By Keaton Studebaker
Reflecting on the end of 1965, Sanders describes a pivotal moment in his memoir when he became determined to make a living from his art (Fug You 181). This decision placed him in a tough position: how does one make a living from the counterculture without betraying its anti-establishment ethos? Sanders’s Peace Eye bookstore catalogues from the 1960s embody this tension since Sanders needed to sell what he listed without selling out.
Peace Eye bookstore was a cornerstone of New York City’s 1960s counterculture, functioning simultaneously as a hub for underground publishing, a salon for Lower East Side creatives, and even, for a time, a crash pad for wandering youth. The bookstore’s cultural importance was recognized from its inception—Time magazine sent a team of reporters to cover its opening (Fug You 129)—and it quickly became integral to the East Village’s counterculture identity. Sanders’s catalogs were the public face of this multifaceted operation, making them one of the most significant surviving artifacts of both Peace Eye specifically as well as the broader American counterculture of the 1960s.
One way the catalogs address this tension is through humor. By listing items that read as elaborate jokes (which Sanders in his memoir refers to as “literary relics” such as the pubic hairs of various literary figures who have signed a pentagram in Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Lies), the catalogs allowed Sanders to generate income without directly commodifying serious artistic work. These ironic offerings performed a dual function. They shielded writers’ legitimate artistic reputations from market pressures while mocking customers gullible enough to purchase them. The authentic artistic work remained untainted by commerce, preserved behind a screen of absurdist merchandise.
Yet this strategy is somewhat contradictory. Even as parody, the catalogs had to maintain enough credibility to generate actual sales, which risked their eventual absorption into the very mainstream commercial culture they mocked. The line between satirizing and participating in the market can be remarkably thin.
Allen Ginsberg’s Ponds Cold Cream jar embodies this tension. Sanders featured the jar in his inaugural catalog, complete with an inscription from Ginsberg himself: “This is the jar of bona fide ass-wine or cock lubricant, into which I regularly plunged my hardened phallos to ease penetration of the rosy A-hole of P. Orlovsky and used vice-versa by P.O. on A.G. winter 1964 N.Y.” Sanders’s catalog description elaborated: “The inscription is on a strip of paper taped around the jar. When we received this relic, there was still A.G.’s cock-dent in the cream, but due to the ????? ??? (“everything flows” from Heraclitus) scene, the rim have proven under microscopy to be tobacco hunks. A literary document & relic never offered before in the history of western civilization……. $35.” The value of the jar comes specifically from it being Ginsberg’s jar, which is to say that its value is tied to his literary reputation, but by virtue of being a joke, the jar can be sold without infringing upon Ginsberg’s literary reputation.
The evolution of the catalogs show Sanders recalibrating his joke, but as the joke evolves, the risk of selling out increases. In the second catalog, Sanders, still trying to sell Ginsberg’s cold cream jar, makes two notable changes. First, he drops the Heraclitus reference, opting for a more direct explanation that the cock-dents in the cream have “fluxed out.” More significantly, beyond its status as a so-called groundbreaking literary relic, the jar is now described as “marvelous, wonderful, & USEFUL.” This emphasis on utility coincides with a price reduction to $22.50. Sanders is trying to find the right pitch, as determined, apparently, by a buyer, for his joke.
By the third catalog, Sanders risks playing the game he parodies, ramping up his marketing tactics while further slashing the price. “ATTENTION ALLEN GINSBERG FREAKS!!!!” he announces. This call to those interested in all things Ginsburg demonstrates just how thoroughly Ginsberg’s literary reputation remains at stake in the sale of the cold cream jar. “Allen Ginzap, noting a lack of response from the last catalogue, has requested his Pond’s cold cream jar back! ‘I can use it,’ he told us recently. This is the final call to all relic-freaks, Ginsberg lovers, & all interested in the cold cream conspiracy.” Utility continues to be the guiding principle here.
In the second catalog, Sanders makes the pitch that, hey, even if the jar is of marginal literary interest at least it’s useful. While utility is a consolation prize in the second catalog, by the third catalog, it’s as if Ginsburg is a prop for utility: maybe potential buyers don’t see the utility in the overpriced jar, but Ginsburg himself does, so you’d better buy now while you still have a chance! Sanders concludes the third and final listing: “Because we feel that some collector should have this historical relic, we place it here for a fantastic bargain basement price of: [$]15.00.” Over the course of three catalogs, the price for the jar bottoms out at less than half of the original price sought. In 2025 dollars, the original price was about $365 and the final $155. Ginsberg’s cold cream jar disappears after the third catalog.
In his memoir, Sanders says he eventually gave the jar to photographer Richard Avedon during a Fugs photo shoot (Fug You 86). However, there appears to have been more than one cold cream jar. In a handbill issued for celebrating his court victory against obscenity charges, Sanders announced an exhibition of “literary relics & ejaculata” that featured—and apparently offered for sale—“several of Allen Ginsberg’s autographed cold cream jars fresh from sensual spurt scenes” (Fug You 256). While the third and fourth catalogs aren’t dated, this handbill from the summer of 1967 suggests that the Ginsberg cold cream conspiracy continued after the jar was no longer included in the catalogs. Sanders’s multiplying cold cream jars look less like intimate relics and more like reproducible merchandise.
Whether sold or given away, the fact that no cold cream jar made it into an institutional collection prevents it from rising to the status of the literary relic that it was marketed as. The catalogs are clear that Sanders’s target buyers were major institutions such as universities: “We will gladly cooperate in typing invoices to Universities, libraries, etc, in such a manner as to ‘cool the controversy’ of freaky items. We do not want to produce any panic in university finance administrations, library executive committees, or command bunkers in state accounting offices.” Again, it’s difficult to determine the degree to which Sanders parodies or plays the game here precisely because he’s trying so hard to make a sale. Yet without the institutional recognition (such as that bestowed upon other items Sanders sold, including the catalogs themselves) Ginsberg’s cold cream jar (or jars?) fails both to achieve full status of literary relic and to live up to its advertising. In this way, the cold cream jar perhaps points towards a relationship selling out and literary status. It’s possible that not selling Ginsberg’s cold cream jar was actually a success by countercultural standards—or it could have been had Sanders not been so set on making the sale.
Sanders’s catalogs stage a major contradiction of the countercultural literary economy by mocking commodification while also relying on it. The Ginsberg cold cream jar, in particular, shows how quickly parody can collapse into what it parodies, with Sanders shifting tone, price, and sales pitch in response to buyers. What appears to mock collectors and the literary marketplace ends up playing by its rules, with Ginsberg’s celebrity functioning as Sanders’s most valuable game piece. The cold cream conspiracy reveals both the ingenuity and the precarity of Sanders’s strategy: he could use parody to resist selling out, but only by continually flirting with the very commercialism he ostensibly opposed.
References
Sanders, Ed. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Da Capo Press, 2011.