Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Each day of the work week I spend roughly four hours commuting. By and large, I sit in the same seat, on the same car, at the same time, with the same people. Monday through Friday. Month after month. For three years now….
Tag: New York
Interview with Tom Veitch on William S. Burroughs
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Let’s start with Literary Days. Can you describe that book? Literary Days is a 25-page 8.5×11 pamphlet edited by Ted Berrigan from two longer works — a novel called WHATS that I wrote in 1963 and a novel called Malgmo’s End that Ted…
The Naked Express: William Burroughs and Tom Veitch
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting It is amazing how a single sheet of paper can capture a special moment in history. My first issue of NOW provides a snapshot into the literary history of San Francisco in the summer of 1963. Similarly my offprint of Tom Veitch’s The…
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…
John Ashbery at the Folger Library
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting On Monday, November 5th, I attended the John Ashbery reading at the Folger Library in Washington DC. I found out about it at the last minute and assumed that it would be sold out (like a Ferlinghetti reading years before) but tickets were…
Interview with Photographer Charles Rotmil
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Since adding the comment feature to RealityStudio, we have gotten a small but very informed response to the Bunker and elsewhere. One of the more active comment threads deals with Kulchur, particularly Kulchur 2. While Kulchur made its name as a little magazine…
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…
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,…
Kulchur
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Kulchur 1 (View complete issue)(Spring 1960)Editor Marc Schleifer; Managing Editors: John Fles, Charles Olson, Leroi Jones, Martin Williams, Donald Phelps. Cover by Stephen Solosy. Selected Contributors: William Burroughs (“The Conspiracy”); Allen Ginsberg (“Paterson”; Diane Di Prima (“Whims”); Charles Olson (“Pieces of Time”; Basil…
Burroughs, Berrigan, and The Ticket That Exploded
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Like Skyline Books, Beat Books and a handful of others, Ken Lopez consistently offers show stopping material. I worked in a used and rare bookstore for a couple years, and few and far between were the days that high quality 20th century literature…
Yugen
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Several years ago, I wrote on the potential joys of collecting Charles Olson. Olson loomed as a literal giant over the small press and little magazine scene from 1950 until his death in 1970. As a result, his work appeared in some of…
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…
Positively Eighth Street
by Bill Reed This is an expanded version of a chapter from Bill Reed’s memoir, Early Plastic. It concerns the Eighth Street Bookshop, an independent Manhattan bookstore that served as a focal point for the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. For more on the bookshop, see Jed Birmingham’s essay Eighth Street Bookshop. For more on Mr….
Locus Solus
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The history and contents of the magazine Locus Solus provide insight into the type of progressive poetry circles and ideas Burroughs started tapping into with his small scale, textual cut-up works of the early 1960s. A testament to refined taste, Locus Solus was…
Kiss and Couch
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Rolling Stone magazine just celebrated its 1000th cover with a tribute to / touching up of the legendary Sgt. Pepper album cover. Reportedly, the new cover cost over $1 million to produce. It is fun and interesting, but I doubt it will reach…
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…
Floating Bear
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Also see Jed Birmingham’s Floating Bear Archive and article on Floating Bear 24. After my deal to obtain Floating Bear #24 fell through a month or so ago, Floating Bears have been much on my mind. I broke down and bought a run…
Floating Bear Archive
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting For more information about Floating Bear, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Floating Bear and Floating Bear 24. You can also download this spreadsheet mapping the recipients to whom copies of Floating Bear were mailed. Floating Bear 1February 1961 Download Floating Bear 2February 1961…
Eighth Street Bookshop
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In the aftermath of my Floating Bear column, RealityStudio informed me that Jan Herman worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop and might have some facts about Corinth Press and the mysterious Bill Wilentz. According to Jan, Eli and Ted ran the bookstore and…
APO-33
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I spent some more time on Dave Moore’s page of Burroughs covers the other night. An interesting piece could be written on the cover art and external packaging of Burroughs’ work over the past five decades similar to the essays that have been…
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…