The Dismal Science of the Ed Sanders Archive

by Jed Birmingham

Heading down to the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton, I had hopes and dreams. I firmly believed the myth that Sanders was the ultimate archivist of the Mimeo Revolution and that the holdings at Princeton would serve as the foundation for the writing of the definitive case study of how a mimeo media empire operated day to day through the study of Fuck You Press, Peace Eye Bookstore, and The Fugs. Mapping the Secret Location will document if such an endeavor is actually possible.

One of the most reoccurring fantasies I had about the Sanders Archive was the ability to document the economics of the Mimeo Revolution. Here is what I wrote on the Mimeo Mimeo Blog that touches on that dream:

Digging through used bookstores, I always keep a look out for books that covered aspects of the Mimeo Revolution when it was a current event. Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture is a good one of course. There are many more books on the Underground Newspaper as opposed to the little magazines and Roger Lewis’ Outlaws of America and Robert Glessing’s The Underground Press in America are two examples.

What I like about these books in contrast with a more recent take, like Smoking Typewriters, is that they are not afraid to provide tons of information about the logistics and economics of printing and distributions. Glessing (more than Lewis) provides some great details on what it actually cost to put out an underground paper in terms of supplies, manpower, and printing as well as the money to be made (or not) on distribution. For example, the leasing of IBM Selectric typesetting equipment was about $150 per month whereas a new Linotype or Intertype machine for letterpress was $20,000 installed. Or Glessing explaining that a four-unit web-fed offset press was $20,000 a unit or about $100,000 to get up and running. The sunk costs made it necessary for small printers to actively search out jobs to fill downtime, and these printers were willing in some cases, like Ed Sanders, to print anything. It is interesting to know that the Los Angeles Free Press started with $15 in capital and quickly grew from four pages to 48 with weekly subscriptions of 95,000 and expenditures of $15,000. Or how about that East Village Other paid full-time staffers $45 a week, but the Helix in Seattle provided food and lodging? Classified sex ads, which were indispensable for underground papers, brought in $6 per inch, and the Dwarfe, an underground paper in Phoenix, charged $100 for a full-page ad for a circulation of $10,000.

Contemporary accounts, be they books or news articles, are full of this type of information and incredibly important for understanding the nuts and bolts and day to day activities of countercultural publishing. As I said, such information is more common for the Underground Press as opposed to the Mimeo Revolution, but that said spending some time digging around in contemporary sources will definitely pay some dividends in understanding the economics of counterculture printing.

I mentioned Ed Sanders only in passing but his archive was really what I was thinking of. Surely, the ultimate Mimeo Revolution archivist would have kept financial records? In high school, I took an accounting class. I don’t know why. I had and still have no mind for numbers and finances. I also took a Home Economics class with a friend of mine as well. That was only to be around girls. For our final cooking project, my friend and I made tacos. The stuffed football I sewed from a pattern still sits in my mother’s office. It is a sorry sight. Where is the ashtray in the shape of a shamrock that I made in shop class for when my mother smoked cigarettes? I could really use that now.

But I digress. My brother also took that accounting class and he made a career out of it. He is retired now, so maybe I should have taken accounting much more seriously. I just could not hack it. Math was not my thing. I asked my brother: “If you were doing an audit of Fuck You Press and Peace Eye Bookstore, what would you need to do it?” Here is his answer:

Monthly statements for all bank accounts and investments
List of vendors to contact for unbilled or unpaid invoices
Sales register
Lease, rent or building terms if owned
Inventory of books, estimated of value
Assets in store if any value – shelves, computers (likely no book value)
Employee listing and payroll, benefit records
Insurance for business
Tax records

There were rumors that stuff like this was in the archive. What I was hoping for was Sanders’ annotated copy of the complete run of Peace Eye Book Catalogues that documents what was sold, to whom, and for how much. This would be one of the holy grails of the entire archive. With a set like this a case study of the economics and distribution of the Mimeo Revolution could be attempted. In the list above, my brother stated he would like to see an inventory of books and the estimated value. The Peace Eye Catalogs provide that at the very least. But I wanted more. The Mimeo Revolution is intimately tied to book collecting culture both individual and institutional. This is what financed the entire operation. From the Mimeo Mimeo Blog:  

The Mimeo Revolution in its prime, as it was cooking, was intimately connected and dependent on the obsessions of the collector’s market. Peace Eye and Fuck You, a magazine of the arts prove this. The relationship of a host of writers, like Ted Berrigan, with rare bookstores, like Gotham Book Mart proves this. The role of the Phoenix Book Store, Better Books, Eighth Street Books, and Indica Books prove this. David Meltzer, Kenneth Rexroth as booksellers prove this. The selling of mimeo revolution archives and correspondence to fund further publication proves this. The mimeo revolution limited edition phenomenon proves this. Gregory Corso proves this.

An annotated Peace Eye Catalog could tell a researcher where the bodies of work are buried. What publications actually existed? What actually sold? Were they purchased by Average Joes browsing in the store, by individual collectors, by other poets, or by institutions? What was instantly collectible and desirable at the time? How much did they sell for?  

Keaton is going through these catalogues with a fine-tooth comb and hopefully he will attempt to answer some of these questions if possible. That essay may or may not appear on RealityStudio. Keaton may have forgotten where he came from and graduate to an academic journal. Keaton, do not forget your roots. You are like Marilyn Monroe. You got your big break in bibliographic porn, dude. You will never be able to shake the stigma.

Unfortunately, there were no annotated catalogues. In fact, there was not even a complete set of them in the Archive. There was gold dust but no substantial gold nuggets. There were no sales registers for an entire year. There were isolated statements and financial documents, but they are haphazardly gathered and poorly organized. There was some information about rent and rent payments. There are isolated checkbooks and check registers. I found a blank version of a Peace Eye invoice, but I could not find a folder or box of these invoices filled out and filed away. There was an invoice for the Sanders’ mimeograph machine (which is reprinted, I believe in Fug You), but few other invoices or documentation for what it cost to buy the paper and ink for a publication, like Bugger, let alone the cost of mailing and distributing it. What was there was tantalizing but disappointing. I leave it as a question because I do not have the knowledge to interpret these bits and pieces.  

Here is a list of some promising financial items from the boxes I reviewed:

Box 71: Peace Eye Bookstore Register Tape Box 1969
Folder: Paid Bills March-Apr-May-June-July 1969
Folder: Phoen, Con-Ed + Bank Bills + Forms
Folder: Unnamed with receipts and invoices
Folder: Consignment Invoices – Periodicals
Peace Eye Account Ledger (1968??)
Box 74: Clamshell: Peace Eye Bookstore 1964-1970 (A+) – Subfolder: 2 Year Lease for Peace Eye Bookstore 383 E. 10th Street Dec. 1964 (A-)
Box 330: Folder: E.S. Business early 1967 (B+)
Folder: 1967 Electronic Stencils E.S. purchased in 1967 a stencil-burning machine (B-)
Folder: 10-27-67 Paper Delivery to 196 Ave Ato print edition of late Cantos (C)
Folder 1967 Accounting sheet Pound’s Cantos The FY/Press (C)
Packet: Ed Sanders Fiscal a & Travel Data 1967-8 (C with potential to A)
Folder: 1967 Tax Info including expenses for publishing the Cantos of Ezra Pound (C with potential to A)
Box 349:
Folder: Receipt 2-19-62 for Speed-o-print mimeograph machine used on printing early issues of Fuck You/ a Magazine of the ARTS (B)
Folder: 1963 Rent Control put after renting Secret Location Aug ’63 (F)
Box 358:  
Folder: Contract, E.S. w/ Kraus Reprint 1969 to publish a facsimile edition of Fuck You/a Magazine of the Arts – Lord Thompson of Fleet St. halted the printing, E.S. was told, it was about to be printed (A)
Folder: 1960s Fugs Music Copyright Forms/AFM contracts W-4 forms (B)
Folder: Bank Check Book Late 69 early 1970 (C)
Folder: E.S. Fiscal Diary Late 69 early 70 (B)
Folder: E.S. Purchased in late 1969 -early 1970 a Harris Web press which was placed in basement on Wooster St. of Film-maker’s Coop (B+)
Box 370:  
Folder: 1-15-68 payment for review of B Dylan’s “John Wesley Hardin” (C-)
Box 373:
Folder: 1966 Lease for pad at 196 Ave A (C-)

As you can see, there is a half-ass effort to archive financial records, but nothing systematic or complete. Mimeo Revolution publishers were notoriously lackadaisical about financial records. From Robert Glessing’s book:

For the business establishment, possibly the most surprising aspects of this study will be those dealing with the business and financial procedures employed by the majority of underground publishers. As the former publisher of a financially sound overground weekly newspaper, the author found most underground publishers both ignorant about and unconcerned with normal methods of accounting, advertising, distribution, and organization. This statement is not intended as a one-sided criticism of the underground editors; indifference to economics is part of the underground movement’s philosophy and its editors have intentionally refused to be tied up in the establishment’s straitjacket of debits, credits, and profit and loss statements.

The dismal science was square. That said, Sanders was more of a counterculture capitalist than almost anyone in the scene and he clearly understood that financial records were important and interesting to future scholars. He just failed to conduct anything comprehensive in terms of document preservation. For example, the documentation in Box 330 relating to the bootleg Cantos is tantalizing. There are bits and pieces regarding the cost of putting that publication together, but is there enough to actually tell a financial narrative of any depth and complexity? The contracts are interesting as are any payments Sanders received for writing assignments. Account ledgers, checkbooks, leases, invoices. This is the stuff you need to perform an audit and maybe that is another reason there is nothing comprehensive here. Who the fuck wants to be audited? Keaton tells me Sanders was audited in 1974 for his 1972 tax returns. This was when he wrote Vote with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. The threat of an audit was a real possibility in 1966-1967 around the time he was busted for obscenity at Peace Eye. Audits are trademark methods of harassment used by the government to tame radical groups, dissenters, and perceived troublemakers. In addition, Fuck You Press was self-funded and largely existed before grants and government money came into the picture in 1967. Some of these grants depended on providing financial or accounting records into proposed publishing projects, if not the entire publishing operation. Quite possibly, an economic case study could be made on individual mimeo publications and presses that relied on grants in the 1970s and early 1980s.  

Faced with the economic related contents of the Sanders archive, I think my brother would be frustrated with what is actually present. Could he piece together a rough sketch of an economic history? Of Peace Eye? Or a single publication like the Fuck You Cantos? Or do you have to be a mob accountant, like Ben Affleck in The Accountant, who specializes in underworld economics. The counterculture underground was a publishing underworld, and the participants not only did not realize that future generations would care about what they were doing day to day, they probably did not want them to know. These publications were considered obscene literature in many cases after all. The less known the better for the reasons I mention above.

Maybe we need the accountant from The Untouchables, who brought down Al Capone for tax evasion. Someone who can dig through and interpret scraps and secret code and draw up a coherent economic picture from what looks like trash. The financial documentation available is beyond me to interpret, it is probably beyond my brother, but possibly we can get a Ben Affleck-type character down to the Ed Sanders Archive in Princeton sometime soon.

Like Sanders, I am not diligent about keeping my receipts, but here is a breakdown of the debits and credits of my trip to the Archive.

All in all, I broke even. If I was not an addict, I could have made quite a bit of money. No doubt, I have my vices and researching Sanders, Burroughs, and the Mimeo Revolution is one of them, so it seems appropriate in some way. I am at heart an amateur when it comes to scholarly activities. It would not be right to make a profit on my trip down to Princeton. I am not in it for the money or recognition from the academic community. I do it because I love it, because I must do it to get through the day as with the vinyl, cigars, and beer. These are the things that make life worth living. The trip down to the Archive was not a job or a resume builder; it was just one hell of a good time.