Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in…
Tag: Small Press
Speed, Apomorphine, Mimeo, and the Cut-Up
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting There are times in your reading life when you dabble in a book, dip into it periodically, put it down, and come back to it. Your experience with the book is leisurely, casual. You are chipping. The book does not have a strong…
The Exterminator
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Published by Auerhahn Press in 1960, The Exterminator is one of the forgotten texts of Burroughs’ bibliography. Roughly 1000 copies were printed in the first edition, and I would gather that few of even the most dedicated Burroughs fans have ever read it….
John Calder and William S. Burroughs
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting Much has been made of the imperiled state of the print publishing industry. Just this weekend I read a review of a large format art book entitled The Last Magazine. Everywhere you look there is an article on the future of the ebook…
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….
Jan Herman and William S. Burroughs
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting It was in 2006 that Jed Birmingham wrote the following text about the relationship between William S. Burroughs and Jan Herman, publisher, writer, artist, and connoisseur of the cut-up. It is with tremendous pleasure that RealityStudio now uses that text as the introduction…
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…
The Edwin Blair Auction of Beat Literature
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The Edwin Blair sale is over and the results highlight issues raised in posts to RealityStudio. Manuscripts, the Olympia Press Naked Lunch, vinyl and even the Olympia Ticket That Exploded are all headline stories in the Burroughs items up for sale. Without a…
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…