Mimeo Revolution Archives

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

During the polar vortex, a pipe froze in a room full of books at my house. Such a chilling prospect gets your mental motor running to thoughts of summer and looking for adventure and whatever comes your way. When bibliomaniacs run wild, they do not riot in the streets or storm the beaches; they get lost in the stacks. So supposing you are a literary obsessive and you have some spare time this summer, forget about channeling your inner Hemingway and running with the bulls in Pamplona or having a drink at Les Deux Magots in Paris. Instead, flip through a copy of Dan Saxon’s Poems from Les Deux Megots at SUNY Buffalo or celebrate the life and legacy of Amiri Baraka in exotic Bloomington, Indiana by digging into the Floating Bear archive at the Lilly. Looking for culture? Skip the Tate, the Pompidou or MOMA and head over to Columbia University and experience the wonders of the Kulchur Foundation / Kulchur Press archives.

The Bibliographic Bunker is excited to provide a literary Baedeker for a dream summer vacation: a list of URLs to library archives relating to the publications of the Mimeo Revolution. Who wants to go to a museum and stand in front of a boring painting or sculpture (so Modern, yet so passé) when you can enter into an archive (the collected past as future)? Collecting, installing, storing and sorting are taking over the museum and gallery anyway. They are striving to be archives. Why not experience an archive firsthand?

As I mentioned in a recent post, the library is fun. Some may say it is a mausoleum for print but I say it is an amusement park. Get lost in the funhouse. In terms of the Mimeo Revolution, the time is ripe for some serious play. Yet unlike contemporary art movements which made archiving and self-documentation part of their practice, I suspect the Mimeo Revolution archives will prove in many cases to be ephemeral and almost non-existent. Many publishers and participants of the Mimeo Revolution cared little for documenting their activities. Despite a strong and financially important tie to private and institutional collectors, they were largely of the moment, merging everyday life with literature, and operating outside the established publishing system, unlike many of the allegedly alternative spaces documented in Gwen Allen’s book on artist’s magazines. Are magazines related to Conceptual art and Minimalism, such as Avalanche, really outside established markets and institutions? Open for debate to be sure. Given the Mimeo Revolution’s relative insouciance towards self-preservation, a researcher will be shifting through fragments and ruins, so the idea of constructing a complete, fully documented history of the Mimeo Revolution is even more of a quixotic quest than usually expected. But the time has come to see what remains have been buried in the archive, since the time for further preservation may have passed archivists by.

In the face of a fragmented and haphazard archive (or one that is merely exceptionally so, since such is the nature of all archives), the resulting history of the Mimeo Revolution may prove to be a speculative or creative one. This is the job, not of academics trained in traditional scholarly practices, but of contemporary poets and artists working with databases, storage devices, and installations. The proper venue for such work would not be an academic journal, but a DIY publication, an alternative art space, or an electronic device. I like that. Personally, I find it exciting to interact with and become a part of the Mimeo Revolution on an everyday basis. To live within a library or archive. Others choose to vacation there. If you happen to be such a traveler and you get a chance, consider some of these Mimeo Revolution getaways. And please send RealityStudio photos and postcards from your journey.