Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Several months ago I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing which operates out of London. Black Dog prints books on a variety of topics such as photography, architecture, film and design. They did a book on Independent record shops…
Tag: Little Magazine
Yay!: A Moving Times Supplement (An In-Depth Examination of My Own Mag)
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In 1963, the Times Literary Supplement announced the arrival of Dead Fingers Talk with a cry of Ugh! Later that year, Burroughs received the first issue of My Own Mag and responded with a resounding, Yes! In Jeff Nuttall, Burroughs found a fellow…
New Departures
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Like many bookish teenagers, I was an editor of my high school literary magazine. It was called Des Pensees and as the name suggests it was a formal, rather stuffy affair. A poem had to look and to act like a poem. Established…
C Press Archive
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting For more information about C Press, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Time, Ted Berrigan, and Don’t Ever Get Famous. Also see the C Press Index. Andy Warhol provided the cover for issue four of C: A Journal of the Arts. Edwin Denby and…
Eureka: Locus Solus V
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting While attending a cigar event, a map collector friend informed me that the Walters Museum houses quite an extensive collection of manuscript material. One of the most publicized of their holdings is the Archimedes Palimpsest containing seven separate treatises by Archimedes. Despite all…
Interview with Brown Paper’s Daniel Lauffer
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The one-shot little magazine has always been an interest of mine. The average run of a mag is as short as the career of an NFL running back. Lack of time, lack of interest, lack of material but most of all lack of…
Don’t Ever Get Famous
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In the 15 years since I began collecting William Burroughs seriously, I have read a ton of books on Burroughs, post-WWII literature, the book, book collecting, and related topics. I find that five books stand apart in that they completely revolutionized my thinking…
Anthony Linick on Nomad
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting For background, be sure to read Jed Birmingham’s overview of Nomad. What was the literary landscape at the time Nomad 1 came out in the Winter of 1959? Poetry was emerging from a period in which formal and academic values dominated the literary…
Eric Mottram and The Algebra of Need
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In 1992, I attended King’s College in London for two terms as part of a study abroad program. I knew next to nothing about the school, and if I remember correctly, I chose it, because it was located on the Strand and seemed…
Islwyn Watkins Interviewed by David Moore
Recollections of Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, My Own Mag, Writers’ Forum, Group H & STigma in early 1960s London by David Moore DM: Please would you tell us a little about yourself and how you came to meet Jeff Nuttall? IW: I was born and educated in south Wales and, in September 1959, moved to…
Recollections of Jeff Nuttall and the Production of My Own Mag
by Michael Bartholomew I met Jeff Nuttall round about 1960, when I was 18 years old. I lived in north London and was a member of the Barnet branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Jeff was also a member. He was maybe 10 years older than I was. He had a wife and family,…
The My Own Mag Community
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Little magazines are expressions of and monuments to a thriving creative community. Looking through the pages of My Own Mag brings this fact home. The magazine expanded in size and scope from its first four-page issue into a newsletter for an international avant-garde….
The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In late 1963, Jeff Nuttall sent William Burroughs the first issue of My Own Mag. In an editorial note on the cover, Nuttall writes tongue firmly in cheek, My Own Mag “will appear every now and then… will be devoted to creations of…
My Own Mag: A Bibliographic Nightmare
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting My Own Mag is a bibliographic nightmare. There is no general consensus on the correct order of the first eight issues of the seventeen issue run. This might be by design. Nuttall, like Ed Sanders, possessed a devilish air and a flair for…
My Own Mag
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In the introduction to the bibliography of his work prepared by Joe Maynard and Barry Miles, William Burroughs spoke about how the “little mags” were a lifeline for him at a time when he had very few hopes for publishing his work. One…
Kulchur 4
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Onward, as Robert Creeley would say. Let’s move to Kulchur 4. What strikes me about this issue is Burroughs and Kerouac’s picture on the cover. Gilbert Sorrentino guest-edited this issue. In his essay in The Little Magazine in America collection, Sorrentino writes, “Marian…
Kulchur 3
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I have not read all twenty issues of Kulchur cover to cover, but of the issues I have sampled, I enjoy Kulchur 3 the most. Issue 3 presents Kulchur at its most Beat. William Burroughs (“In Search of Yage”), Jack Kerouac (“Dave”), Gary…
Kulchur and “The Conspiracy”
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. I always think of these three magazines together. One reason for this is the editorial and creative presence of the then Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The other impetus behind these magazines is Donald Allen’s New American Poetry Anthology or,…
Time
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Recently, I received an email asking me about a copy of Time, a limited edition collage piece published by C Press. According to its copyright page, Time was published in 1965 in 1000 copies. 886 copies comprised the trade edition. These copies were…
David Meltzer Archive: A Partial Index
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting 1. Nov 2, 1963 TLS from Anthony Linick to Dave Meltzer — Letter SIGNED by Linick. Linick along with Donald Factor was editor of NOMAD magazine which ran for 10 issues from the Winter 1959 to Autumn 1962. Nomad was published in London…
David Meltzer and Nomad
Reports from the Bibliographic BunkerJed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting For more on Jed’s mini-archive of Meltzer letters, see David Meltzer Archive: A Partial Index. A small archive of letters to Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press from the likes of Henry Miller and William Burroughs popped up on Abebooks. Many of the letters are…
Fuck You Press Archive
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting It was a good day when I finally got my hands on Fuck You Vol. 5/No. 7. Quite possibly the coolest, hippest magazine of the mimeo revolution (Fuck You epitomized the revolution as demonstrated by naming the Steve Clay book “A Secret Location…
Interview with Lakefront Carol
Owner Selling Burroughs’ Former Cabin “Lakefront Carol” is the current owner of a lakefront bungalow formerly belonging to William S. Burroughs. She and her husband are selling the cabin on ebay (PDF) and are planning on passing it along to a friend if the cabin doesn’t sell by May, 2006. Jed Birmingham had some thoughts…