Archive from “A Secret Location” Small Press / Mimeograph Revolution, 1940s–1970s We are pleased to offer for sale a captivating and important research collection of little magazines and other printed materials that represent, chronicle, and document the proliferation of avant-garde, underground small press publications from the forties to the seventies. The starting point for this collection, “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side,” is the acclaimed New York Public Library exhibition and catalog from 1998, curated by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips, which documented a period of intense innovation and experimentation in American writing and literary publishing by exploring the small press and mimeograph revolutions. The present collection came into being after the owner “became obsessed with the secretive nature of the works contained in the exhibition’s catalog.” Using the book as a guide, he assembled a singular library that contains many of the rare and fragile little magazines featured in the NYPL exhibition while adding important ancillary material, much of it from a West Coast perspective. Left to right: Bill Margolis, Eileen Kaufman, Bob Kaufman, and unidentified man printing the first issue of Beatitude. [Ref SL p. 81]. George Herms letter ca. late 90s relating to collecting and archiving magazines and documents from the period of the Mimeograph Revolution. Small press publications from the forties through the seventies have increasingly captured the interest of scholars, archivists, curators, poets and collectors over the past two decades. They provide bedrock primary source information for research, analysis, and exhibition and reveal little known aspects of recent cultural activity. The Archive from “A Secret Location” was collected by a reclusive New Jersey inventor and offers a rare glimpse into the diversity of poetic doings and material production that is the Small Press Revolution. It provides a rich gathering for framing an understanding of the various drifts, swirls, and eruptions in the poetry and art firmament of the era, including: Beat Generation, Counterculture, New York School, Venice West, San Francisco Renaissance, Wichita Vortex, Black Mountain, Mavericks, Hippies, Diggers, and related iterations that inform, incite, and inspire one another and the culture at large in ways we are only now beginning to fully grasp. The collection includes excellent runs and significant examples of important little mags including: Angel Hair, Beatitude, Big Table, Black Mountain Review, C, Caterpillar, Fuck You, Gnaoua, Grist, The Hasty Papers, Insect Trust Gazette, J, Kulchur, Locus Solus, Matter, Measure, Miscellaneous Man, Merlin, Mother, Now, Open Space, The Outsider, Pacific Nation, Poems from the Floating World, Renaissance, San Francisco Earthquake, Set, Some/thing, Tree, Trobar, Whe're/, and Yugen. Additionally, the collection includes a representative sampling of sixties West Coast counterculture publications, including: The San Francisco Oracle, The Southern California Oracle, Communications Company (the publishing arm of the Diggers); items relating to the explosive San Francisco music scene including a collection of handbills and postcards from Family Dog and others; newspapers and magazines of radical politics such as The Berkeley Barb, Ramparts, The Realist; uncommon pre-zine self-published journals of offbeat commentary such as Horseshit and Jack Green's Newspaper; and a wide assortment of pamphlets, magazines and diverse additional obscure and rarely seen publications from the period. Selected Highlights from the Collection . Books and websites sited: AW = Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s, by Reva Wolf DF = Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, by James Knowlson RS = RealityStudio: A William S. Burroughs Community (realitystudio.org) SC = Semina Culture, by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna SL = A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980: A Sourcebook of Information, by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips . Contour, no. 3. Summer 1948. Christopher Maclaine and Norma Smith, eds. [Collection includes nos. 1–3] Filmmaker, poet and editor Christopher Maclaine, together with Norma Smith, produced four issues of Contour (1947–49). Filmmaker Jordan Belson was the art editor for no. 1. The magazine published such writers as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, Madeline Gleason, Curtis Zahn, James Schevill, Kenneth Patchen, and Denise Levertov. No. 3 included the first publication by photographer Charles Brittin (writing as C. William Brittin) who went on to become an important figure in Los Angeles documenting local Beat culture, Venice Beach, the Civil Rights Movement, antiwar activities and much more. He exhibited at Wallace Berman’s roofless Semina Gallery in 1960. Maclaine published four books of poetry between 1948 and 1960 and made four films between 1953 and 1958. He was a major catalyst in the early Beat days of San Francisco; according to J.J. Murphy in Film Culture, he was known as “the Antonin Artaud of North Beach.” After years of prodigious drug and alcohol use, Maclaine was institutionalized in the late sixties and died in 1975. The Ark, [no. 1]. Spring 1947. The Illiterati, no. 4. Summer 1945. [Sanders Russell, Philip Lamantia, and Robert Stock, Kermit Sheets and Kemper Nomland, eds. eds.] [Collection includes no. 4] [Collection includes sole issue, no. 1] [Ref SL pp. 97, 280] [Ref SL p. 16] The Ark and The Illiterati were West Coast magazines with strong anarchist and pacifist leanings. The editors of The Illiterati met at the CPS (Civilian Public Service) camp in Waldport, OR, where they also encountered several of the contributors to the magazine, including: Alex Comfort, William Everson, and Kenneth Patchen. Kemper Nomland beautifully designed The Illiterati, which was handset in type and printed by the editors and others interned at Waldport. The sole issue of The Ark came shortly after the war and very much in the shadow of the bomb. It was decidedly antiwar and anti-state; contributors included Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Paul Goodman. The Ark was set and printed by hand and features linoleum blocks by Ronald Bladen. Merlin, no. 1. Spring 1952. Alexander Trocchi, ed. [Collection includes vol. 1, nos. 1–3, vol. 2, nos. 1, 3] Alexander Trocchi was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1925. He moved to Paris in 1952 with his wife and children but left them for his nineteen-year-old American girlfriend, Alice Jane Lougee; together they founded Merlin. Contributors to nos. 1–2 include: William Burford, Trocchi, Christopher Logue, Patrick Brangwyn, Alfred Chester, H. Charles Hatcher, James Fidler, Patrick Bowles, Richard Seaver, and A.J. Ayer. Richard Seaver was on a fellowship in Paris where he discovered the work of Samuel Beckett. He published an essay on Beckett in no. 2 and eventually brought Trocchi and Samuel Beckett together; Patrick Bowles would later, in collaboration with Beckett, translate Malloy. Beckett published a section of Watt (which was written in English) in no. 3 and by vol. 2, no. 1, Merlin (with Seaver as advisory editor and director) had contributions from Jean- Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller. Merlin published seven issues and ended in 1954. Trocchi’s illustrious life took him to Venice, CA in 1957. An excerpt from his then unpublished novel Cain’s Book was included by Wallace Berman in Semina no. 2. [Ref DF pp. 335–58; SC p. 289] . The Black Mountain Review, vol. 1, no. 3. Fall 1954. Robert Creeley, ed. [Collection includes complete run, nos. 1– 7] [Ref SL pp. 106–109] “The Black Mountain Review, printed in Palma de Mallorca where Robert Creeley was producing his Divers Press books, developed from the friendship in daily correspondence between Creeley and Black Mountain rector Charles Olson, who thought a quality literary journal might help to increase enrollment. Editorially, Creeley followed advice given to him earlier by Ezra Pound: ‘he suggested I get at least four others, on whom I could depend unequivocally for material, and to make their work the mainstay of the magazine’s form. But then, he said, let the rest of it, roughly half, be as various and hog wild as possible.’” The Black Mountain Review is one of the most focused yet far-reaching and influential literary magazines produced after WWII, not to mention beautifully produced by Mossen Alcover. [Ref SL p. 107] . Mother, no. 4. Feb.–Mar., 1965. David Moberg and Jeff Giles, eds. [Collection includes complete run of printed issues vol. 1, nos. 1–8. 1964–67. Nos. 9–10 were issued as vinyl recordings] Editors for the magazine include David Moberg, Lewis MacAdams, Duncan McNaughton, Peter Schjeldahl, and Jeff Giles. The magazine began in Northfield, MN before moving to Princeton, NJ and then to Buffalo, NY. Artist Michael Steiner created the cover of no. 4; other contributors to the issue include: Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, Tom Veitch, Kenward Elmslie, Peter Schjeldahl, and more. Big Table, vol. 2, no. 5. 1960. Kulchur, no. 2. 1960. Paul Carroll, ed. [Irving Rosenthal edited no. 1] Marc D. Schleifer, ed. [Collection includes complete run, nos. 1–5] [Collection includes complete run, nos. 1–20] [Ref SL p. 45] [Ref SL pp. 84–87] Big Table was launched Spring 1959, following the suppression of the Winter 1958 issue of The Chicago Review. An exposé in the Chicago Daily News revealed editors Irving Rosenthal’s and Paul Carroll’s plans to publish work by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beat writers, and the administration quashed the magazine. Rosenthal and Carroll, along with other Chicago Review editors, resigned and with the suppressed material started Big Table. The first issue contained work by Jack Kerouac, Edward Dahlberg, and Burroughs, and was summarily impounded by the U.S. Post Office. The lawsuit was unsuccessful and Big Table continued through 1960 and five issues. Rosenthal left the magazine after the first issue and Carroll stayed on for the duration, publishing many of the poets from Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry.