Joshua Kotin turned me onto the David Gahr archive being auctioned off on eBay this past November. For those who don’t know, Gahr was known for his photos of musicians. He worked principally for Time from the mid-Sixties through the Seventies but also for major publications such as Life and People during his lifetime. With Robert Shelton, Gahr documented the Sixties folk music scene in The Face of Folk Music (1968), and the Fugs were among the many famous musicians, artists, and writers Gahr photographed. Gahr shot the photo used for the Fugs’ first album cover:

It’s not surprising that Gahr shot this album cover because he was there for the Fugs’ premiere at the grand opening of the Peace Eye bookstore on February 24, 1965. I’ll share photos Gahr shot of this event here. The photos show Sanders’ bookstore was packed on opening night, with old guard Beatniks alongside soon to rise hippies. Gahr’s photos document the counterculture percolating. Here is Sanders’ handbill for the event:

This handbill outlines the “total assault on the culture” that Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts declared. Every aspect of underground culture is represented here. The announcement for the third anniversary issue of Fuck You featuring a cover from Andy Warhol’s Couch shows literature and film overlapping. That Fuck You wasn’t a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Catch-22 is reflected in the handbill’s inclusion of porn as one of the things in the issue. The “World Premiere” of the Fugs adds music — and amphetamines — to this mix. Peace Eye was to be a new home base for the total assault on the culture. 

The photo of Sanders talking with William S. Burroughs is the most important of these photos. This was a full-circle moment because Sanders’ total assault was inspired by Burroughs. In the photo, Sanders appears to be showing Burroughs the new Fuck You issue. Here we have Burroughs effectively endorsing Sanders’ project:

Burroughs had only just returned to the States, now with his recently gained reputation as an underground icon. His status within the underground at this moment can’t be overstated. Burroughs putting in an appearance made the opening. 

Burroughs being there was bigger than Peace Eye opening, which is why Burroughs features prominently in Sanders’ 2011 memoir account while Burroughs’ biographies practically overlook this event. According to Sanders, Time sent reporters to cover the grand opening, and Burroughs expressed dislike for them, likely because of their coverage of his 1951 uxoricide. Ted Berrigan’s C Press published Burroughs’ response — his own version of Time — the same year Peace Eye opened. Peace Eye’s opening was big enough for Gahr to shoot and Time reporters to attend but not big enough for Time to run a story about. However, similar to Burroughs’ appearance, Time‘s attendance was important enough for Sanders to include in his memoir almost five decades later. Through his account of Burroughs and Time at the opening, Sanders positions himself as the bridge between the underground — represented by Burroughs — and the epitome of what the underground cast as its opposition — Time. 

This wasn’t the beginning of Sanders’ involvement with Burroughs. Their relationship started with Sanders’ publication of Roosevelt After Inauguration in January 1964, which Jed Birmingham has written about. Sanders also published APO-33, which Birmingham has also written about. Additionally, not long after this event, Burroughs provided the motorcycle image on the cover of Fuck You‘s final issue.

Among the things this next photograph shows is the mimeo poetry world contributing to the rise of the underground press. While the underground press hadn’t begun when Sanders declared a total assault on the culture, Gahr’s photographs show the underground press incubating at Peace Eye. 

The balding man smoking next to Sanders at the center of the photo is Allen Katzman, co-founder of East Village Other (EVO), which would start later this same year. Alongside Paul Krassner’s The Realist and the Los Angeles Free Press, EVO was one of the most important underground papers of the Sixties. Sanders himself was offered an EVO ownership position but declined. Like Sanders, Katzman came out of the coffee house poetry scene, but Katzman writes in his unpublished memoir that he made a conscious decision to move away from poetry with the founding of EVO. The whole of historian Arthur Marwick’s “long sixties” (1958-1974) is in this photograph: EVO began as a standard newspaper, evolved in increasingly psychedelic directions, and by the late Sixties pivoted toward pornography with Kiss, helping lay the groundwork for the “porno chic” trend of the early 1970s. Fuck You was an inspiration for EVO.

There’s another through line in this photo to porno chic. On the left of the photograph is the National Tattler with the “PEANUT BUTTER ORGY” cover story. National Tattler was one of the sensationalist tabloids that Sanders, working at a cigar store on 42nd Street before opening Peace Eye, knew well. Fuck You editorials mimicked these tabloids. For this issue, Tattler editor Bob Luce photographed his naked wife covered in peanut butter melting under the hot lights. Pretty soft-core stuff, but this is also the kind of publication the reformed industrial spy turned pornographer Al Goldstein wrote for before starting Screw. Goldstein claimed Screw was a rebuke to the tabloids’ hypocritical embrace of graphic violence while shunning explicit sex. Goldstein inspired Larry Flynt, but it was Fuck You that inspired Goldstein. Not only did Sanders’ magazine give Goldstein the name Screw, but the “Fuck You” segment on his TV program Midnight Blue was lifted directly from the “bouquets of fuck yous” Sanders published — as was Flynt’s “Asshole of the Month” feature in Hustler. It’s been forgotten that before there was Larry Flynt, there was Ed Sanders.

Bob Luce eventually left the National Tattler to promote wrestling events around Chicago, which feels fitting with the Michael McClure poster above Katzman and Sanders. This “poster poem” riffed on boxing match promotions, eventually becoming the play The Beard, which faced various obscenity charges. The year after Peace Eye opened, Warhol shot a film version of The Beard. The significance of Peace Eye as a counterculture launching pad is reflected by McClure’s poster being on the wall well before the attention the play’s obscenity charges brought. Having the poster hung shows just how “in” a place Sanders’ scrounge lounge was. 

Warhol wasn’t present for the grand opening — though Sanders says popular author James Michener came in a limousine on Warhol’s recommendation — but his presence was surely felt that night. Three Warhol flower silkscreens hung at the opening, one of which is visible above Sanders in the photo. To the right of the flowers appears to be a drawing of this photo booth self-portrait:

This photo booth self-portrait was of the bunch that Self-Portrait (Red) (1965) came from. Self-Portrait (Red) was at the center of the authentication debacle that Richard Dorment elaborates in Warhol After Warhol (2023). At minimum, Dorment shows how the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board failed to account for Warhol’s use of distributed production methods. However, the Board’s actions — including reversing forgery rulings to sell works formerly rejected as authentic for millions of dollars — suggests motives more troubling than ignorance or oversight. Long story short, the Board spent over $7 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over one of these portraits, then disbanded after 16 years of operation, but in a way that sidestepped mounting legal and reputational danger by offloading authentication risk on buyers.

It’s possible that Sanders had his own run-in with the Andy Warhol Authentication Board, which operated from 1995-2012. Sanders reports having owned three silkscreened Warhol flower banners. One he destroyed in “a very expensive tear-up” for a Fugs show, another was abandoned in a deli, but the last he managed to keep long enough to christen “The Peace Eye Diptych” and sell. He doesn’t say how much he got for the banner or if he went through the board, only that he later saw it sell for $250,000. While Sanders bemoans the $500,000 he carelessly lost during the Sixties, back in 1965 making this kind of money probably wasn’t at the top of people’s minds. This likely changed by, say, 1967 — the year Sanders was featured on the cover of Life — with events like the Monterey Pop Festival proving the total assault on the culture’s mass appeal.

Sanders was no stranger to authentication controversy. The issue of Fuck You celebrated at Peace Eye’s opening included W.H. Auden’s poem about fellatio, “The Platonic Blow.” The poem had circulated underground for a while before Tram Combs of the Pierpont Morgan Library gave Sanders a version. At the time, some, such as Random House editor Jason Epstein, doubted that the poem was Auden’s. It was later learned that the poem really was Auden’s. Auden described this poem in this way: “Deciding that there ought to be one [pornographic poem] in the Auden Corpus, I am writing a purely pornographic poem, The Platonic Blow. You should do one on the other Major Act.” Sanders’ Bugger: An Anthology (1964) covered the other “Major Act” Auden jokes about.  

In Fuck You, Sanders introduced “The Platonic Blow” as “a Gobble Poem snatched from the notebook of W.H. Auden,” thereby positioning his own Gobble Gang Poems in a literary lineage. The version printed in Fuck You swapped the first and fifth stanzas around, starting in medias res with:

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along 
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong,
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

Instead of:

It was a Spring day, a day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown; 
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stop I saw him standing alone.

This error stands out from the kinds of anomalies typical of Fuck You (upside-down pages, mispagination, different kinds of paper, etc.), many of which may have been a consequence of the varied, unsupervised help Sanders had in collating issues. (See, for example, Andy Clifford’s description of putting together copies of Fuck You while crashing in the back of Peace Eye to hand out at the Bronx Zoo if Sanders was convicted). Tempting as it is to think this transposition could have been Berrigan-inspired, the stanza order’s correction in the subsequent Fuck You Press stand-alone edition suggests that the error was unintentional. (Fun fact: Guild Press published an illustrated version with photos of two men doing what the poem described in 1970.) Regardless, publishing a sexually explicit poem from a poet with Auden’s literary reputation — without his permission — was a big deal. Sanders’ commitment to “publish anything” brought together Pop Art and “serious” literature.  

Underground filmmaking was another important part of the total assault on the culture, and Gahr documented Jonas Mekas, the God of American underground cinema at this time, attending the Peace Eye opening: 

In addition to Burroughs, Mekas was a primary inspiration for Fuck You as well as Sanders’ brief stint as a filmmaker. Sanders has said that for years the first thing he read from the Village Voice was Mekas’ weekly column and that Mekas’ film Guns of the Trees inspired him to start publishing Fuck You. In fact, Fuck You‘s infamous dedication to those “groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of congress” comes from a poem Allen Ginsberg reads in Mekas’ Guns of the Trees. Mekas sourced cheap blackmarket film, possibly from the air force, and a discreet development service for Sanders. He also funded Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures, which figured in Sanders’ 1967 obscenity trial. Here is a shot of a Village Voice clipping with Sanders’ pronouncement that Mekas is God on the wall of Peace Eye that Gahr photographed:

One last component of the total assault on the culture that I want to show from these photographs are the Fugs. The Fugs were proto-punk, and the FBI famously called them “the filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive.” The FBI is probably overselling it, but their shows were much more wild — in the spirit of happenings — than they tend to be described now. Keep in mind that Sanders was still very much in Warhol’s orbit at this point. I wish I had the contact sheets or negatives from the Fugs’ album cover shoot, but I’ve lost bid after bid on Fugs items, usually in the last 10 seconds of the auctions. If an eBay sniper is reading this, in the spirit of Sanders I say, fuck you. RealityStudio readers will have to settle for photos of Fugs at the opening event. Here Tuli Kupferberg is reading in the front right of the frame, and Peter Stampfel — who joined the Fugs from The Holy Modal Rounders — is talking with Katzman at the center:

There’s a copy of Bugger on the shelf behind them, and Kupferberg appears to be reading the Village Voice. I can’t make out the full title of the magazine behind the individual between Kupferberg and Katzman (does anyone recognize him? Peter Orlovsky?), but the first word of the magazine’s title appears to be “true” (True Confessions? True Detective?). This person I can’t name appears to be holding a copy of the new Fuck You issue. I didn’t see Fug Steve Weber in any of these photographs but I believe Ken Weaver is in the sweater (balding, with glasses) in the center of this final photo:

You can also see Stampfel in the right corner and Katzman on the couch. The infamous “pot is fun” sign is visible in the back. Peace Eye, it’s worth recalling, was also home to the Marijuana Review, an important organ of the total assault on the culture. As a flip through the pages of Fuck You will show, drugs were an integral part of this cultural assault. Rumor has it that Thurston Moore has this “pot is fun” sign (and maybe some rare Fuck You Press items to boot). If anyone reading this can put me in touch with Moore, I’d love to talk.

Gahr’s photographs capture the counterculture on the verge of becoming The Counterculture. The Peace Eye that appears here is at a crossroads where poetry, underground film, folk music, obscenity battles, experimental publishing, pornography, psychedelic journalism, and avant-garde art all occupied the same physical and social space. Burroughs, Mekas, Warhol, Katzman, the Fugs, and Sanders each represent developments that would later tend to be remembered as distinct histories. Here we can see them — and many I can’t identify — existing within a single milieu. The total assault on the culture that Sanders proclaimed was less a coherent program than a network of overlapping projects, personalities, and ambitions that hadn’t yet settled. These photos are a reminder of how much was incubated in places that at the time seemed temporary and marginal. Many of the developments traced through these photos eventually became industries and institutions. It’s tempting to see Peace Eye as the beginning of an inevitable story but Gahr’s photos can be read differently: a crowded room full of people who had little idea what would matter fifty years later. That uncertainty is what makes these photos valuable. 

Back in the day, I was something of a fanboy. For a while there I wrote fan letters to academics and scholars whose work struck a chord with me. I should say fan emails. Even an avid collector of paper like me did not write hard copy letters. So, when I read Kyle Schlesinger’s essay on Robert Creeley as a publisher and editor, I dropped him a line expressing how impressed I was with his essay. It made me see my Black Mountain Reviews and Divers Press items in a whole new light. Same with Oliver Harris. Daniel Kane. Jim Pennington. Roy Pennington. The list goes on.

Most of these initial emails are lost on my end. Part of me believes that hard copy letters are in some ways more likely to survive than emails and texts. But the experts tell me differently; they insist that emails and texts are persistent, even indestructible. Tell that to my initial email to Kyle Schlesinger. I can’t find it. Maybe he has it. That said, I do have my fan email to Reva Wolf. Wolf wrote one of the best books on the Mimeo Revolution of all time: Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s.

Here is what I wrote about her book on the Mimeo Mimeo Blog:

For me, Reva Wolf’s Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s is the mirror by which all books relating to the Mimeo Revolution must stand in front of to judge their appearance. Wolf’s mirror is unforgiving and reveals all blemishes. This was the first book I read that provided a coherent, directed reading of mimeo mags beyond providing a narrative history of a scene and its participants. Wolf does not tell a story, she provides a close, fascinating reading. She has read all the mags; she has dug into the archives, she has watched the films, she has seen the artwork, she has read the interviews and histories, she has talked to the participants, and then wonderfully she weaves it all together in a readable, clear, exciting fashion.

Generally, in the little magazine universe only Modernist magazines get this superstar treatment, such as Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism, and to be honest, I do not think anybody has approached what Wolf accomplished. The reason is Warhol no doubt. The success of Wolf’s book stems from art criticism rather than literary criticism. Wolf is an art historian and the better for it. In my opinion, art criticism is far more interesting and exciting in its readings than literary criticism. Wolf’s book is much more innovative and entertaining than Morrisson’s book for example. As we will see further on, the most successful treatments of the Mimeo Revolution have treated the publications in the context of art.

Wolf’s readings of the Warhol covers of C and Fuck You have become the accepted way to approach those magazines. Her treatment of 2/2 Stories for Warhol is fantastic and fun. Her analysis of the Haircut piece in Floating Bear 26 is as close as the shave on Kojak’s head. She ends any doubt over whether Warhol was an intellectual (he was).  Wolf can handle the bread and butter of literary criticism with ease as she shows by documenting how little magazines operate in a creative community and how mags talk to each other and about each other. Any number of literary scholars have dealt with reception theory in terms of little magazines (such as Morrisson). Wolf does it better. In short, her too short book is absolutely brilliant. Yet like a gifted teenager, this book is a bit of a loner. Maybe I’ll think of some company for it in the days to come, but Wolf’s book stands in a class by itself.

One way to see if a work of criticism has made its case, and even to an extent crossed over out of the academy, is whether the book is cited in rare book catalogues. Wolf’s book is a standard reference for bookdealers everywhere and is relied on heavily. It is as essential as Clay and Phillips Secret Location. Only Daniel Kane approaches Wolf’s mastery of New York mimeo.

The minute I finished Wolf’s book I was literally bouncing off the walls with excitement, and I wrote her what amounted to a fan letter. The book was so fun to read, so informative, and so inspiring I had to let her know that she had changed the way I looked at the mimeo mags I had the opportunity to look at every day for years. She revitalized my book collection and infused it with meaning and energy. I would guess that academics do not get fan letters from those outside of the academic establishment very often. Maybe that is for the best, because I think I scared her.

And here is the fan letter:

Professor Wolf

My name is Jed Birmingham. I am a William Burroughs and little magazine collector. This pursuit has lead (sic, Oy!!!) me to studying the material I own and writing about it on a Burroughs site called Reality Studio. As you may know, Burroughs appeared in most of the major magazines of New York in the 1960’s: Floating Bear, Fuck You, C Journal, Yugen, Kulchur, et al.

Your book on Andy Warhol and gossip has been a wonder to me. I cite and link to it often in my articles. Given all the items I have purchased lately dealing with the New York scene, I will be sure to reread your book soon.  It is a wonderful resource. Although I am not an everyday reader, I am not an academic either. In any case, I found your book fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable.

I eagerly await any new work you might have as well as any articles or essays you might suggest. Thank you for your scholarship; it is appreciated.

You might be interested in some of my articles if only for the images that accompany them. Below is a small sampling. I would appreciate any comments, additions or corrections if you so choose.

 http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/kiss-and-couch/
 http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/couch-the-andy-warhol-cover-of-fuck-you/
 http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/burroughs-berrigan-and-the-ticket-that-exploded/

One of the joys of your book was all the great images.

Thanks again

Wolf’s response was not as aloof as I remembered but we did not get in touch ever again as I recall. Going through the Sanders Archive I thought of Wolf and her book once again. Box 349 – `1962-1964, Folder: 1964 Peace Eye Gossip Item Ashbery + Warhol brough her to mind to be exact. Just a scrap of paper really with writing on both sides, and one that was hard to decipher, but I did my best to transcribe it:  

Have quiz on mouth
Ashbery/Drunk took Warhol/hook up/woke up bed full/of big gobs vaseline/+ piss

What would Wolf make of this? She wrote on Sanders and Ashbery extensively in her book but not in this context. Although she does mention Sanders in terms of blow jobs. I can only imagine her take would be brilliant, insightful, and well-researched. Maybe it would only be a lengthy footnote.  

Gossip is a big part of Sanders’ Fuck You publications. The Talk of the Town section of Fuck You, a magazine of the arts is a gossip section for the literary underground of the Lower East Side. A zine like Bugger has tabloid, gossipy elements to it. The Dick is a mimeo gossip tabloid fully realized. I suspect that Sanders got some of the inspiration for these gossipy elements from Warhol as well as Ted Berrigan and C Press. Berrigan is a major figure in Wolf’s book, of course. In 1969, Warhol would publish his own version of The Dick with the publication of Interview, a magazine in part dedicated to gossip. Sinking Bear also plays into this Warhol-Ashbery item in some way. Sanders’ interest in gossip, like the tidbit in the Archive, parallels his foray into investigative journalism in the 1970s, starting with his study of the Manson Family. Investigative journalism is the less tawdry, more serious manifestation of dishing gossip. Keaton has been looking into this angle for quite some time and maybe in the future he will expand on it on Mapping the Secret Location on RealityStudio. Maybe this scrap of gossip involving Warhol and Ashbery will find its way in his account somewhere.

That said, should I email Reva Wolf? Remember me? If she doesn’t respond I can write Chad Bennett a fan email. His book Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry looks promising. There is a chapter on Frank O’Hara, so he must know about the New York mimeo scene. Well, before you write a fan email, you must become a fan. So, I guess reading Word of Mouth is long overdue. It has been sitting on my shelf for ages. On the same shelf as the Wolf book. I wonder if Bennett’s book measures up. Does anyone out there have any word of mouth on it?

Where do you begin with the tidbits that lurk within?

A: Is anything really trivial in an archive? That seemingly innocuous scrap of paper may be the missing piece that completes the puzzle that is your research project. Or maybe it just supplies a narrative or factoid that adds some life to a paragraph within? Or most likely it doesn’t quite fit in your project at all, but it is too interesting to let go of completely, so it makes a spicy footnote that gives your research project flavor. The Sanders Archive is full of seemingly trivial like this.

B: One of the most endearing things about the Fugs is that they could not really play. In that respect the band is a merging of garage and folk before the lo-fi movement of the likes of Jeffrey Lewis. There is quite a bit of “Louie, Louie” in “Boobs-a-Lot.” Even better the Fugs were proto-punk. Their lack of virtuosity is what makes them influential. “This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.” This is the DIY idea at its finest. The Fugs fit in perfectly with the Fuck You Press aesthetic, which gives off an air that anybody can do this shit: from the printing, to the design, to the poems themselves. All you have to do is get started. And maybe take some speed. A lot of speed. Sid Vicious could have been a Fug precisely because he could not play, which makes the contents of the following folder in the Sanders Archive so weird and fascinating.

C: On Record Store Day for Black Friday 2025, I bought an LP of The Eleventh House featuring Larry Coryell live at the Riviera from 1976. In recent years, YouTube music commentators have gotten me into jazz fusion, especially fusion guitar. Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies live album probably prepared my ears for fusion. John McLaughlin is considered the Jimi Hendrix of the genre, but Jeff Beck might be the Miles Davis of the electric guitar. Beck, like Miles, constantly evolved on his instrument and never stayed put in one style. Many talk about Allan Holdsworth and I am still looking for the Soft Machine albums he performed on. The consensus is he is a giant. I have a soft spot for Tommy Bolin. He made The James Gang and Deep Purple relevant after the devastating departures of Joe Walsh and Ritchie Blackmore from those respective bands. Bolin played some mean fusion as well. But my favorite is Larry Coryell, the Godfather of Fusion. He was an OG and to my ears he does it the best. So, it was music to my ears to see Coryell in the Sanders Archive even if it was only just a few notes.

Where to begin with Box 307, Folder: Tryouts for Fugs Fall 65. If you look in the Sanders Finding Aid, you are not going to find any mention of this folder. Proof that the Finding Aid is incomplete and maddening when you realize that any of the 400-plus boxes in the Archive might have just the thing you were looking for. As it happens, the folder above contained just the type of thing I was looking for. 

In the folder were two scraps of paper. The first I saw was the name, address, and phone number of George Golub at 81-43 247st, F17-0264, with a drawing of a guitar to the left. There is a Jeff Golub, a jazz guitarist, and a Gregory Golub, a jazz pianist, associated with music. Not what I was looking for. But close. I was able to find a brief biography of a George Golub, who was associated with the East West Musical Instruments Company in San Francisco, which operated from 1967 to 1979. Pretty cool piece of trivia. Interesting but not earth shattering.

These were interesting threads to pursue until I looked at the second scrap of paper in the folder: Larry Coryell, 198 Eldridge, 777-2119. What the fuck? The thought of a guitar god like Larry Coryell in the Fugs, I must admit, blew my mind. Here is Nat Finkelstein from Uptight on Fugs musicianship: “One of the reasons I got tossed out of that whole Lower East Side group was the fact that I was working with The Velvets. Also Lou and John were pretty good musicians, whereas Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg wouldn’t have known music if it’d bit them on the ass.”

Coryell wrote a book, Improvising: My Life in Music, and there is quite a bit of name dropping in there, but he never mentions the Fugs or Ed Sanders at all. Coryell writes about being in New York City in the 1960s but this moment, from Fall 1965, must have been inconsequential for him. It is fun to fantasize about what Coryell played at that audition. Did he just sit in with the Fugs and jam? It would have taken him a few seconds to learn the rudimentary guitar work of the Fugs. Did Coryell show Sanders and the boys the full extent of what he could do?  

What would the Fugs have become if Coryell had joined the band? Would they have become some type of jam band with poetry? Or a true rock band? Or one of the first protofusion outfits with crazy, juvenile lyrics like “Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side” as opposed to the Eastern mysticism bullshit that dominates so much fusion of the 1970s.

Coryell moved to New York City in September 1965, attending Mannes School of Music. The Fugs audition must have been one of the first tryouts he attempted in the Big Apple. Eventually, Coryell hooked up with Chico Hamilton’s quintet, replacing guitarist Gabor Szabo. So clearly by the time Coryell arrived in New York City in September 1965, he was already a brilliant jazz guitarist, if unknown. In terms of technique and virtuosity, this is quite a distance from the Fugs. Coryell would not see Jimi Hendrix live until 1967 in Manhattan at The Scene. In 1969, he was invited to join Tony Williams’ Lifetime, which he declined. He suggested that John McLaughlin would be ideal for the job. He was. From an early age, Coryell was a monster musician. Why would he slum around with the Fugs? Were the Fugs actually paying anything? Apparently not.

This is perfect footnote stuff if you are researching a book on the Fugs or Coryell. Sanders lays it out in Fug You and answers some of the questions above:

A Police Informant Trying Out for The Fugs

Meanwhile I ran an ad in the Village Voice looking for a guitarist or a bass player to accompany us on the cross-country tour. I interviewed four. The first was Larry Coryell, not yet famous, with a very expensive guitar; we couldn’t afford him. The second was underage, so I turned him down. 

The third turned out to be a police informant. I know this because George Plimpton called me at Peace Eye and told me that a famous crime reporter had brought to a party a police informant who had just tried out for The Fugs! Good thing I hadn’t been that impressed with the way he played the guitar.

The fourth one, whom I hired, was named Jon Sheldon, who later became a doctor

Hmmm. Who was George Golub? I guess I will leave that one alone. Too hot to handle. Maybe a future researcher will dig around and fill out this footnote. The results will make for interesting reading.

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.

You have your grant. Now you are stoked to order the materials you want to see. The Sanders Archive is stored at an offsite facility separate from the Firestone so to see items from the collection, you have to place an order ahead of time to get them pulled and delivered to the Special Collection Reading Room, The Library asks for three days notice in order to assure that the items get pulled prior to your arrival. Keaton and I placed orders well over a week in advance. This may be overkill but when you are ordering dozens of boxes at a time it gives the staff plenty of time to take care of you.

Before requesting items, you must create an account. Go to the Collection Overview Page for the Ed Sanders Papers on the Princeton Library website. Click on “Your Account” in the top right-hand corner. From there, you will be prompted to either login or register with the usual types of required information. You don’t need to be affiliated with a university to create an account. I have absolutely no academic credentials of any kind.

Once you create this account, getting a Special Collection Photo ID card is rather easy when you get to the Library. I would also have your grant acceptance letter available and a contact in the Special Collection in case there are any issues. On your first day, enter the main library and go to the kiosk to the left. They’ll ask for some ID, take your picture, and print a card. You can only get a card Monday through Friday beginning at 9am. This card will allow you to access the entire library, not just the Special Collection.  

I arrived at the Firestone on a Saturday to case the joint out and could only get a one-day pass. Word to the wise, keep your Special Collection card. It is good for around six months, and you can just reactivate it after that point. Keaton keeps losing his card and having to get a new ID and photo taken. I refuse to do this because I do not want any more photo IDs in my life. I have gotten to the point where anytime I get a photo ID I wonder how can this fucking piece of plastic possibly work since I swear none of the photos taken in recent memory look like me. I mean there is no way in hell that I look like that. I do not see that fat, florid face in the mirror each morning. I sincerely hope nobody else sees it either. Thank God, you do not have to actually show the ID to anybody in the library. You can scan your way in and out everywhere. If anyone examined my ID, they would not let me in since, as I insist, it looks nothing like me. Who is this Steve Bannon-looking idiot anyway? Entry denied.

Back to ordering. The items you want to see are requested by box number. There are over 400 boxes in the Sanders Collection now. From what I am told, hundreds more are on the way. Once you receive your grant you should already have a particularly good idea of what boxes you want to see. In fact, referencing the boxes you want to review and what you hope to find in them is one of the keys to a successful grant application. Once you’ve selected what you are interested in from the online finding aid, click on “Request This Box” at the bottom of the page; this adds the box to your cart. There may be multiple items you want to see that are in a single box. If this is the case, you only need to add the box to your cart once. When you have added all the boxes with items you want to look at to your cart, you click “Request” at the bottom of the cart window. 

If you’re going to request a large number of boxes, it’s best to write to the library ahead of time and let them know when you are coming, how long you plan to stay, and the order you’d like to work through the boxes. They can’t bring all the boxes to the reading room at once for a large order. For this reason, when you finish looking through a box, they will ask if the box can go back to the offsite storage. They can continue to hold a box if you think you might return to it, but there is only so much space. This means that if you have a lot of boxes, you’ll need to finish some so that there’s space to bring in more. You can request boxes, but you must factor in the up to three-day period it takes to get boxes from the other location. For reference, I ordered roughly twenty boxes at once. You can only review two boxes at your desk at one time. The rest are onsite in Special Collections at the Firestone but not available for instant access. The librarians advised me not to send any of the boxes back after I looked at them. So, for 20 boxes, at least, space does not seem to be an issue. By the way, that advice was some of the best I received as I was constantly re-reviewing boxes of material based off what I found in other boxes and based off how my research interests developed over the two weeks.  

The Special Collection Room is on Floor D in the bowels of the Firestone. Pack light. They do not allow any bags, writing instruments, paper, food, or drinks in the room. Basically, you can bring your computer, a power source, and your phone. You might be able to bring a camera and tripod, but when I was there everybody was using their iPhones, which accounts for the fact that my pics are so shitty. They have lockers to keep your things in but they are small. If you are a food and drink person, maybe keep some shit in there. I smoke cigars (heavily), so the lockers were my humidor. Someone downstairs will check you in using your new card, run you through the basic rules and procedures, have you wash your hands, and let you into the reading room. You must wash your hands every time you exit and re-enter the reading room.

I like routine and so does Special Collections. There are long rectangular tables in the reading room with three seats at each table. The librarians will seat you at the ends of the table first. For the entire two weeks, I sat at the exact same spot as did everyone else there. When I was there, anywhere from four to ten people were also researching at the same time. There is Wi-Fi available in Special Collections but like everything associated with the library you must sign up and register for it. I was sick of registering for shit, so I used the hot spot off my phone. This was passable but not ideal. I suspect the library Wi-Fi is much faster and more dependable.  

It is a pretty straightforward process. Something Keaton was recommended before his first visit was to contact the librarians about questions or concerns before showing up. Spend some time thinking about any potential needs or issues. Spend even more time thinking about what you want to look at. You should know the Finding Aid like the back of your hand before you get there. You may not know what exactly is in the boxes but you should be familiar with the descriptions that are available for those boxes. The less time you spend getting set up and having the librarians to get you set up, the more time you have to research. Time goes really fast in there. The next thing you know last call at 4pm has rolled around and it is time to pack up and leave. In our experience, the librarians have always been very friendly, supportive, and happy to help. The key to this is being familiar with the policies and procedures before you get there. Do not come into Princeton and research on the fly. It is wasteful of your time and the librarians. If you believe anything I am telling you, believe me time flies. My two weeks were over before I knew it.

Princeton is fucking expensive. Forget about tuition; just being in the town as a visitor drains your bank account. If you decide to do research here, one of the biggest hurdles to spending two weeks, let alone six weeks, is the cost of lodging. The Friends of the Library are very open about this. Here is the FAQ on housing options at Princeton:  

Unfortunately, housing is expensive in Princeton, especially within walking distance of the campus. There are pricey hotel options in town, including Nassau Inn and Peacock Inn. There are more affordable hotel options on the outskirts of town; many provide a shuttle service. The Erdman Center permits individuals to rent when they have rooms available. Another option is to find a short-term sublet. TigerReTail is the Princeton University community classified ad site. Local hotel options and additional lodging information can be found on the university’s website. 

Please see the University’s Transportation website for information about accessible transit services around campus.

The ideal option is not listed above and that is staying at a friend or acquaintance’s place in or around Princeton. Bonus points if it is a student or professor that lives on or around campus. That was not in the cards for Keaton Studebaker and me. Between the two of us, we have covered several of the options listed in the FAQ and for me there is one clear cut answer to the question: “Where do I stay?”  

First things first, let’s deal with some of the lesser options.

Keaton has been to the Sanders archive on four separate occasions and has stayed at different places than me all those times. Here is Keaton on lodging in Princeton with a little bit on gyms in town. You are not going to get that information from me because I am fat and out of shape and getting fatter every day.

I stayed at the Extended Stay America Suites at 3450 Brunswick Pike the first three times I went to Princeton. It’s not nice. I don’t imagine anyone with a real job would choose to stay here. The “free breakfast” offered consists of really bad granola bars, some small-packaged muffins (depending on the morning), and coffee that’s worse than what’s at most gas stations. It hasn’t always been the cleanest place outside my room either, but I’ve stayed at worse places. This place has gotten the job done: it’s cheap, the rooms have a kitchen (which mitigates the bad breakfast and means I can save money by cooking for myself), there’s Wi-Fi, and it’s less than a ten-minute drive to the university. I didn’t hang on to receipts, but looking at my budget notes, I think I paid a little over $500 for the week (it definitely wasn’t over $600). Maybe you already know this, but it’s cheaper to get your room (and extend your stay if you end up needing to) through a third party like Expedia instead of directly through the hotel itself. 

One thing I liked about this Extended Stay is how close it is to Ludus Performance Gym (45 Everett Dr #130, Princeton Junction, NJ 08550). This is where I’ve typically gone while in Princeton. My favorite gym in the area is Diesel Gym (1485 Livingston Ave, North Brunswick Township, NJ 08902), but the extra driving after a long day digging in the archive often isn’t worth it to me. In case it’s something you care about, both gyms have chalk. 

This past summer, this Extended Stay was a lot more expensive than the past three times I went. While I’ve never been a fan of AirBnBs, the cheapest place with a kitchen I could find ended up being an AirBnB in Trenton, so I caved. This was about a twenty-minute drive to the campus (with good weather — watch out for Princeton rainstorms and flashfloods) and was ten minutes away from a Crunch Fitness (2465 S Broad St, Hamilton Township, NJ 08610), which I was able to use for free for the week with a trial pass I got online. Crunch is, of course, much worse than Ludus or Diesel. However, depending on your budget and gym needs, it could be good enough, and saving some money by not having to pay for a week’s pass is also nice. The AirBnB cost me about the same as the Extended Stay. Don’t forget to bring your own soap and shampoo. 

Doing things this way means you need a car to get around. This has never been an issue for me because I’ve always driven from Pittsburgh (it’s cheaper than flying). You’ll have to rent a car, which is an additional expense, if you fly in. 

What becomes obvious from the FAQ and from Keaton is that you may have to stay out of town to do research for any length of time at Princeton. There are several hotels outside of Princeton. I do not know the prices of those, but I seriously doubt they are cheaper than the option I detail below.  

The biggest negative about a hotel on the outskirts of town is that you must drive and park. Staying in Princeton and walking is ideal. But it is fucking expensive. Just to give you an example of how ridiculous staying in a hotel in Princeton is, I stayed one night at the Nassau Inn during my trip. That one night was $350 including all taxes and fees. I would suspect that for most people that makes a two-week or longer stay here just impossible. That said, the location of the Nassau Inn is as close as you are going to get to the Firestone Library without actually staying on campus, and it is right in the heart of all the action in town.  

It is located smack dab in the center of Palmer Square just a stone’s throw from a ton of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. In the summer when I was there, the Square is hopping with people and live music both during the day and at night. The Inn is a historic landmark that has been operational in one form or another in and around downtown Princeton since 1756. Legend has it that Paul Revere and Thomas Paine drank at the original 52 Nassau Street location.  

They did not drink at the Yankee Doodle Tap Room inside the Inn, which like most bars in Princeton is no bueno. Come to hang out with Jill, a local legend as a bartender, take a look at the Norman Rockwell painting behind the bar, but do not drink here. For a true American hero like me who drinks American premiums that my father drank and his father before him and so on, there was not much to choose from at the Doodle. Lots of hoppy nonsense that has destroyed beer in the United States as well as one of the most disappointing Guinness I have had in quite some time. I would have liked to see a PBR in a 16oz can or even a pony Miller High Life, no premiums but premium prices. With a small tip, my Guinness was over ten dollars. $350 for the room and $10 per beer is just not sustainable. I also did not have a car, so I did not have to worry about parking at the Nassau Inn, which I believe requires a parking pass. More money.  

That said I must say my room was awesome. It was too big for what I needed. It was like a honeymoon suite. But I was on a serious business trip and just wanted something cheap, clean, and close to the library. If you are blowing in to Princeton for one or two nights and you are treating your research in the library like a vacation, I would recommend the Nassau Inn. It is like staying in a modernized historic site right in the heart of the city. Something like Trump’s renovated White House.

In my opinion there is only one option for lodging in Princeton for a trip of any length: The Erdman Center at the Princeton Theological Seminary at 26 Library Place. Point blank if it were not for The Erdman Center I would have had to forfeit my grant to Princeton. There is no way I could have afforded a rental car and lodging for the entire two weeks. The Center only has fifty-five guest rooms available. I stayed about a week in an Accessible Single (1 Twin Bed Priv Accessible Bath) for around $90 a night, and another week in an Accessible Double (1 Dble Bed Priv Accessible Bath) for $105 a night. The bathrooms were huge, and I face-timed my wife about it. I realize now that was because it was outfitted for those with disabilities. Not cool taking those rooms on my part. I am a dope. I should have gone to the Seminary and asked for forgiveness.  

Personally, I would recommend the cheaper twin-bed option as the room includes a desk which is ideal for typing up your notes after a day’s research. If you get the double bed you are going to have to work in the common area which also has a microwave. During my time at the Erdman, most of the occupants seemed to be mothers with their high school kids touring the school or foreign exchange students. For a couple of days, there was a group of high school kids that were on a chaperoned trip of some kind. Despite this, it seemed like I had the Erdman to myself. I was outside smoking at all hours of the day and night and I barely saw anybody. Students of the Seminary staff the Center, and they go out of their way to help you out. They answered and even researched all my questions about where to go in town and what to do. The staffing is not a 24-hour service. So, do not forget your keycard and lock yourself out. Not that I speak from experience.

The cheapest option, which I would have done, but was not available long term, was the Single (1 Twin Bed with Shared Bath) for $80. There are also suites that go up to $140 a night, more expensive for sure, but far cheaper than any option in downtown Princeton. The Erdman has your basic amenities, but all that really matters is that there are free Wi-Fi and free parking. The parking is a huge bonus. Parking like lodging is a bitch at Princeton. The Erdman solves that problem. They give you a free parking pass to go across the street and park in the Wright Library parking lot. Even if you do not have a car, like me, I would recommend getting the parking pass when you arrive. I had visitors and the parking pass solved any issues about where to park.

Keaton had a car and here is his solution for parking:

For parking on campus, I’ve always used the Stadium Drive Garage (Stadium Dr, Princeton, NJ 08540), which is free if you register your car through their website. It’s about a 10 or 15-minute walk to the Firestone Library from the garage.

The Erdman has an excellent location, not as central as the Nassau Inn, but within walking distance of everything you could want: the library, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, record store, cigar store. The Firestone is a pleasant fifteen-minute walk from the Erdman. It is also within walking distance of an Enterprise Rental Car. I had to rent a car and a word of warning, if you do so, rent far in advance. Princeton runs out of rental cars and some rental car places will not approve one-way trips of long distances as I found out. You will need a credit card. The Enterprise by the Erdman does not allow out-of-state renters to use a debit card. Be warned. If you do rent a car only do so to get in and out of Princeton, most things are walkable and there is a robust Uber system if you need to get somewhere over a few miles away.

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.

It’s not a coincidence that the year Grove Press brought Naked Lunch to America was the same year Ed Sanders rolled out Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders stepped onto the literary stage with William Burroughs as his model for cultural rebellion. The first issues of Fuck You were built around Sanders’s Soft-Man poems, a series he later admitted were “a kind of semireligious text inspired by William Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine” (Fug You 8). Even though he later brushed them off as juvenilia, Sanders still collected most of them in Peace Eye in 1965. Even Sanders’s iconic rallying cry “total assault on the culture” was inspired by Burroughs (Fug You xiv). Yet while there would have been no Sanders without Burroughs, the two came to represent considerably different visions of the counterculture. Whereas Burroughs blurred boundaries, collapsing utopian and destructive energies into a single counterculture stew, Sanders sought to separate the “authentic” from the “corrupted,” offering readers an interpretative compass for a subculture he felt a need to defend in the court of public opinion. Examining where Sanders and Burroughs align and diverge shows how Sanders’s counterculture is always curated, shaped not only by who he felt deserved the status of authentic rebellion but what he thought could gain mainstream traction. The different strategies of Burroughs and Sanders reveal competing definitions of what counterculture was, could be, and should be.

Burroughs’s influence on Sanders persisted long after Fuck You ended. In a 2020 interview with Raymond Foye for Gagosian Quarterly, Sanders confessed that while drafting The Family—his 1971 book on Charles Manson—he had the galleys of Burroughs’s The Wild Boys right in front of him. He even claims to have scrawled his first notes for The Family directly onto the galleys for Burroughs’s novel. Sanders joked about whether some sharp-eyed scholar might one day make note of this, but the anecdote says more than the joke: Burroughs was never far from his work. You can see aspects of The Wild Boys seeping into The Family. Sanders’s cinematic flair—for instance, his introduction of Roman Polanski with the line “Fade in electronic soundtrack from Rosemary’s Baby” (68)—feels lifted from Burroughs’s arsenal of jump cuts and camera pans in The Wild Boys. Sanders’s campy refrains, especially the goofy-spooky “oo-ee-oo,” feel like an attempt to echo Burroughs’s balance of pulp and menace. And like Burroughs’s slippery “I” in The Wild Boys, Sanders only writes of himself obliquely in The Family, referring to himself as “this writer” while dropping editorial asides that can’t be mistaken for anyone else. Burroughs’s influence on The Family is suggested in some of Sanders’s writing techniques.

Both of these books also focus on transgressive subjects, but Burroughs and Sanders diverge sharply in approach to these subjects. Sanders constructs an interpretative scaffolding around disturbing material while Burroughs dismantles such frameworks, leaving readers without an interpretive safety net. Consider how Sanders emphasizes the horror of Manson followers contemplating death, describing how “people arrived from the desert, attired in leather, tanned and trim of form. And they were all sitting around ‘mocking up snuff,’ postulating the event of their own death so as to experience it mentally. Sound like fun?” (The Family 131). The heavy handed rhetorical question at the end makes it clear how Sanders expects the reader to feel. Compare this to the more ambiguous passage from Burroughs: “One time I smashed one of these gourd rats and the blood spurted out all over me. I threw him on the ground and he twisted around the sharp little black point between his legs was stiff. Xolotl laughed pointing to it then we were pointing to each other and laughing and I lay down pretending I was the gourd rat throwing myself around and Xolotl shoved my legs up and we made fire I was kicking like a grog” (The Wild Boys 112). How does Burroughs position the reader in relation to these events? As a voyeur, critic, or something else? Is this a celebration? A portrayal of something to be condemned? Are these experiences supposed to be pleasurable or painful? Sanders tells readers how to feel about what he writes, but Burroughs leaves readers to confront unsettling ambiguities without interpretative guardrails.

These contrasting portrayals reflect different approaches to what constituted the counterculture. Throughout The Family, Sanders persistently works to separate the authentic, positive elements of the counterculture from its corrupted manifestations. This distinction matters because, while both The Family and The Wild Boys represented (relatively, at least for Burroughs) mainstream works for their respective authors, they addressed different audiences. The Family wasn’t written for an underground or avant garde readership like The Wild Boys. This left Burroughs space to blend all elements of the counterculture into a single, chaotic mixture. Consider that although Burroughs at one point aligns his wild boys with the Yippies—the political group Sanders helped found—he also depicts them performing violent, orgiastic rituals designed to “push… the spirit out the back of the head” of boys (The Wild Boys 139, 156). These rituals echo practices Sanders attributes to Manson. Most tellingly, the wild boys pursue “total chaos,” a goal Sanders explicitly links to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which he argues was instrumental in corrupting Manson (The Family 74, The Wild Boys 139). Burroughs’s wild boys seem as close to Manson’s apparently murderous occult philosophy as they are Sanders’s picturesque rebrand of the counterculture.

The Process Church libel lawsuit against Sanders and his publisher foregrounds the difference between these two versions of the counterculture. In the British trial, Sanders’s legal team only needed to demonstrate a 51% probability that the Process had influenced Manson—a relatively low burden of proof where minor factual errors wouldn’t undermine the defense as long as the central claim of malign influence remained credible. While Sanders’s team presented enough evidence of overlap between the Process and Manson to satisfy this legal requirement, much of this evidence regarding shared beliefs could equally have been applied to Burroughs’s work such as The Wild Boys. A psychology professor testified for Sanders’s team that the Sex issue of the Process magazine could harm young, impressionable people, and they argued that distributing Process literature was like giving matches to children, making the distributor partially responsible when one child inevitably starts a fire. This same loose logic of malign influence through provocative counterculture materials could theoretically extend to Burroughs’s work (or even Sanders’s work prior to The Family). Since a significant portion of the defense relied on a monkey see monkey do conception of representation, the trial foregrounds Sanders’s curatorial approach to the counterculture. Burroughs made the cut for Sanders. 

It’s interesting to imagine a case that could have been made for Manson finding inspiration in, say, Naked Lunch or the Nova Trilogy. Since these four novels all predate the founding of the Process, maybe Burroughs was one of their sleazo-inputs (fade in John Carpenter’s Halloween theme). To be clear, this isn’t an evaluation of the veracity of any of Sanders’s claims, but the probabilistic defense of The Family helps show a meaningful difference in how Sanders and Burroughs presented the counterculture. Burroughs recognized more affinities between strains of the counterculture that Sanders kept separate. Sanders curated a mainstream-friendly version of the counterculture that attempts to preserve his idea of radical promise by cutting off its darker permutations. On the other hand, Burroughs didn’t back away from the chaos. His version of the counterculture shows a drive toward freedom bound up with self-destructive tendencies. This difference matters because not only did it inform how the counterculture was seen then but also how it is remembered today. Reading Sanders and Burroughs alongside each other shows two distinct conceptions of the counterculture: one carefully managed, the other unwilling to be contained.

References

Burroughs, William. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Grove Press, 1994.

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.

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?

Mapping the Secret Location: Postings on the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton University is a new section on RealityStudio exploring the Ed Sanders Papers located at Princeton. It is a complement to the Fuck You Press Archive created by Jed Birmingham in a series of Bibliographic Bunker columns.

• Introduction by Jed Birmingham
• Grading Criteria for Boxes at the Archive by Jed Birmingham
• Lodging at Princeton by Jed Birmingham
• Ordering Items by Jed Birmingham
• The Dismal Science of the Ed Sanders Archive by Jed Birmingham
• Archive Trivia Part I – Larry Coryell by Jed Birmingham
• Archive Trivia Part II – Warhol Gossip by Jed Birmingham
• Soft Men, Wild Boys: The Countercultures of Ed Sanders and William Burroughs by Keaton Studebaker
• The Ginsberg Cold Cream Conspiracy by Keaton Studebaker

Additional Links

• Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton
• Finding Aid for Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton (pdf)