Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker
Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting
For more information about Floating Bear, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Floating Bear and Floating Bear 24. You can also download this spreadsheet mapping the recipients to whom copies of Floating Bear were mailed.
Floating Bear 32
February 1966
Label to Dave Ossman
Label to Ed Sanders
Label to James Lowell
Label to Linda Francis
Floating Bear 35
April 1968
Label to B. Dawson
Label to Josephine Miles
Label to Seamus Cooney
Label to Keith Wilson
Floating Bear 38
Summer 1971
Created by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 3 October 2006. Updated February 2010, October 2016, June 2017, and June 2018. Thanks to Jeff Ball for additional labels.
thank you so much for doing this. Are the covers copyrighted? I would like to use one of them for a book I am writing for Wesleyan University Press on the influence of Buddhism on the NY avant garde.
Thanks,
Ellen
Here is a brief introduction by Robert Duncan from a reading in New Mexico in 1964. He mentions Floating Bear and particularly its status as a New York magazine and what it meant for a SF poet to appear there. This highlights Di Prima and Jones’ willingness to tear down borders and publish anything that was considered new writing. It also foreshadows the Bear’s shift to SF in the later issues when Di Prima moved there. Also note that the parochialism of the SF writers would be a big source of tension in the SF Renaissance period when the East Coast Beats blew into town and brought loads of media attention.
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Duncan/Albuquerque-64/Duncan-Robert_04_Introducting-Night-Scene_Albuquerque_02-29-64.mp3
Duncan’s Night Scenes appeared in Issue 19 of FB. You can see the first few stanzas in the archive. Duncan also appeared in Fuck You, the 5/7 issue that also included William Burroughs and in Robert Kelly’s Matter so he was in other NY mimeos but you were more likely to see him in West Coast mimeos like J (a classic mimeo that you almost never see copies of), Wild Dog, and Sum. Fred Wah (of Tish) edited Sum when he was a grad student at the University of New Mexico when Robert Creeley was a lecturer there. Given Wah and Creeley’s presence in NM you can see why Duncan read there in 1964.
There is an Ed Sanders exhibit at The Arm in Brooklyn. Details: http://thearmnyc.com/news/2009/06/ed_sanders_show_at_the_arm
I hear there are paste-ups of the various Fuck You, a magazine of the arts issues as well as rare and virtually unseen ephemerial items. The opening in on July 10th.
hi there, is there any way to get copies of the floating bear issues? my grandfathers name (bobby driscoll) was mentioned in a few of them and i would love to see them personally
Luke,
I just saw this comment. Go to Abebooks.com and search for Floating Bear and the number of the issues you want.
Hi, I love this site, especially the fully downloadable issues of Fuck You and Yugen, etc. I was wondering – is there a chance you could identify the writer of the works on the front cover of the Floating Bear archive? I can recognize a few of them: Olson, Wieners, etc. but many of them I don’t recognize, and the poems are extremely good, so I’d like to check out more of their work, or find the work in its entirety. Thanks. Keep up the great work.
hi RS, just a quick note to say: Ezra Pound received most of the issues of Floating Bear in Rapallo (they’re held in his MSS43 and MSS53 collections at Yale’s Beinecke)
Hi, Lots more brilliant work by Reality Studio. Can I just clarify from where your list of Floating Bear subscribers originates? There are several issues in the Dave Cunliffe Archive at the John Rylands Library so either he or Tina Morris would have subscribed but they don’t appear in the list. Just to be clear, this isn’t a criticism but I’m interested for my own research as to why they don’t appear. Could there have been a separate UK/European subscription list perhaps?
Bruce,
Thanks for asking. The excel list was compiled by mapping mailing labels on Floating Bears that I saw for sale on the rare book market and in collections of people I knew. I was into it hot and heavy for a while and kept up on it but I did not give it the full attention and research it deserved. That is my fault and a just criticism. That said it is a good start for a professional academic to work with as a foundation and to use mapping programs to get something out of it. I really hope someone does. That goes for a lot of the stuff on RealityStudio it is a start. Something to get people thinking. The Burroughs Unbound book that is coming out this year has two essays on the C Press Time that take what little I have done to new levels. It is really exciting to see. I hope the same is done with Floating Bear. The mag deserves the full Modernist little mag level treatment. It is as important as transition or any other Modernist mag that has gotten the monograph done on it
This is a great discussion. Floating Bear Archive is a fantastic early window into the Beat Project, and it definitely deserves more attention. Thanks for the great read.