loose photos. But when it came to the collages, it was less about finding similar material and much more about understanding their context and importance. For unique items such as these, determining value can be much more art than science. Which is not to say it’s not entirely rational, just difficult to describe. To prove the (science) point: When Ken Lopez and I were considering the purchase, we both came up with prices — both for the archive as a whole as well as the individual pieces — independently of each other and our numbers were nearly identical.

But to further prove the point (i.e. art): the buyer of the archive was another dealer, who — unless he has an immediate buyer — obviously wouldn’t have purchased it if he didn’t think he could market the items at a higher price.

I know the collection was offered to a few institutions. What is the state of affairs of the institutional market?

I’m not sure that the financial situation for institutions is substantially different now than it was a year or two ago. You will hear older dealers lamenting the fact that library budgets are not what they were twenty or thirty years ago. And that does seem to be the case. You don’t see much of the vacuum approach anymore that places like the Ransom took during the Texas oil boom, for example. But I never experienced that first-hand; my timeline is much shorter and from where I stand, special collections are still a strong, necessary and important market. In other words, there are absolutely libraries actively buying. In the last sixth months, I’ve placed everything from a small Henry Miller archive to a collection of papers from a prominent 19th century historian with various large institutions. Of particular interest to Bunker readers: for more than two years I’ve been working with a major library that actually has an endowed fund dedicated exclusively to the acquisitions of the magazines from the mimeo revolution. It’s shaping up to be a great collection.

In your opinion, what is the future role of the individual collector? For example, I see that in a New Yorker article philanthropists have taken over some aspects of journalistic research for the struggling newspaper industry. Are we going to see an increase in private individuals filling the role of archivists with the goal being preservation and not financial speculation?

In the same way that Burroughs — as the avant-garde of his day — prefigured much of the work that was to come after him, private, individual collectors are very much the avant-garde (read: advance guard) of special collections. The best collectors will almost always be way ahead of most libraries simply because they are accountable to no one else and so have no one to whom they need justify their acquisitions.

As for “private individuals filling the role of archivists with the goal being preservation and not financial speculation,” I guess I reject the premise of the question as I don’t see a dichotomy between preservation and long-term financial value. Though the age-old advice to book collectors — “Collect what you love; don’t do it for the money” — still remains very sound, at the levels you’re talking about (important / rare / unique primary material), there’s little reason to believe the rare book market should behave much differently than the art market. And indeed, some recent sales (I’m thinking of the Kerouac On the Road scroll, the WSB archive sale to the Berg, Don Delillo’s recent seven-figure sale of his archive to Texas) suggest that the we may see appreciations in the rare book world similar to those seen over the last fifteen years in the world of art, where prices for the very best and rarest of materials completely out-paces the rest of the market.

But even outside of those dizzying financial realms, a good collection is always worth more than the sum of its parts — which is and will continue to be good news for the small collector. Or to put it another way: history suggests that the pendulum is constantly swinging between the power of the individual and the institutional collector. Due to a number of factors, at the moment, I suspect the pendulum is swinging in favor of the individual — both well-healed and thrifty.

What do you see as the future of literary archives? Will an institution or collector ever pay big money for an electronic file of archived email, drafts, or images? How will electronic files be collected — or will they be collected at all?

To be honest, I have trouble imagining an entirely electronic archive. I suspect that authors will continue to interact with the physical draft for some time. This will, however, increasingly and obviously be in conjunction with more and more electronic media (word processors, email, etc.), and this poses several problems. First is the ease of infinite duplication (thereby eliminating the exclusivity of the physical object) which can make determining monetary value more difficult. Second is the danger of corruption (i.e. unintended changes) to the electronic data — something that is not an issue with information in a physical archive. And finally and perhaps most importantly, electronic documents are in many ways even more ephemeral than paper ones. (Can you still open the documents on that floppy disk from your college years?) My guess is that writers, dealers, and libraries will begin to work more closely with each other and at earlier points in authors’ careers to address these issues and ensure that important information is preserved. At least, that’s my hope.

Is the rare book industry prepared to deal with digital collecting or archiving of this nature? For example, Ralph Ellison’s last novel was cobbled together from drafts on computer disks (as well as other sources). Is the rare book field prepared to assess and market this type of material?

No. Generally speaking, I don’t think the rare book world is ready for digital collecting or archiving. But I think this has much more to do with the fact that there haven’t been any real test cases rather than any kind of professional blindness or bias. Indeed, I don’t think most institutions or authors are ready for these changes either.

The problem with an example like Ellison is that it calls into question the very idea of primacy and authenticity upon which the rare book market is built. What is a real draft or a real letter in the age of email and .doc files? What is a “first edition” of an e-book? Now, these questions have been around at least since the development of photography, and have been far better addressed by the likes of Walter Benjamin, but I think you’re right to sense that these questions will be coming to a head in the near future. How it all will shake out, I’m just not sure.

Can you name an author who will be collected electronically?

Perhaps Mark Z. Danielewski, whose House of Leaves was originally published and distributed on the internet.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For more information about C Press, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Time, Ted Berrigan, and Don’t Ever Get Famous.

Andy Warhol provided the cover for issue four of C: A Journal of the Arts. Edwin Denby and Gerard Malanga appear on the silk-screened cover. The cover is reprinted in Reva Wolf’s book on Warhol along with a discussion of the politics and gossip behind this image. Issue 4, like the Mad Motherfucker Issue of Fuck You with the Couch cover, is tough to get a hold of. Ars Libris sold a copy awhile back in a small, incomplete run of Cs. Expect to pay in the four figures if you ever get the opportunity.

Complete runs of C: A Journal of Poetry are elusive. The Fales Library possesses a C Journal archive but lacks a complete run. Syracuse University also holds a number of Berrigan’s papers including dummies for C Journal, yet they lack a complete run. The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library has about half of the issues. The Library’s Rare Book Division houses the editor’s (Berrigan’s) file of the mimeo. The NYPL possesses a complete run but they don’t know it. According to Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Issue 12 is missing from this collection.

Based on an email I received from Ron Padgett, Berrigan never published a twelveth issue of C: A Journal of Poetry. As evidenced by the text in Issue 11, he intended to publish one but the project never saw completion. Again according to Padgett, Berrigan viewed C Comics #1 as essentially the 12th issue. There is no indication as to Berrigan’s reasoning in this bibliographic detail.

Burroughs appears in Issue 9 and Issue 10 of C Journal. Fuck You Press issued Roosevelt After Inauguration in January of 1964. Ed Sanders included Burroughs in Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts No. 5 Vol 7 in the summer of that year. Berrigan first published Burroughs in the summer of 1964. At the time, Burroughs still resided in Tangier, but given the flurry of mimeo activity Burroughs could see that the Lower East Side in New York City was the place to be. Burroughs saw this for himself during brief visits in 1963/1964. In C Journal 9, Burroughs contributed two pieces: “Giver of the Winds Is My Name” and “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” Literary Days was published by C Press and I would guess that Berrigan sent Burroughs a copy for his review. As is common in the 1960s, Burroughs responded with a cut-up. In “Giver of the Winds Is My Name,” Burroughs incorporated Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time. See my column on da levy and Burroughs for a brief discussion of this appearance.

In C Journal 10, Burroughs contributed “Fits of Nerves with a Fix.” According to the Maynard and Miles’ Burroughs bibliography, this issue hit the streets on February 14, 1965, St. Valentine’s Day. For the artists and writers of the Lower East Side, Burroughs must have been on their mind as he gave a famous reading at the American Theatre of Poets on that date. The C Press Time also appeared in 1965.

Burrroughs’ work in C Journal is listed as prose, but these pieces can be considered examples of Burroughs the poet. “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” reminds me of the work in Floating Bear 24 (“Spain and 42st,” “Dead Whistle Stop Already End,” and “Where Flesh Circulates.”) The look of the work on the page is especially similar. “Giver of the Winds Is My Name” also has the look of a poem in a way that differs from the block text and newspaper formats of other cut-ups from the period. This would suggest that Burroughs’ influence on the Second Generation New York School and even First Generation members like John Ashbery, stemmed not just from Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, but also from the lesser known and underappreciated Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. These two books can be considered books of poetry for the lack of a better categorization and the work therein has similarities to the work in C Journal.

C: A Journal of the Arts

C Journal 1

C Journal 2

C Journal 3

C Journal 4
front

(Thanks to Dan Laufer for the scan.)

C Journal 4
back

(Thanks to Dan Laufer for the scan.)

C Journal 5

C Journal 6

C Journal 7

C Journal 8

C Journal 9

C Journal 10

C Journal 11

C Journal 12

C Journal 13

Michael Brownstein
Behind the Wheel (aka C Journal 14)

C Press

Ted Berrigan
The Sonnets
C Press, 1964

Tom Veitch
Literary Days
C Press, 1964

Ron Padgett
In Advance of the Broken Arm
C Press, 1964 (First Edition)

Ron Padgett
In Advance of the Broken Arm
C Press, 1965 (Second Edition)

Kenward Elmslie
Power Plant Poems
C Press, 1967

Elio Schneeman
In February I Think (front)
C Press, 1978

Elio Schneeman
In February I Think (back)
C Press, 1978

Steve Carey
The Lily of St Mark’s
C Press, 1978

Boke Press (Edited by Joe Brainard)

C Comic 1

C Comic 2

Ted Berrigan
Living with Chris
Boke Press, 1965

Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard
100,000 Fleeing Hilda
Boke Press, 1967

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Recently, I received an email asking me about a copy of Time, a limited edition collage piece published by C Press. According to its copyright page, Time was published in 1965 in 1000 copies. 886 copies comprised the trade edition. These copies were unnumbered and unsigned. 100 copies were signed by Burroughs and Gysin. 10 copies numbered A-J were hard bound and contained a manuscript page of Burroughs and an original colored drawing by Gysin. 4 more were hors commerce. (This French term literally translates as “before business.”) An hors commerce print was used as the color key and printing guide that the printer would use to insure consistency of the print run. These pieces are usually printer’s proofs that are not for sale and are often used for promotional purposes. Ports of Entry: William Burroughs and the Arts provides images from the Joseph Zinnato collection which included an extensive archive of Time. Stephen J. Gertz wrote a great article detailing his experience with the Zinnato collection including a description of the Time archive. I have encountered several descriptions of copies of Time, signed and unsigned.

Burroughs and Gysin signed the book together, as called for in the limited edition of 100 numbered copies. In isolated cases, Ted Berrigan, the editor, signed as well. My copy is signed by Burroughs, Gysin, and Berrigan. Berrigan inscribed the copy to Roger Richards, a Beat friend and patron. He was particularly close with Gregory Corso, who lived with Richards during his later years. I have never seen one of the 10 lettered copies. UCLA possesses a copy (D) in its rare book room.

According to Ports of Entry, “Burroughs created his own version of Time magazine, including a Time cover of November 30, 1962, collaged over by Burroughs with a reproduction of a drawing, four drawings by Gysin, and twenty-six pages of typescript comprised of cut up texts and various photographs serving as news items. One of the pages is from an article on Red China from Time of September 13, 1963, and is collaged with a columnal typescript and an irrelevant illustration from the ‘Modern Living’ section of the magazine. A full-page advertisement for Johns-Manville products is casually inserted amid all these text; its title: Filtering.” The “Fliday Newsmagazine,” “Proclaim Present Time Over,” “File Flicker Tape” are some of the texts. The November 30, 1962 issue of Time was chosen, because the magazine reviewed the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch in an article entitled “King of the YADS” (Young American Disaffiliates). The looming face of Mao symbolizing the threat of Red China adds an aura of nuclear disaster.

Time, along with Burroughs’ contributions to My Own Mag, is a stellar example of Burroughs’ attempts to merge the collage technique of art with the cut up technique of literature. Time is the fullest expression of Burroughs’ experimentation with the newspaper and magazine format that is part parody and part critique as well as an expression of a new format and form capable of expressing a greater truth than fiction or journalism separately. Time goes to the heart of Burroughs’ distrust of the mass media manipulation of image and news. Many think of Burroughs the visual artist as a flowering of his later years, but as his scrapbooks and pieces like Time attest, Burroughs delved into the visual arts early in his creative life. Elements of surrealism, the collage and assemblage art of Rauschenberg or Wallace Berman and his circle, Pop Art, and Mail Art are all present in Time.

All this is an introduction to the question I received. Basically, the collector wanted to know if he possessed one of the 100 signed copies of Time. He sent me an image of his copyright page with the Burroughs signature in pencil. Attached is his scan. The issue number is written incorrectly and is not stamped. In addition, only Burroughs signed the copy and not Gysin. Both Burroughs and Gysin signed the 100 copies. See my copy. What I think happened is that the collector received one of the unsigned, unnumbered 886 copies that somebody, not Burroughs, then numbered and signed with Burroughs’ name. The signature looks suspect especially the William. See my webpage for examples of Burroughs signature over time. I have never seen Burroughs sign in pencil, particularly Time. The numbering of the signature is flat out wrong. Why would Burroughs number his signature if he happened to sign this copy at a later date? The person who signed it obviously saw Burroughs’ signature before but could not reproduce the numbering of one of the true 100 copies.

Time was bootlegged in 1972 by Roy Pennington as an Urgency Press Rip Off. According to Maynard & Miles, Pennington published the bootleg for the Bickershaw Festival. The bootleg was not staple-bound like this forged copy, but stapled at the top. I have never seen the bootleg, so if anybody has a copy please send an image and description.

Time Archive

Time Bootleg

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

1. Nov 2, 1963 TLS from Anthony Linick to Dave Meltzer — Letter SIGNED by Linick. Linick along with Donald Factor was editor of NOMAD magazine which ran for 10 issues from the Winter 1959 to Autumn 1962. Nomad was published in London and Culver City CA. Contributors included Paul Blackburn, Charles Bukowski, Cid Corman, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Gael Turnbull, Louis Zukofsky and William Burroughs. Linick is asking Meltzer’s support for a research project concerning the literary underground since WWII. The letter mentions a questionnaire (not present) to obtain information on the small press movement.

2. Artwork. Pen on paper drawing (8 1/2″ by 11″) of mother and child (Mary and Child) surrounded by multi-colored (green blue yellow orange) fingerpainting. No signature.

3. Typed Letter January 29, 1966 from cowboy poet Kell Robertson (KDR Albuquerque NM) to Meltzer and all. Letter talks of the poetry reading scene in Albuquerque. Mentions FOLKTHING2 performance.

4. Typed Letter(??) from Nam June Paik to Meltzer. Letter is a free form poem TELE-PET with PAIK and ROBOT magic markered over the poem. Paik is a Korean American video artist. Nam June Paik (rhymes with “cake”) is widely credited as the founder of a new art form called video art. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Paik and his family were forced to leave in 1949 because of the Korean War. In 1956 he graduated from the University of Tokyo and went to Germany to continue his studies as a musician and composer. In the 1960s, under the influence of John Cage and the Fluxus group, he began to exhibit television sculpture. By the early 1970s he had settled in New York where he made a major breakthrough with the first appearance of video art — which has become widely influential as an art movement. “Radio dominated 50 years and …..gone/TV will dominate 50 years and …..will gone” The poem which features radio / TV / cybernetics is a unique expression of Paik themes which include speculating on the future mediums of art and expression.

5. Typed Letter signed from Sol Hurok to Meltzer dated Sept. 28, 1965. Letter on San Francisco Mime Troupe letterhead. Letter briefly discusses the details of a play to be presented at the theatre with Hurok requesting Meltzer’s presence at a rehearsal. Emigrating to the United States in 1906, Hurok was a peddler, streetcar conductor, bottle washer, and hardware salesman before becoming the foremost impresario of his age. By his own estimation, he presented more than 4,000 artists and companies, among them Pavlova, Marian Anderson, the Comédie Française, the Old Vic Company, the Royal Ballet, Andrés Segovia, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Victoria de los Angeles. The film Tonight We Sing (1953) was based on his autobiography, Impresario (1946). We are in debt to Sol Hurok for his role in making ballet one of the most popular theatrical art forms in the 20th century.

6. Holograph letter Jan. 1964 from “Freezing R Keisters Singers” (possibly George Herms) (Healdsburg CA) to Meltzer. Letter contains a poem and a drawing in gold paint. “Clarity / Lucidity / To stand / Under the light / and pass / the pure sound / of joy / thro a human horn.” Poem possibly titled “I’m with You.”

7. TLS from I (Idell, Aya Tarlow) to ld dated August 1963. Letter typed on Globe Photos Inc of Hollywood CA letterhead. Handwritten notations throughout letter. Tarlow describes her struggles as a poet. Poem ‘There is a unity in surrender’ typed on back of page one. Enclosed Newsweek article about the marriage of Gregory Corso.

8. Postcard from London to Ray Johnson. Postcard is an interesting example of Johnson’s conception of correspondence art. Possibly from Fluxus artist Robert Falliou. Postcard mentions Emmet Williams. Raymond Edward Johnson was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan. His first experiences using the mail as an art medium stretch back to 1943 with his friend Arthur Secunda. From 1946-48 he studied alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina with faculty members Joseph Albers, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminister Fuller, and Willem and Elaine DeKooning. He moved to Manhattan and showed annually with the American Abstract Artists which included Ad Reinhart among its members. By 1955, the trailblazing Johnson was painting over and cutting up images of Elvis Presley. A year later a portrait of Ike would appear in the Robert Rauscenberg collage and Roy Lichtenstein would include fuzzy pictures of Mickey Mouse by. But it would be seven long years later Johnson-crony Andy Warhol would immortalize Elvis for the first time. By then Johnson had moved on. The trailblazing Johnson was a fixture on the Manhattan scene, heralded as an innovator by the heroes-to-be of Pop and Fluxus. A pre-Factory Warhol crony, he joined Billy Name and a handful of others to provide the creative atmosphere that Andy bounced off of. In the early sixties, long before there was an Internet, Johnson’s greatest performance work- the New York Correspondence School, an international network of poets and artists who used the low-tech medium of the postal system- freely exchanged artwork, objects and anything else deemed worthy by it’s participants, many of whom became the cultural movers and shakers of the next several decades. The epicenter of this decentralized whirlwind? Ray Johnson- “the most famous unknown artist in the world.”

9. TLS from Aya Tarlow to Meltzer. Letter includes a drawing of a bird and a collage.

10. Form TL from Joel Climenhaga to Friends with Holograph letter to Meltzer regarding birth of child signed by Climenhaga. Form letter describes Climenhaga’s doings at UNC where he is teaching at the moment. In 1961 he originated TRANSIENT PRESS, when he published the first issue of Seed, a poetry magazine, under its imprint. During the greater part of the 1960s, other magazines (Jacaranda, Ferment, Rananim and Open Letter) were published through TRANSIENT PRESS. Later, during the 1970s and 1980s, other ephemeral poetry magazines and literary journals were published on an irregular basis under his editorship through TRANSIENT PRESS; these included Awakening, The Back Shelf Dispatch, Below Ground Level, Counsel for the Offense, Foundation, Greenage, Inner Dimension, Jonah’s Gourd, Lighthouse in the Coming Storm, Noah, Only Two Believers, Qua Qua, Rock Drill, Scop, Stone Cottage, This Time, White Lion and Zymosis. Climenhaga was a noted scholar on Kenneth Patchen.

11. Typed Poem “Peyote Night” from Yvonne Bond to Meltzer (August 1963)

12. Typed Letter from “Herms” (George Herms) of Malibu to Meltzer Nov. 1962.

13. TLS from Eric Andersen to Meltzer, May 1964. Andersen, singer/songwriter writes about family life and its conflict with art; his upcoming physical for the draft, the Greenwich Village Music scene.

14. Signed Typed Postcard from Joel Climenhaga to Meltzer dated Jan. 1963

15. “Combination Theatre Poem and Birthday Poem for Ten People” mailed to Meltzer from NYC Mar 1964. Ten people include Billy Name, Wallace Berman, Meltzer and others.

16. Holograph letter from Jerry Rockwell (musician) to Meltzer dated Feb. 1966.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For more on Jed’s mini-archive of Meltzer letters, see David Meltzer Archive: A Partial Index.

A small archive of letters to Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press from the likes of Henry Miller and William Burroughs popped up on Abebooks. Many of the letters are about Henry Miller lobbying for a Nobel Prize in the 1970s. I wonder what the Burroughs letter entails. In a previous column, I noted the rarity of high quality manuscripts of Burroughs material on the open market. Public institutions have for the most part snatched up all the good stuff. I think the same holds true for Burroughs’ letters. The recent sale of the Robert Jackson collection to the New York Public Library highlights the active role of institutions in gathering this material. Jackson’s stash included hundreds of letters including several to crucial figures like Brion Gysin and Timothy Leary. These letters should prove a goldmine for scholars and for everyday readers as well, as Oliver Harris’ collected letters from 1945-1959 demonstrated. I find myself returning again and again to this book, not just for research purposes but for pure enjoyment. I place it with Naked Lunch in terms of reading pleasure. As Oliver Harris has shown in books and articles, letter writing was essential to Burroughs’ creative process. Let’s keep our collective fingers crossed for the second volume of letters.

By and large, Burroughs letters (to and from) rarely come to market. Those that do are usually short notes, many times on a postcard. Such notes usually respond to fans requesting signatures or likewise reaching out to their idol. Any correspondence to another literary or artistic figure fetches a pretty penny. A brief postcard to Herbert Huncke is currently available for almost $1000. In most cases, the available Burroughs correspondence rarely allows a glimpse into Burroughs as a private individual or as a working writer. That is the joy of the collected letters. There are exceptions. Ken Lopez possesses an archive of material, including letters, relating the creative partnership of S. Clay Wilson and Burroughs. Wilson worked on the cover art for the German edition of The Wild Boys and Cities of the Red Night. The archive features goodies from 1979-1991, a period noted for Burroughs’ own explorations in visual art. Per usual with late correspondence, Burroughs often uses a postcard. Not surprisingly, one has to pay for this peek into the late Burroughs’ creative life. Only $17,500.

Given their scarcity, price, and the generally banal nature of the available material, I do not own a single original Burroughs letter. A letter to Ginsberg from the 1950s would be a crowning jewel to any Burroughs collector. However, a cache of correspondence to David Meltzer from the mid-1960s fell into my lap several years ago. Shifting through this material highlights just how fun and what a learning experience letters can be.

This mini-archive sat in my bookshelf for a couple of years untouched until January of this year when I purchased Wallace Berman and the Semina Circle. This book accompanied an exhibit relating to the literature and art surrounding Berman until his untimely death in 1976. This exhibit is currently touring the West Coast and will make its way to New York City (New York University to be exact) in January 2007. A complete run of Semina Magazine represents the Holy Grail for me as a collector. An early fragment of Naked Lunch (Pantapon Rose) appeared in Semina 4. As I have mentioned before, Semina is the epitome of the little magazine as art object. David Meltzer appeared in Semina as well. In fact, the entire issue of Semina 6 features Meltzer’s The Clown.

Unlike Burroughs, Meltzer was an intimate member of the Berman Circle. He published a few books including Luna with Black Sparrow. In the late 1960s, he wrote a series of avant garde pornographic novels for Essex House. At the same time, he fronted the psychedelic band Serpent Power. In 2004, Meltzer published Beat Thing. He also edited two collections of valuable interviews entitled San Francisco Poets and San Francisco Beat. A collection of Meltzer’s papers are at Washington University.

Needless to say, I returned to my collection of letters. I made a rough catalog of the archive and found a treasure trove of material about the 1960s California counterculture. There were a few letters and art work from George Herms, a postcard to mail art pioneer Ray Johnson, a letter from Sol Hurok on San Francisco Mime Troupe stationary, and a poem from (I think) the recently passed artist Nam June Paik. In addition to a few Herms letters and artwork, the highpoint of the collection are several letters from Aya Tarlow (Idell). Aya is featured in Semina Culture, and the letters provide insight into the struggles of being a woman and an artist in California in the 1960s. Aya and Meltzer corresponded for years and remain friends to this day. Tarlow’s papers are at University of California at Berkeley.

New Journalism pioneer Grover Lewis wrote a letter to Meltzer from Texas filled with literary gossip and dreams of starting a little magazine. I don’t think it ever got off the ground. In addition, there were letters from Frank Jenner, Peterson (in Rochester, New York), and Lionel (who claims only Nabokov as his literary peer) who I know next to nothing about. I include this rough catalog in the hopes that somebody out there has more information about this material. Some of the pieces are nice examples of mail art practiced by the Berman Circle or other similarly minded individuals, including collages, paintings, poems, and drawings. I will post some of this material in the next few months as it is all very striking and may be of some interest given the recent exhibits concerning funk art of California and Berman’s Circle in particular. (See Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle and Pop L.A.:Art and the City in the 1960s
.)

Of particular interest to me was a letter from Anthony Linick. Linick along with Donald Factor edited Nomad from 1959-1962. Nomad was not featured in Steve Clay’s Secret Location on the Lower East Side and I can find little information on it. On the collectible market, Nomad 5/6 (The Manifesto Issue) is by far the most common. Burroughs appears in that issue along with Corso, Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles. “Open Letter to Life Magazine” comes from Minutes to Go. Published in 1960, Nomad 5/6 is an early Burroughs magazine appearance. Bukowski also contributes to this issue. Again this is an early appearance coming in the same year as Bukowski’s first book of poetry: Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. Bukowski also graces Nomad 1 with four poems.

In the later issues, Nomad features several New American poets from the Donald Allen anthology. The last issue, Nomad New York, is the strongest of the bunch concentrating on the New York avant garde. In fact, the introduction of that issue mentions the Allen anthology as well as Corinth / Totem Press, Hawk’s Well Press, and a host of important little magazines. In “In Regards to this Selection of Verse, or Every Painter Should Have His Poet,” John Bernard Myers coined the term “New York School” to describe Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Bill Berkson and others. The magazine also includes work from the emerging Pop Art including Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. The issue is a wonderful time capsule of the first generation New York School as well as the newly anthologized New American Poets.

In his letter to David Meltzer, Linick hopes Meltzer will answer some questions for a projected dissertation and book project on the underground with a focus on little magazines. I could be wrong but I don’t think the book was ever published but it would have been a wonderful read and a wonderful resource. Linick’s letter was written in 1963, one year after the last issue of Nomad. I assume Linick went to grad school and discontinued the little magazine. But I don’t know, so consider this column another form of that letter. Any information on the literary and artistic scene described in these letters would be appreciated.

A Nomad Archive

	Nomad #1
	Nomad #2
	Nomad #3
	Nomad #4
	Nomad #5/6
	Nomad #7
	Nomad #8
	Nomad #9
	Nomad #10/11

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

It was a good day when I finally got my hands on Fuck You Vol. 5/No. 7. Quite possibly the coolest, hippest magazine of the mimeo revolution (Fuck You epitomized the revolution as demonstrated by naming the Steve Clay book “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side”) and the most desirable piece in my collection with serious competition from Dead Fingers Talk, Floating Bear, Rhinozeros, and Time. They are all great pieces; all signed. The cover by Robert LaVigne (who discovered and drew Peter Orlovsky in the mid-1950′s before Allen Ginsberg came into the picture) of an infant demon is awesome. The Burroughs cut up “Fluck You, Fluck You, Fluck You” in three column newspaper layout is wonderful. But what makes Fuck You so wonderful is its construction. Literally on multi-colored construction paper (supposedly it would not be unusual to get a copy of the magazine with a footprint on it) scattered with freaky, turned-on hieroglyphics.

The writing of the magazine is sometimes spectacular, yet uneven. Editor Ed Sanders claimed “I’ll publish anything.” The list of contributors is impressive. Charles Olson, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, W.H. Auden, Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Antonin Artaud, Robert Duncan. The editorial comments are priceless, especially the notes on contributors, the advertisements for a secretary, or the search for a literary assistant for Allen Ginsberg.

Here is a visual archive of materials from the Fuck You Press.

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 1
(Feb/April 1962)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 2
(May 1962 (??))

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 3
(June 1962)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 4
(Aug 1962)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 1
(Dec 1962)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 2
(Dec 1962)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 3
(May 1963)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 4
(1963)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 5
(Dec 1963)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 6
(April/May 1964)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 7
(Sept 1964)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 8
(1965)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 8 (Warhol cover)
(1965)

Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts
Number 5, Volume 9
(June 1965)

Jake Marx
“An Index to Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts”
The Serif, 1971
(Special thanks to Jake Marx for permission to reprint this index)

Fuck You Press Publications

William S. Burroughs
Roosevelt After Inauguration
(1964)
I may be biased as a Burroughs collector, but Roosevelt After Inauguration is for me one of the most famous and desirable Fuck You Press items…

William S. Burroughs
Health Bulletin: APO-33, a Metabolic Regulator
(1965)
Photo by Bradley Allen.

W.H. Auden
The Platonic Blow
(1965)

Carol Bergé
The Vancouver Report
(1964)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
To Fuck Is to Love Again
(1965)

D.H Lawrence
Maxims And Aphorisms from the Letters of D.H. Lawrence
(1964)
Compiled with appended poems by Marguerite Harris

D.H Lawrence
Maxims And Aphorisms from the Letters of D.H. Lawrence
(1964)
Compiled with appended poems by Marguerite Harris
Tipped-in drawing

Claude Pélieu
Automatic Pilot
(1964)

Ed Sanders
The Toe Queen Poems
(1964)

Ed Sanders
Fuck God in the Ass

Ed Sanders (Editor and contributor)
Despair: Poems to Come Down By
(1964)

Poems for Marilyn

A Valorium Edition of the Entire Extant Works of Thales
(1964)

Bugger: An Anthology
(1964)

Ezra Pound
The Cantos of Ezra Pound CX-CXVI
(1967)

The Regal Society of Sooey Semen
(1969)

The Fuck You Quote of the Week

Harry Fainlight
Quote of the Week #1
(1964)

John Ashbery
Quote of the Week #2
(1964)
(Image courtesy of Between the Covers Books.)

Kenneth Koch
Quote of the Week #3
(1964)
(Image courtesy of Between the Covers Books.)

Fuck You Press Catalogues and Newsletters

Fuck You Press News Flash

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 1

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 2

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 3
(Spring 1965)

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 4

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 4.5
(Image courtesy of Paul Rickert)

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 5

Ed Sanders’ Catalogue 6

Peace Eye Bookstore Catalogue 7

Peace Eye Bookstore Catalogue 8

Ed Sanders
In Defense of Kiss and Screw
(1969)

Marijuana Newsletter No. 1
(1965)

Marijuana Newsletter No. 2
(1965)

Flyers and Handbills

Marijuana Review Handbill
(Can anyone confirm that Fuck You is actually the publisher of this?)

Flyer
The flyer advertises a reading by Herbert Huncke to take place at Le Metro Cafe in New York on 1 July 1964

Flyer
The flyer advertising a protest against federal narcotics agents

Flyer
The flyer announcing a publication party for the novel Barbara by Frank Newman-Sam Abrams

Flyer
Flyer for the October 1967 march on the Pentagon

Leaflet
Leaflet for the mock exorcism of the Pentagon held on October 13, 1967 at the Village Theatre.

Handbill
Handbill announcing a “Marijuana March” in the East Village
December 27, 1964

Handbill
Handbill announcing reading of Carl Solomon (including a lecture on Artaud) at Le Metro Café
July 29, 1964

Handbill
Handbill announcing Picket to Legalize Cunnilingus at Union Square in San Francisco on October 30, 1965 (possibly designed by Sanders)

Handbill announcing “Free Marijuana Prisoners”
Circa 1965

Ed Sanders Newsletter
Circa 1966

Ed Sanders, ed.
With Extreme Regret We Must Announce that Ed Sanders Does Not
Circa 1965

Ed Sanders
Handbill announcing a reading by Sanders at the Coda Gallery in Greenwich Village
Circa 1965

Ed Sanders and Ted Berrigan
Handbill announcing a reading by Ted Berrigan and Ed Sanders at the Le Metro Cafe in Greenwich Village
Circa 1965

Legal-size mimeo handbill proclaiming “Ed Sanders Wins Obscenity Case.”

Fugs Memorabilia

Fugs Flyer
(Image courtesy of Paul Rickert)

Fugs Flyer

Fugs Flyer

Fugs Flyer

Fugs Cross-Country Caravan Flyer

Fugs Bios

Handbill
Handbill announcing a Night of Napalm concerts starring the Fugs on August 7, 1965 at The Bridge on 4 St. Marks Place.

Handbill
Handbill announcing Fugs concert and poetry reading at The Orb Theater at 1470 Washington in San Francisco on October 29, 1965 (possibly designed by Sanders).

Handbill
Handbill announcing return from cross-country tour and concert of The Fugs at The Bridge Theatre (December 1965).

Handbill
Handbill announcing The Fugs held over at the Café Au Go Go on 152 Bleecker Street through December 26, 1965.

Handbill
Handbill announcing The Fugs’ first appearance at The Bridge Theatre in Greenwich Village
1965

Handbill
Handbill announcing an appearance by The Fugs at The East End Theatre
Circa 1965

Handbill
Handbill announcing an appearance by The Fugs at Ego East on the Lower East Side
Circa 1965

Handbill
Handbill announcing an appearance by The Fugs at the Bowery Poets Coop in the East Village
Circa 1965

Posters

Poster
Fugs poster with fold-in that spells “Fuck You.” Image courtesy of Between the Covers.

Related to Fuck You

Peace Eye
Peace Eye was not actually published by Fuck You but by Frontier Press. However, it provides an interesting bridge between two great mimeo scenes — Fuck You Press headed by Ed Sanders in New York and Frontier Press in Buffalo.

Ed Sanders
Poem from Jail
City Lights, San Francisco, 1963

Miscellaneous Items

Invitation
To Ed Sanders obscenity trial on March 20, 1967 with list of the prosecution’s potential exhibits

Invitation
To the grand reopening of Peace Eye Bookstore in celebration of Sanders’ victory over obscenity charges to be held on June 27, 1967

Invitation
To party and exhibition of the collages of Claude Pelieu at midnight on March 28, 1969 at Peace Eye Bookstore on 147 Avenue A

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number One

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Two (John Weiners)

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Three

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Four (Carol Berge)

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Five (Michael McClure)

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Six (Ed Sanders)

Phoenix Book Shop Check Number Seven (Gerald Malaga)

Herbert Huncke 80th Birthday Card