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. 

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)

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Recently I was flipping through the latest copy of Fine Books & Collections as I am wont to do. I generally spend as much time looking at the advertisements as I do reading the articles. The piece on the Gotham Book Mart was a fun read with a closing quote by friend of the Bunker Brian Cassidy, which reminded me that I should have made the trek up to Penn in order to catch the conference honoring the historic bookshop. Cassidy gave a presentation on the Gotham Book Mart “Howl” that is fascinating book porn for Beat collectors, bibliographic nerds, and fans of mimeography. Hopefully Cassidy’s recent work on mimeography will be more widely available soon and get an audience of outside of academia and library science.  

Back to the ads. I came across Cardozo Fine Arts’ The Complete Reference Edition of Edward Curtis’ The North America Indian, which reproduces Curtis’ masterwork word for word (all 2.5 million of them), in its entirety. “At less than 1% of the cost of the original set, The Complete Reference Edition is an exceptional value and offers greatly improved accessibility and readability with fine workmanship and materials throughout.”  

I found this the most interesting ad in the entire magazine and I promptly forgot all about it until a friend of mine brought to my attention that The North American Indian of the Mimeograph Revolution was getting the same treatment. Yes, that over-the-top publication by that other Edward. Edward Sanders’ magnum opus, Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts, is now available complete in a single leather-bound edition for $500 published by Optics Press. That is roughly 2.5% of the cost of an original set. If anyone needed further proof that Fuck You is the most iconic mimeo mag of them all, the King, the Curtis of mimeo, this seals the deal. The volume is available on eBay and there is a great YouTube video that flips through the edition and really lets you get a good look at the contents and workmanship.

Now I have to admit that I chuckled when I read the ad for the Cardozo Curtis. If you are really into The North American Indian, there is absolutely no hope of getting a set unless your name is Jeff Bezos. Even the Reference Edition is $6,500 which is hefty in itself. It is not for me, but I can understand it I guess. But I was really conflicted by the Optics Fuck You. A few years ago someone at the NY Book Art Fair was selling a collection of Fuck You reproductions printed by a risograph for $25. I think it was five or so of the original 13 issues. Without hesitation I bought one. I have a complete set of originals but I thought this project was cool given how it was published.  

The Optics with the fine press trappings really gets my goat. Unlike the Curtis American Indian, Fuck You is not a fine press publication. Putting the mag in leather bindings and custom boxes kills the spirit of the thing. It is described as a passion project, but this is more of a eulogy than anything else. This edition entombs Fuck You. The publisher as mortician. As a collector I would much rather pay $500 for a single issue of the original mag than $500 for a dressed up corpse. Fuck You is lo-fi and DIY. The mag should be reproduced that way. The complete run is available on RealityStudio and elsewhere, so why not create your own xeroxed set and devise your own binding and paratextual framework. Why pay for something you can do for yourself and present in a much more personal, intimate, and interesting manner. It would be cool to have an entire exhibition of DIY reproductions of Fuck You and what a fitting tribute to the ethos of the magazine. Fuck You should not make you dependent on fine printers but inspire you to become a publisher and printer yourself.  

That said, I just might buy the Optics Press edition. It goes against everything I believe in but it is a new edition of Fuck You and I do not have it. Am I a Fuck You obsessive or not? The Optics Press Fuck You is the true test of my commitment. Speaking of commitment if this edition was a true passion project it would be distributed for free. I do not care if it is being sold at cost. Passion, like love, hurts. The Optics Press edition should be a gift distributed free like Floating Bear or Semina to friends through the mail. Publication as potlatch. Who knows what Optics Press might get in return? Maybe nothing. That is the true eroticism of publishing. Money can’t buy you love.

This essay is a preview of a larger project, still in progress, about Ezra Pound’s Cantos 110-116 published by Fuck You Press in 1967. To share information about the book or to comment on the essay, please write Joshua Kotin.

I

A thought experiment. You are teaching a course on the history of twentieth-century American poetry and can only assign one collection. No anthologies. No compilations. What would you assign? Tender Buttons (1914)? The Waste Land (1922)? Harmonium (1923)? Spring and All (1923)? The Weary Blues (1925)? Howl (1956)? The Bean Eaters (1960)? Ariel (1965)?

I might assign The Cantos 110-116 published by Fuck You Press in 1967. Why that book — a pirated, mimeographed edition, limited to 300 copies? The book connected Ezra Pound, the most influential poet of the century, to the world of the mimeograph revolution, a publishing phenomenon that changed how poetry was written and read after the Second World War.

But the book did more than connect Pound and the mimeograph revolution. It changed them both. The book forced Pound and his publisher, New Directions, to publish Drafts & Fragments (1969), bringing The Cantos to an artificial, arbitrary end. “It is difficult, and perhaps inappropriate, to speculate on the fate of these last poems had this piracy on the high seas of Cantos texts not occurred,” writes Peter Stoicheff; it is possible “that Cantos 110 to 116 and the fragments would never have been included in the complete Cantos.”¹

The book, in turn, brought Fuck You Press and its publisher, Ed Sanders, celebrity and revenue. But more important: it allowed a new generation of poets to read Pound in the face of his fascism and anti-Semitism. As Chelsea Jennings writes, “Sanders’s edition of the Cantos […] is at once an homage to Pound — an affirmation of his continued relevance not just to history but to the present — and a defiant appropriation of his poetry and legacy.”²

The book — as a physical object — exemplifies these entwined histories. It tells a story about Pound and the composition and influence of his epic, and about the counterculture in postwar New York and around the world. The book is, at once, a mini-Pound Era (1971) and an introduction to the communities mapped in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980 (1998), the bibliography that takes its name from the tagline of Fuck You Press. The book also provides a window onto the history of United States copyright law — a history that links Noah Webster to Ulysses (1922) to Napster — and a pre-MFA world of contempt for mainstream publishing. Finally, the book offers a model — relevant today — for how to separate artists from their artworks, and thereby mitigate complicity in injustice.

II

The facts about the book’s origin and impact are well known. Stoicheff’s essay, “The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text” (1997), offers the best account. To summarize: in 1960, Pound sent drafts of seven cantos to The Paris Review after being interviewed by Donald Hall. (The magazine published two cantos — “From CXV” and “CXVI” — and the interview in 1962.) Hall shared the drafts with Tom Clark, who was then writing an honors thesis on Pound at Cambridge. Seven years later, Clark shared the drafts with Sanders, who had asked for a manuscript to “instantly freak into print.”³ Clark and Sanders commissioned a cover from Joe Brainard and mimeographed 300 copies of the book in Sanders’s apartment.

James Laughlin, the owner and publisher of New Directions, learned of the piracy from Pound’s bibliographer, Donald Gallup, and summoned Sanders to lunch at the Russian Tea Room to elicit a promise not to print additional copies. “[H]e says he won’t do it again,” Laughlin wrote Robert Gales, a sales manager at J.B. Lippincott, “but with an anarchist like that you never know.”⁴ Laughlin immediately began to pressure Pound to complete a new volume of cantos. In 1969, New Directions published Drafts & Fragments in two editions. A regular edition of 3000 copies appeared in April and sold for $3.95; and a signed, limited edition of 310 copies, printed by the Stone Wall Press in Iowa City, appeared in October and sold for $100.

Gallup, in his bibliography, describes the basic features of the most common version of Fuck You Press Cantos:

14 leaves. 27.9 X 21.6 cm. Heavy white paper wrappers printed in black on page [i] with design incorporating title: the cantos of ezra pound cx-cxvi; wire-stitched.

Published without authorisation in November 1967; 300 copies printed. Colophon (recto of final leaf): Limited edition of 300 copies of which this is No…. [number written in] [Text reproduced from typewritten copy.]⁵

Gallup then lists differences between the poems printed in Fuck You Press Cantos and the poems Pound authorized for the New Directions editions.⁶

Sanders, in his autobiography, provides additional information about the book, reporting that 100 copies were sold to the Gotham Book Mart for $6 each, and that 100 were given to friends. (He doesn’t mention the remaining 100 copies.) He includes a reproduction of an accounting statement, which he dates November, 1967, listing the costs for paper, ink, and stencils, and indicating that he split the $491 profit with Clark, reserving $60 in royalties for Pound.⁷ In a letter to Stoicheff, Clark offers a slightly different account, reporting that most of the edition was sold to Robert A. Wilson at the Phoenix Bookshop.⁸ The difference is understandable: Sanders and Clark were both writing decades after Cantos 110-116 was published and distributed.

Unpublished material from various archives resolves some of these gaps and contradictions. My main source is Richard Taylor’s magisterial (and unpublished) Annals project, but I provide citations to the relevant documents.⁹ In 1967, Laughlin wrote Herbert P. Gleason, Pound’s lawyer at Hill & Barlow in Boston, that Sanders sold 200 copies to the Gotham Book Mart and 100 to the Phoenix Bookshop.¹⁰ In March, 1968, Robert H. Johnson, another lawyer at Hill & Barlow, wrote Sanders to demand $2,550 in restitution, claiming that the book was “being sold at $8.50 a copy in New York City.”¹¹ By March, 1969, Laughlin had convinced the Gotham Book Mart and the Phoenix Bookshop to compensate Pound. (That month, Gotham sent a check for $21.25 to cover their profits from the sale of twenty-five copies.) Sanders, however, remained recalcitrant, failing even to send the $60 promised in his accounting statement.¹² In a letter to Pound’s wife, Dorothy Pound, Laughlin wrote:

The two offending booksellers who had handled the Sanders piracy of Canto Fragments have now agreed to make a token “contribution” in lieu of royalties, on their sales, since the wretched Sanders has never come through with anything, despite his assurances […]. He is quite hopeless, a very bad apple.¹³

That March, Laughlin wrote yet another Pound lawyer — Caryl S. Terry at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. — that Sanders was now “selling the thing” at his Peace Eye Bookstore for $1.50. “Do you think you should take further action on Sanders? I really can’t do anything with him.” “It is my hope,” Laughlin concludes, “that when our book of these Cantos comes out next month that will dry up the interest in the Sanders version, except for a few collectors who must have everything, even if it is pirated.”¹⁴

III

Laughlin’s suspicion that “with an anarchist like that you never know” occurred to me when I began researching Cantos 110-116. Why would Sanders respect the book’s limitation? Why not, for instance, sell ten copies of copy number ten? Why not make as much money as possible?

More than greed was at stake. The piracy, as Jennings suggests, was a way to recognize the importance of Pound’s poetry without becoming complicit in his politics. But it was also a way to harm Pound. An analogy to television in the age of #MeToo is useful, although imperfect: imagine a world in which every time you watched The Cosby Show (1984-1992) or Louie (2010-2015) or House of Cards (2013-present) you took money out of the pockets of the shows’ stars. The piracy created a version of this world. Excluding the bookshops’ reluctant “contributions,” profit was a zero-sum game between Sanders, and Pound and New Directions. As Laughlin acknowledged, sales of Cantos 110-116 directly decreased sales of Drafts & Fragments: only a collector (or scholar) would buy both. Sanders, thus, had an unselfish reason to sell as many copies as he could — political activism — and an almost two-year head start.

In 2014, I began a census of the book — an attempt to track down all 300 copies. I have located 152 copies so far. My method is basic: WorldCat, word of mouth, bookfinder.com. There are no overlapping numbers — but there are definitely more than 300 copies in circulation. I have located 118 numbered copies — in institutional and private collections, and for sale. (Seventy-four of the 118 are in institutional collections.) I have also located thirty-four unnumbered, out-of-series copies. These copies do not have a colophon — and I don’t think ever did. Thirteen of the unnumbered copies have pink covers, instead of the white covers listed in Gallup’s bibliography. (None of the pink copies has a colophon.) I’ve also found a copy numbered 302, which belonged to Allen Ginsberg. I bought it in 2016 on eBay for $50 from the seller, “artinall,” who has been selling books from Ginsberg’s library. Many of these books have been put up for sale again by Captain Ahab’s Rare Books.

My research has revealed other connections. The University of Delaware has copy number one, which belonged to Wilson, suggesting that the first 100 copies were sold to the Phoenix Bookshop. (Michael Stevens reports that Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up bought stock from the Phoenix after it closed, including thirty copies of Cantos 110-116. Stevens then bought some of these copies to sell on eBay.) A collector in Toronto has copy number two, which belonged to Joseph Gold, the former general counsel and director of the legal department of the International Monetary Fund. (Pound would have found the connection relevant.) The University of Pennsylvania has three copies — two of which (124 and 133) are from the stock of the Gotham Book Mart. (Over 200,000 items from Gotham were donated to Penn in 2008, and are preserved in the Gotham Book Mart Collection. Other items from the bookshop are currently for sale at Grey Matter Books in Hadley, Massachusetts.) Harvard has two copies, including one (113) that Laughlin purchased from Gotham in 1967, and that now resides in the New Directions archives. (These numbers confirm that the first 100 copies went to the Phoenix, and the next 200 went to Gotham.) Yale has Gallup’s copy (225). Steven Clay has poet Paul Violi’s copy — with white covers and no colophon. A pink copy at Princeton was a gift of Charles Ryskamp in 1969; and another pink copy, with the autograph of a Bruce Richman, is part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. These connections, together, tell a story about the almost immediate institutional absorption (or arrogation) of the counterculture.

Because I have been working on the census for four years, I’ve been able to track the movement of copies in real time, and have given and traded copies myself. (I bought six copies in 2015 for $120.) One copy (228) traveled from bookseller to bookseller to bookseller — from Burton Weiss to Kenneth Mallory to Brian Cassidy. Another copy (132) traveled from Derringer Books to Sheffield University. I gave a copy (223) to a poet and Pound scholar as a birthday gift; and traded another (80) to the editor and publisher of Crater Press — one of the best poetry publishers today — for a subscription.

There are many questions about the book left to answer. Most obvious: where are the other numbered copies? What is the story behind the different versions? Was Sanders really attempting to harm Pound when he pirated the book? But other questions also matter. Were the first 300 copies printed and numbered in 1967, and the remainder printed at a later date — perhaps to give to friends or to sell for $1.50 at Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore? Were all the copies produced in the same way — on the same mimeograph machine with the same stencils? Cassidy, the bookseller, has suggested to me in conversation that the three versions might have been produced using different duplication technologies. A curator at the Morgan Library and Museum has suggested that I try to identify additional variants by comparing staples.

Jed Birmingham notes that printing out of series was not uncommon during the mimeograph revolution. He cites a 1966 letter from Wilson to Dan Saxon — editor of the magazine Poems Collected at Les Deux Mégots / Poets at Le Metro (1961-1965) — asking for new copies of five back issues. “Could you possibly produce one of each?” Wilson asks.¹⁵ As Birmingham observed in an email to me, “if Wilson did this with Saxon I am sure he did with Sanders. The mimeograph is after all just a copy machine.”

From St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., where Pound began to write his final cantos, to Rome, where he completed his initial drafts; and from London, where Hall shared them with Clark, to New York, where Clark and Sanders freaked them into print; and from Arlington, Massachusetts, where I am writing this sentence, to wherever you are reading it now: Cantos 110-116 illuminates a world. Every book has this potential. One can track a book’s composition and distribution; indeed, one can track a book’s actual composition — the supply chains and manufacturing processes that lead to the object that one holds in one’s hand. (Eric Slauter is doing just that for a book, Walden’s Carbon Footprint, about the first edition of Walden, published in 1854.) A census — of a book, of a place — reveals a unique network of lives.

Fuck You Press Cantos connected Pound to the mimeograph revolution and changed them both. And it continues to change our world, connecting poets, scholars, collectors, booksellers, institutions, presses, readers. The book’s comparatively small scale — 300 plus copies, fourteen pages (thirteen without the colophon) — allows us to track its impact even as it impacts us.

I thank Rachel Applebaum, Sheelagh Bevan, Jed Birmingham, Ronald Bush, Brian Cassidy, Michael Kindellan, John Logan, Gabriel Swift, and Eric White for discussing Cantos 110–116 with me; I also thank everyone who responded to my queries about specific copies of the book.

Endnotes

1 Peter Stoicheff, “The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 220.

2 Chelsea Jennings, “Pirating Pound: Drafts & Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature 40.1 (2016): 103.

3 Tom Clark, quoted in Stoicheff, 214.

4 James Laughlin, quoted in Stoicheff, 215.

5 Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 107.

6 For a history of the Drafts & Fragments text, see Stoicheff, and Ronald Bush, “‘Unstill, Ever Turning’: The Composition of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments,” Text 7 (1994): 397–422.

7 Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo Press, 2011), 286.

8 Clark, quoted in Stoicheff, 214.

9 Ezra Pound et al., “Annals, Documentation for a Variorum Edition of The Cantos,” ed. Richard Taylor, Word file, 2014.

10 James Laughlin to Herbert P. Gleason, 21 December 1967, item 2917, folder 127, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–1997 (MS Am 2077), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

11 Robert H. Johnson to Edward Sanders, 5 March 1968, item 5056, folder 1, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records. The New Directions archives includes a receipt for two copies that Laughlin purchased from the Gotham Book Mart for $8.50 each, less a discount. See Gotham Book Mart receipt, item 5056, folder 1, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records.

12 Sanders also failed to send $120 he promised another Pound lawyer in 1968. (Sanders told the lawyer that he had sold copies of Cantos 110–116 to the Phoenix Bookshop and the Gotham Book Mart for $2 each.) See Caryl S. Terry to Laughlin, 12 November 1968, item 5003, folder 4, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records.

13 Laughlin to Dorothy Pound, 24 March 1969, Pound mss. II, box 9, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. The two bookshops wanted to protect their relationship with New Directions, and thus were willing to comply with Laughlin’s request for “contributions.” In 1968, Laughlin wrote Caryl S. Terry, one of Pound’s lawyers, that “Andy Brown at Gotham Book Mart […] is pushing me hard for a larger allocation on the next limited edition, and he now seems to want to cooperate, and describes himself as repentant for having gotten mixed up in the Sanders affair.” The high price of the Drafts & Fragments limited edition meant a significant profit for the bookshops. See Laughlin to Terry, 18 November 1968, item 5003, folder 4, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records.

14 Laughlin to Terry, 13 March 1969, item 5003, folder 5, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records. Pound’s lawyers were reluctant to prosecute, knowing that damages would not cover the cost of prosecution.

15 Robert A. Wilson quoted in Jed Birmingham, “The Smoking Gun,” Mimeo Mimeo (blog), Mimeo Mimeo, https://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-smoking-gun.html.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Ed Sanders Catalogue #1 – June/July 1964

Item Description: Ed Sanders, New York, 1964. Soft cover. Book Condition: Near Fine. No Jacket. Ed Sanders (illustrator). [7] leaves; 28 x 21.7 cm. Side-stapled binding. Pages un-numbered. Mimeographed on one side on typing paper stock. Light age toning at edges. Otherwise, in Near Fine condition with uncreased pages, sharp corners, no writings, scuffs or spots, all staples present and unrusted.

For years there has been talk among book dealers of somebody finally going completely meta and issuing a book catalogue selling nothing but book catalogues. It is an idea long overdue. We here at Bibliographic Bunker Booksellers are offering for sale what just might be one of the crown jewels of such a catalogue: Ed Sanders Catalogue #1. In 1964, Ed Sanders, publisher of Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, needed some loot so he hit up Allen Ginszap for a list of millionaires and decided to get into the bookselling business. Sanders cranked up the trusty mimeo and puked out a series of nine book catalogues under his name and later under the auspices of his bookstore Peace Eye.  

The catalogues are important on several levels. First bibliographically. They allow a glimpse into New American Writing, the Mimeo Revolution, and, specifically, Fuck You Press circa the mid-1960s as well as providing insight into the burgeoning collecting culture surrounding these publications. For example, from Catalogue #1, one can find confirmation that C: A Journal of Poetry was instantaneously collectible and a rarity from the get-go. For those attempting a bibliography of Fuck You Press, the catalogues are essential for beginning the process of unraveling the mysterious world of the press’ limited editions and archival material. You will find here several leads that will prove tantalizing a dogged bibliographer. Did the archive surrounding Roosevelt After Inauguration actually exist? Was it sold? What institution or collector bought it? The same holds for the Boiling Sperm Edition of Fuck You. This brings us to another reason why the catalogues are important. They are creative works of Sanders and Fuck You Press in their own right on the level of Fuck You, a magazine of the arts. Sanders brilliantly satirizes the book collecting community feeding off the counterculture underground as well as the uptight and buttoned-down world of bibliography in general. The entries on Ginsberg’s Pond’s Cold Cream and packets of poets’ public hair should be considered classics in this regard.  

In order to get your motor running and your hand digging for your credit card, we at Bibliographic Bunker Bookseller provide a pdf of Ed Sanders Catalogue #1 for your perusal. We are of the opinion that collectors will never be satisfied with merely pixels on a screen and will only truly be content with paper on a shelf.  

PROVENANCE: The Catalogue comes from the archives (trashcan) of Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of Eros and Fact down through the hands of Jeff Nisbet and onward into the welcoming arms of BigCrux. Thanks to BigCrux for laying at our feet the means for this pdf. For further information on the complete contents of this archive, see Nisbet’s presentation on RealityStudio.  

PRICE: SOLD.

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Ed Sanders Book Catalogue #1

Ed Sanders Book Catalogue #2

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

We here at RealityStudio can keep on giving thanks only to the generosity of others. In this case, it is once again that of Jeff Nisbet, who has been so kind as to provide us with access to his Fuck You/Ralph Ginzburg Archive. Please take the time to look through the pdf presentation Jeff created documenting the archive. One of the tantalizing aspects of that pdf is the single page provided of a longer interview that a journalist conducted with Sanders for inclusion in Ralph Ginzburg’s Fact. Thanks to Jeff, RealityStudio now has a pdf of the entire interview.

It is both interesting and unfortunate that what we have is a draft of the interview transcript. Unfortunate because it is difficult to read with all the edits but on the other hand they provide some insight to what the interviewer thought was important or not or what was too hot to publish. We see here the inner working of how an interview comes together. It is proof, if we need it, that interviews are rarely spontaneous, raw, or off-the-cuff. That said Sanders is pretty candid and upfront about sex, censorship, and drugs at a time when such things could mean jail time. Believe me, there is much talk of jail time. Ed seems rather unconcerned but the interviewer’s fear of repercussions by the government or police is obvious. The hammer would come down in January 1966 as Peace Eye was busted and Sanders faced obscenity charges. This effectively ended Fuck You, a magazine of the arts. As for the nuts and bolts on Fuck You, the interview provides some insight, such as on the number of copies or the price of production, but I was hoping for more. As Sanders seems to agree, there is too much focus by the interviewer on Sanders’ family. The interview seems somewhat unfocused for my tastes but feel free to judge for yourself. I am unaware of whether this interview or an article based on it appeared in the pages of a Ginzburg publication. I dimly recall that it did but I have yet to locate it. If anybody out there has a copy of Fact, Eros or Avant Garde with something on Sanders please send it along in the spirit of giving.

The interview reminded me of the time I tried to get Sanders to help me out with some Fuck You related projects. Here is the opening letter I drafted to Sanders:

Dear Ed:

I hope this letter finds you well. My name is Jed Birmingham. I am a contributing editor to RealityStudio.org, a website dedicated to William Burroughs, and to Mimeo Mimeo, a journal investigating all aspects of the Mimeo Revolution.

I was hoping to meet you at the show at the Arm, but was unable to attend. Dan Morris suggested that I write you about some projects I have been working on and that I hope will get your support.

On RealityStudio, I have written a few pieces on various aspects of Fuck You Press and Fuck You, a magazine of the arts. I enclose those pieces. The growing Fuck You Archive is one of my favorite sections of RealityStudio, and it is here that my project lies.

I hope to compile an annotated / illustrated bibliography of Fuck You Press. What I envision would be along the lines of Alastair Johnston’s trilogy of bibliographies (on White Rabbit, Auerhahn, and Zephryus Image) or the Something Else bibliography. I want to create a complete bibliography that also presents a narrative history of the Press and its publication. I would like to cover everything from detail entries on each publication, to a section on the mimeographs or presses used, to Peace Bookshop’s role in the Press, etc. Completeness if possible would be key. I would detail all the books and magazines, but I also want to list the handbills, one-offs, business cards, and other ephemera. I enclose some notes I have taken that would serve as the basis for future entries.

Does such a bibliography interest you in any way? In the future I hope to do archival research through letters and manuscripts in order to tell the story of the Press. I would also like to talk to you about gathering a complete list of Fuck You publications and, if possible, sit down and discuss them with you.  

Do you know of any bibliographers who have started (or completed) a similar project? I know you are a historian yourself, have you worked on such a project yourself? Dan Morris mentioned to me that you would be interested in an interview with Mimeo Mimeo. Maybe that is the way to start.

I will end here as I do not want to burden you with a long letter. The attachments are long enough. Please contact me when you can about your feelings regarding a bibliographic project of this type. I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely 
Jed Birmingham

As I said the letter was a draft, which I never sent, because in fact I was able to attend the show at The Arm and talk to Sanders. He arrived hours early as did I and it was the perfect opportunity to talk to him. Turns out the garage where he stored his archive was leaking after a storm so he was pretty concerned about that, but in any case we got to talk a bit and he made clear that all my questions would be answered by his upcoming book on Fuck You that he was then working on. Well, I had to wait awhile but the book finally came out and much to my disappointment it did not include a full bibliography of the Press. As far as I know the archive on RealityStudio is the closest to a definitive bibliography that exists, but as I am well aware this archive is more fanzine in nature than scholarly journal. Hopefully it can provide the foundations to a thorough accounting with Sanders’ participation.  

As for the interview, my memory is a little hazy but I think that after our talk Sanders agreed to consider my questions for Mimeo Mimeo. I promptly emailed them to him but never heard anything back. For anybody interested here are the questions I sent.  

As a mimeographer did you have an aesthetics of printing? How would you describe your style? Who are your influences or idols as a printer?

In your experience, what are the primary benefits and limitations of the mimeograph?

Your glyph work in Fuck You, a magazine of the arts and elsewhere is some of the finest artwork in the mimeo medium. Who did you consider to be particularly gifted as a mimeographer? 

In the Glyph show at The Arm, one glyph sequence charted the interrelationship between underground magazines, film, newspapers, and radical politics? What is the role of Do-It-Yourself publishing today?

You are a historian in an Olsonian sense and an investigative reporter. What do you think of the decline of the newspaper as a source of information and investigative reporting?

What is your personal favorite item that you published be it magazine, book, or piece of ephemera?

With Fuck You Press, was there a poet, writer or book that you really wanted to publish but never did? Do you have any regrets of omission?

Do you or would you own a Kindle? What do you think of the predictions of the death of the book?

You still have your mimeograph machine in Woodstock. What would you print on it now if you had the inclination?

What use do ancient writing technologies like glyphs and hieroglyphics have for us in the 21st Century?

Who influenced your thoughts on glyphs and hieroglyphics? Olson, Pound, someone else? What did you take from them?

Did you have any discussions with William Burroughs about glyphs or hieroglyphics? For example, he published a poem with hieroglyphics in C: A Journal of Poetry. He studied Mayan codices much of his adult life.

You owned and operated Peace Eye on the Lower East Side. What do you see as the role of the bookstore in society? What are your thoughts on the decline of the independent brick and mortar store?

You are one of the foremost practitioners of poetry as performance. Who do you feel has been particularly successful in this area? What was the greatest reading you ever witnessed?

No questions about Sanders’ mother and father so I had that going for me but I guess it was not enough to capture Sanders’ attention. Maybe all this Sandersiana will capture yours.

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Ralph Ginzburg, Interview with Ed Sanders for Fact

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#12 Roosevelt After Inauguration (Fuck You Press 1964). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

As a Burroughs collector, I am envious of those who collect Bukowski. Back when I was working at Second Story Books, a beautiful copy of the Loujon Press It Catches My Heart in Its Hands came into the shop. The minute I saw it I felt jealousy rushing over me, like a shot of rotgut burning down my throat. Here is a fine press effort from one of the giants of the Mimeo Revolution. Jon Edgar Webb’s Loujon Press was and is famous for its over-the-top publications and for the arduous and meticulous manual labor that went into producing them. Facts which Webb made sure his patrons and readers were well aware of. It Catches features a beautifully illustrated cork cover, colored paper with deckled edges, and exquisite letterpress work. As a bonus each copy was signed by Bukowski in silver ink. This is persistence, dedication, and obsession in publishing. It also does not hurt that these poems represent some of the finest Bukowski ever wrote. Why is there nothing like this in the Burroughs bibliography? You can see where my envy comes from.

Sure, Burroughs was in The Outsider, which make no mistake is a beautifully constructed mag, but It Catches, along with Crucifix in a Deathhand, are on another level. Few people know that Burroughs almost got there himself. The first issue of The Outsider included an excerpt from The Soft Machine. In conjunction with his submission for issue one, Burroughs also sent Webb a packet of cut-up material from himself and other authors experimenting with the technique, namely Sinclair Beiles and Harold Norse. There was correspondence back and forth about a cut-up issue of the magazine, which never occurred although Burroughs appeared in later issues. Again we come to What Ifs? What if Webb published a cut-up anthology with all the pomp and circumstance of Bukowski’s It Catches or Crucifix? Such an effort would put later fine press publications involving Burroughs, like The Cat Inside, to shame.

Of course, that What If never was, but at Second Story Books, It Catches was within my grasp and I reached deep into my wallet in order to grab it. Even with a substantial discount, the book was about the same as one of my paychecks if not part of a second. My marriage was falling apart at the time and there was a mortgage to pay, but I could not resist getting in on the Bukowski action. There are a lot of proverbial camels, straws and backs around this period and it is difficult if not impossible to focus on just one but hanging out with Buk did not help things. Bros not hos will not get you anywhere. For some perspective, this was also a time in which I was forced to put my run of Fuck You, a magazine of the arts up on ebay to make some quick cash. This was the equivalent of selling an internal organ. I sabotaged it by pricing the set rather high and luckily nobody bid on it. A few weeks after the posting, I received an anonymous email expressing how happy he/she was for my sake that the magazine went unclaimed. My financial prospects were somewhat dire and buying Buk threatened to put me, not on skid row, but in default on my mortgage. In buying It Catches, I literally did not get paid, which was not an uncommon situation at the time. I spent more on books than I earned in selling them. Everything went back into the coffers of Second Story Books. Completely irresponsible, I know, but Bukowski’s bibliography from the 1960s will do that to you. It encourages you to make bad decisions. Looking at It Catches now and reading the poems in that context, I can honestly say I have few regrets.

If you are a collector of the Mimeo Revolution like I am, please forget about focusing on the A items and the C items. It is all about the B-list: Burroughs, Bukowski, Berrigan, Blazek and Brainard. That is everything you need to know and everyone you need to buy. Out of that list Bukowski stands out until Black Sparrow took over his bibliography. I have stated my case on that matter in the Bunker and it does not need repeating in detail here, but for me all those mimeo and little mags before John Martin took over the show are so seductive. The book that stands out is The Genius of the Crowd published by 7 Flowers Press in 1966 on a letterpress by d.a. levy and Jim Lowell of Asphodel Bookshop, with prints by Paula Marie Savarino, in small run of 103 copies. It is crude to say the least and some of the pages are actually trimmed envelopes. A form of mail art perhaps. This type of DIY publishing is as fine an example of printing as anything Arion Press churns out. It is quite simply sublime. In the raid on Lowell’s bookshop, many of the copies were seized for obscenity and it is thought that around 40 copies have survived, many of those in institutional holdings. It has become a true stopper for Bukowski collectors. In Al Fogel’s list of Bukowski rarities, The Genius may well stand along as the Holy Grail. Ken Lopez recently had a dampstained copy for $8500.

Despite my love for Jeff Nuttall, I have to grudgingly admit that levy, a suicide at age 24, was the greatest mimeographer of all-time. He was not a draftsman, but an experimental artist, a master of the medium, much like Johnny Thunders is the god of punk guitar. Sloppy, uneven, a manipulation of slurs and blurs, levy’s Scarab Poems and “AGAIn? Yur primer cord is showing” with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading are as radical as the artwork of the Abstract Expressionists. Karl Young argues levy’s case best:

Taking a cue from blurs and set-off, levy began overprinting texts, sometimes for visual effects alone, sometimes as a technique to obscure some words while leaving others visible, creating a new text out of an old. A number of other mimeographers had reversed stencils, printing texts backwards. This was invariably done to produce results that were merely cute. levy worked reversed stencils in conjunction with other print runs to produce meaningful interactions of directions. His most resourceful use of mimeography came from over-inking stencils. Slight overinks were one of the perennial annoyances for veteran mimeographers. In a number of late works levy achieved a surprising range of text alteration and abstract graphics through various degrees of over-inking and cylinder impression. The initial results of these prints were often single sheets which he then had reprinted offset so as not to disturb the imbalance he had set up. In this process, he had completely jumped over the standard limitations of mimeo, turning it from one of the most tediously restricted forms of letter reproduction into the tool for one of the most dramatic forms of visual poetry of the era.

Another What If — a dream work for me, and one that would have have been at the top of my list of Burroughs collectibles — would have been a combination of levy’s most experimental mimeography and Burroughs’ most radical cut-ups with juxtapositions of text and image, as distributed by levy and Lowell. As I wrote about on the Bunker, Burroughs was on levy’s radar, but it was not mutual. Burroughs mingled in more established circles within the anti-establishment.

The most levy-ish publication, think Marrahwannah Quarterly, of Burroughs’ bibliography is the Fuck You Roosevelt After Inauguration. Although printed mimeo not letterpress, it has the look and feel of The Genius of the Crowd. Or more accurately, it is the closest Burroughs ever got to being published in such a manner. If levy was the greatest mimeographer, Ed Sanders ranks as one of the finest, most successful, and most influential mimeo publishers. I am less impressed with his glyph work than his ideal merging of context and content in his publications. Sanders was as much a revolutionary printer as Benjamin Franklin. In Sanders’ hands, the mimeograph serves as a weapon in the total assault on the culture along with underground bookshops, rock music, marijuana, fucking in the streets, and experimental film. All of which Sanders had his hand in. The Marijuana Newsletter deserves a mention here and could easily have made my list as it combines the best elements of Fuck You Press with Burroughs’ interest and involvement in alternative news outlets. I could be argued that by picking Roosevelt instead, I went with the more traditional and easy choice. Yet there is a lot going on in that seemingly simple publication; as I wrote on the Bunker, Roosevelt was a fuck you to mainstream publishing, City Lights, and the United States government.

I received my copy of Roosevelt as a Christmas gift from my mother years ago. She had no idea what it was and bought it on James Musser’s (Skyline Books) suggestion. When I opened it on a bright sunny day in Florida, my mother was horrified. She held it between her fingers like a used condom (which reminds me of levy’s Cleveland Prints, one of his highspots). “I paid for this? What the hell is this; this is what you wanted?” Oh, hell yeah! And I still do. In the realm of mimeo, where the down and dirty is heavenly, this is as angelic a publication as you are going to find. I find it quite simply beautiful and beautifully simple. “Glories stream from the underground below/Heavenly hosts sing Hallelujah.”