by Jed Birmingham
Ed Sanders and Nelson Barr inside Peace Eye Bookstore (383 East 10th Street), New York, January 14, 1966. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah
As Bobby Bittman would say, “How are ya?” It’s been a while. Can I just say something? (to quote the real William B.) I have been out of the loop in the book collecting game for years now. As I have mentioned before, I can be roused out of retirement by a signed Icarus 46. Jeff Ball, you hear that? Or My Own Mag Issue 1 & 2. Or The Divers Press Snarling Garland of X-Mas Verse. But the one thing that can consistently rattle my cage and get me to stick my nose in the air is Fuck You Press items. I am always game for a handbill I don’t have or just about anything I can add to the RealityStudio Fuck You Press Bibliography page. To be honest, the shit just does not come up. Not that I am looking. But if I could say that I am still a book collector, it is not of William Burroughs, so much as Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press.
And Ed Sanders is who brings me out of retirement and back to RealityStudio. I did a pretty cool thing last summer. I spent two weeks researching the Ed Sanders Archive at The Special Collections of Firestone Library at Princeton University. Best of all, I did this thanks to a Princeton University Library Research Grant awarded through the Friends of the Princeton University Library. Joshua Kotin, a professor at Princeton and a contributor to RealityStudio on the Fuck You Press bootleg of Ezra Pound’s Cantos tipped me off that grants were available. I applied for a two-week research stay at $1,500 per week plus a transportation cost of $700. There are grants available for up to six weeks but given that I am a drone with a job, I was happy that I could get two weeks somewhat to myself from my employer. The Friends of the Library offer about 25 grants a year. The application process is pretty basic and it is open to anyone, not just professors and graduate students. I am a book collector and independent researcher with no university or institutional affiliation so it is possible for even fanboys to get a grant.
Here are the bare bones of the application process (from the Grant Webpage at Princeton University):
- Set up an account in the application system
- Complete application form
- Upload a curriculum vitae or resume (Word or PDF)
- Upload your Project Narrative (no more than 1,000 words); your narrative should include the relevance to the proposed research of the unique resources found in the Princeton University Library collections
- Provide two letters of recommendation; invitations are sent directly from the system to the recommenders
- Submit your application once all of the items above are received.
For 2026-2027, the application process opens this October and closes in January. If you are interested in researching the Ed Sanders archive, I encourage you to give it a shot. It did not take me long to get my application together and it is easy to submit.
To give some idea of what a successful Project Narrative looks like, here is mine in full. This will also give some idea of what I was looking to do in the Archive.
I am applying for a two-week grant to research two projects involving the Ed Sanders archive housed at Princeton. The first project is a manuscript involving Floating Bear, an essential publication in the Mimeograph Revolution edited by poets Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and Diane DiPrima, which ran for thirty-eight issues between 1961 and 1969. One unique aspect of this periodical is that unlike other publications in its milieu, Floating Bear was not available in stores, and was distributed strictly by the United States Postal Service. The presence of mailing labels on many copies make it possible to track recipients of the magazine.
Ed Sanders received issue thirty-two in February 1966. By researching the Ed Sanders archive, I will be able to write a chapter that details Sanders, with a focus on 1966, as issue thirty-two relates to Floating Bear, Fuck You Press and Sanders’ creative circle, including his iconoclastic rock and roll band, The Fugs. The archive will allow me to provide bibliographical, biographical and anecdotal details that will establish the foundations for the chapter and enable me to flesh out the narrative of the Mimeograph Revolution and counterculture of that moment as documented by issue thirty-two’s distribution to Sanders.
I have tracked more than one hundred copies of Floating Bear that were addressed to notable figures such as Donald Allen, Jasper Johns and Jack Kerouac. The manuscript is structured in thirty-eight chapters, one for each issue that was mailed to prominent artists, publishers, and authors. The manuscript begins with a chapter on the maverick editor Donald Allen, whose role in jumpstarting the Mimeo Revolution cannot be underestimated. The following chapter on Jasper Johns discusses the artist’s interactions with New American Poets, while the chapter on Beat novelist Jack Kerouac discusses his relationship with New York City and its creative community.
My objective is to write the most substantial history of Floating Bear to date with a focus on the individuals, presses and organizations associated with the Mimeograph Revolution and counterculture of the time. For example, Beat novelist William Burroughs received issue thirty-one while living in New York City in 1965. I have composed a sample chapter that details the importance of Burroughs receiving that issue at that time and place.
Sanders receiving issue thirty-two of Floating Bear in February 1966 is of great temporal interest. On January 1, 1966, Sanders was arrested on charges of obscenity at Peace Eye Bookstore in Manhattan’s East Village. His receipt of Floating Bear just a month later was a demonstration of solidarity from the mimeo community and an expression of intimate empathy by DiPrima. Issue nine of Floating Bear faced obscenity charges in 1961 for the publication of Jones’ The System of Dante’s Hell and Burroughs’ Roosevelt After Inauguration. Sanders’ Fuck You Press published the Burroughs text as a chapbook in 1964 when City Lights bookstore in San Francisco refused to publish it for fear of obscenity charges. Box 373 in the Sanders Papers contains information about the police raid that can tell the story of Sanders’ censorship battles, which in turn relates to censorship in the mimeo revolution from Big Table to Floating Bear to Fuck You Press.
Also of interest is Box 307, involving the opening of Peace Eye Bookstore. As a rare-book dealer who issued rare-book catalogues, Sanders not only operated a brick-and-mortar store but also managed a mailing list, an example of which is in Box 307. The Peace Eye distribution list may overlap with Floating Bear’s and thereby help tell the story of the Mimeo Revolution network of the period, which also ties back into the story of censorship at the hands of the post office suffered by publications like Big Table and Aspen.
The second project I will research in the Ed Sanders archive is an anecdotal bibliography of Fuck You Press. On RealityStudio.org, I have compiled a draft checklist that I believe is the most comprehensive and complete bibliography of Fuck You Press currently available. In the future I plan to expand this list into a full anecdotal bibliography that provides essays on each individual publication from the press. For example, for Roosevelt After Inauguration, published by Fuck You Press in 1964, I wrote an essay that would serve as a prototype of a descriptive entry for the bibliography. Access to the Ed Sanders Papers would allow me to review and revise my current listing as well as research the descriptive entries for the A-list items.
While the A-items of the Fuck You Press bibliography are well established, the handbills are undocumented and under-researched. The Sanders archive will help fill out that narrative on both a bibliographic and descriptive level. For example, Box 307 contains a Peace Eye flyer from 1965. Researching this box, I could confirm whether it is present on my bibliography and then, with the other materials regarding the opening of Peace Eye Books in Box 307, structure a descriptive entry regarding the history of the founding of Peace Eye in 1965.
Given two weeks to research the Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton, I am confident I can complete my chapter on Ed Sanders in the Floating Bear book as well as make substantial progress on an anecdotal bibliography of Fuck You Press.
As you can see, I was focused in my approach to the Archive. I knew what I wanted to do there. The question is whether the Archive was up to the task. Hopefully over the next few months or years of posts relating to the Archive we will figure that out.
So, I got awarded the grant and went to Princeton in August 2025. When you get there you get your money and for those two weeks you are obligated to be in the Special Collection from 9AM to 4PM Monday through Friday. The Special Collection does not open a second before 9AM and it is closed over the weekend. When I was there, I had to work for my day job at the same time, taking meetings and doing projects. They do not make you punch a clock at the Special Collection to make sure you do your 70 hours of research in two weeks, but they will notice if you are not in there consistently and are just there for a money grab. $3700 is a nice chunk of change. Besides actually putting in the time in the Special Collection, the only obligation the Friends of the Library require is that you submit a 300-500 word report on your experience in the archive and what you think the results will be. They do not require that I actually write my Floating Bear book or even update my Fuck You Bibliography. There is no formal publication required to fulfill the grant’s obligations.
Here is my report, which gets us to where RealityStudio fits into all of this:
In my two weeks of research at the Ed Sanders Archive in the Special Collection, I was able to establish that Issue 32 of Floating Bear sent to Sanders in February 1966 will form the basis for a chapter in my Floating Bear book, which will chronicle the police crackdown on the mimeo underground and the underground’s resulting banding together in solidarity. Sanders’ receipt of Floating Bear shortly after his Peace Eye bust for obscenity in January 1966 is symbolic of this community’s cohesion in the face of adversity, such as the harassment of Allen Ginsberg and d.a. levy. The Sanders archive has material about this harassment and the mimeo underground’s response, including letters of support to Sanders after his bust. Floating Bear‘s own brush with the law in 1961 foreshadowed the police crackdown on the mimeo underground later in the decade as that underground gained increasing influence on the counterculture.
While I was not able to compile a definitive bibliography of the publications of Fuck You Press by means of the archive, I was able to supplement the bibliography on RealityStudio.org through the presence of never realized Fuck You manuscripts, unrecorded Fuck You and Peace Eye handbills, and handbills printed at Fuck You by groups such as the Motherfuckers.
RealityStudio.org will update the Fuck You bibliography with the information and images gathered from the Sanders Archive as well as create a section on the RealityStudio.org site dedicated to the Archive in general. Future posts on the site will deal not only with the unpublished Fuck You manuscripts, the handbills, 1960s Rolodex of Sanders’ contacts, mailing lists, invoices, and other ephemera from the archive but also with the logistics of researching the archive including reviews of places to stay, eat, and relax in Princeton during your stay. During my research, I graded on an A through F scale folder by folder the boxes of the 1960s material in the archive to determine its research value, which will be posted on RealityStudio.org along with my grading criteria. This should prove of use for those looking to research in this area. While my focus was on the 1960s aspects of the archive it is hoped that other scholars will post on RealityStudio.org about their research in other areas. Supporting that effort, contacts have been made with a researcher dealing with the Manson and investigative journalism material who plans to post essays on site.
Consider this an introductory post to what is hoped to be a series of essays and postings of the holdings of the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton. Keaton Studebaker, who has been doing research on Sanders at Princeton ever since the Archive arrived on campus, is the contact I mentioned above. He has a couple posts in the can and hopefully will contribute several more as time goes on.
I do not want to oversell all this. RealityStudio is primarily a William Burroughs site although for quite a while the Bibliographic Bunker has been focused on the Mimeo Revolution side of things. Here at Mapping the Secret Location: Postings on the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton University, the Mimeo Revolution will be front and center but William Burroughs will make appearances, as will all your favorites of the counterculture, including Charles Manson. As always it is hoped this will not be a one man show and that others, like Keaton, will post of their experiences with the Ed Sanders Archive. I think there is even room for researchers to send in their reports from other archives around the world dedicated to William Burroughs and his fellow travelers. A while back I posted an excel spreadsheet with a list of special collections of all our friends in the literary world. Let’s consider that list the legend of gold in lost mines. Now it is time to dig in these places and see what we come up with. I have just scratched the surface at the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton. Have you been digging there too? Or anywhere else? Anybody with me?