Sudbury, MA: Water Row Press, 2000. First Edition. Hand-sewn Wrappers. Signed by Author. An autobiographical prose piece by the wife of Beat poet Ray Bremser. Sex, Drugs, and the Beat Generation all converge in Greenwich Village in New York City, 1960. 8 pages, + foldout 4-page poem. Also includes an illustration of a vintage couple. One of 150 numbered copies signed by the author, Bonnie Frazer (aka Bonnie Bremser) (total..... More
[Item #1031]
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1976. First Printing. Softcover. A compendium of excerpts from speeches, press conferences, etc. by California Governor Edmond G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr. from early in his first term. Published by City Lights Books, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's iconic imprint which produced Allen Ginsberg's Howl & so many other Beat Generation classics. Now serving again, Brown was a most iconoclastic political & cultural figure during his first tenure..... More
[Item #2077]
New York: Blast Books, Inc., 1991. First Edition. Paperback. An anthology of writings on drug experiences, edited by John Strausbaugh and Donald Blaise. Foreword by William S. Burroughs. Other contributors include Antonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Huncke, Aldous Huxley & many others. A rare and most interesting item, issued only in softcover. Near Fine. More
[Item #1067]
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1963 (2016). First Trade Softcover Edition Thus. Softcover. "Poet Alan Bernheimer provides a long overdue English translation of this French literary classic--"Lost Profiles" is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by the co-founder of the Surrealist Movement. Opening with a reminiscence of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s and its transformation into the beginnings of surrealism, "Lost Profiles" then..... More
[Item #2795]
New York, NY: Criterion Books, 1956. First Edition. Hardcover. Jean Cocteau was the celebrated poet, playwright, and filmmaker who, among myriad other accomplishments, succeeded in achieving something that no establishment-challenging poet before him ever had: he was (in his lifetime) accepted into the French Academy. Poet Allen Ginsberg consistently recommended "Orpheus" and "Blood of the Poet" to his classes while teaching at Naropa. An absolutely integral figure in French literature..... More
[Item #2662]
Ann Arbor, MI: Third Mind Books, 20185. First Edition. Hardcover. Signed, Lettered, Limited (1/26) "The seismic cultural impact of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs was followed by a series of aftershocks. 'Starting from San Francisco' measures a vital instance of this natural process, the circle of aspiring poets around poet and publisher Thomas Rain Crowe and the resurrected Beatitude magazine in the 1970s who used a small-press explosion to sustain and..... More
[Item #3075]
Coventry, England: Beat Scene Press, 2019. Limited First Edition Thus. Stapled Wrappers. "This essay first appeared in Rolling Stone magazine back in 1974. Michael McClure had earlier connections with Bob Dylan, meeting him in San Francisco in 1965 when he was present at a photo shoot around Dylan at the City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. That day young photographer Larry Keenan captured McClure, Dylan, Robbie Robertson and Allen..... More
[Item #3298]
Philadelphia & New York, NY: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1979. First American Edition. Hardcover. "This book for the first time answers in a systematic way the often-asked question, What was Bloomsbury? It was not, Edel finds, altogether the parcel of snobs, egotists, eccentrics, and elitists of the common legend. The "Bloomsberries" struck out for sexual freedom, they questioned the "received ideas" of the Victorians, they helped renovate writing and painting in..... More
[Item #3188]
New York, NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991. First Edition. Hardcover. Signed to Charles Plymell by Charles Henri Ford, & with additional related ephemera. "In the 1940s, as the world stood divided by war, View magazine, together with the talents of the European and American artistic communities, helped define the avant-garde movement in this country and established New York as a world art center."(from front flap) The first anthology of the..... More
[Item #1791]
n/p (distributed by City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA: Beach Books, Texts & Documents, 1968. First Printing. Stapled Wrappers. Published the year after T.V. Baby Poems (item #1809), this is a facsimile of Allen Ginsberg's original 1961 hand-typed manuscript, with subsequent hand-written corrections & notations, of the first & longest poem in that previous volume, where it is titled "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Death Chamber." It is..... More
[Item #1810]
San Francisco, CA: Anonym Press, 1972. First Printing. Softcover. As stated in the introduction by editor Mark Robison, this is "...a discussion of modern poetry between Allen Ginsberg, Michael Aldrich, Edward Kissam, and Nancy Blecker at Ginsberg's farm in Cherry Valley, New York on November 26, 1968...Ginsberg depicts with minute detail how he implements what could be called a marked vocalization of mind thought and how the actual physical circumstance..... More
[Item #1814]
San Bernardino, CA: Beatdom Books, 2014. First Printing. Softcover. '72 through '97, Letters & Recollections. "Don't Hesitate is a masterpiece of candor. It is beautifully written & designed, making it a pleasure to read and re-read. One would like to pigeon-hole the book and say that it is a collection of poems; a collection of letters; a memoir; a love story; a character study; a coming of age story; a...... More
[Item #2015]
West Glover, VT: Something Else Press, 1973. First Edition. Soft Cover. Signed by co-author William S. Burroughs. A classic work that explains & applies the cut-up writing technique by its co-inventor, Brion Gysin. Also includes texts by William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville. Edited by Jan Herman. Advance Review Copy of the first softcover edition, limited to 1000 copies, with publisher's review card laid in. Signed by William S. Burroughs..... More
[Item #1175]
New York, NY: Hanuman Books, 1986. First Edition. Softcover in Stiff Wrappers. Signed by Taylor Mead, Legendary Underground Actor & New Yorker. This publication from legendary Lower East Sider Taylor Mead is a centerpiece rarity for any collector interested in New York City during the 1950s & 1960s. Mead, who became infamous for his roles in Andy Warhol's avant-garde films, was also in San Francisco during the mid-1950s. He experienced..... More
[Item #2987]
New Haven, CT & Athens, Greece: Pharos/Athens, 1990. Limited First Edition. Stapled Wrappers. "(Henry Miller) went to Greece at a time when his creative and personal life was at its lowest point, and when the realities of Nazism and the horrors of war refuted with finality the established values of high-culture Europe which he himself had already questioned. Greece- and certainly (George) Katsimbalis, (George) Seferis and their circle- awakened a...... More
[Item #3256]
Coventry, England: The Beat Scene Press, 2007. First Printing. Stapled Wrappers. Signed by Ben Pleasants. Signed, numbered, Limited Edition (#76/125). In this undiscovered gem from Kevin Ring's Beat Scene Press, Los Angeles Poet, playwright, & journalist Ben Pleasants delivers an article on the hilarious-yet-inconceivable infighting that ran rampant in the private lives of myriad influential American authors in and around San Francisco in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Rexroth..... More
[Item #2652]
San Francisco, CA: Canessa Gallery, 1975. First Printing. Single Sheet. A broadside (8&1/2"x22") with a prose essay-reminiscence about the North Beach area of San Francisco. Published anonymously & with no reference to place, publisher, date, etc. According to John Sherlock's Bibliography of Works By and About Gary Snyder (Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, 2010), the author is Snyder, the great primary poet of the Beat Generation & beyond. It was..... More
[Item #2351]
California, PA: Arthur & Glee Knight, 1972. First Printing. Stapled Wrappers. "This issue is dedicated to Henry Miller, a great artist, on his 81st birthday." (from contents-copyright page) Thus do the late Arthur (1937-2012) & Glee (a/k/a Kit?) Knight state the main theme of this vintage issue of their acclaimed, pioneering series of Beat-related publications under the umbrella title of "The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual." Henry Miller, the great..... More
[Item #3225]
New York, NY: Venture Publications, Inc., 1960. First Printing. Softcover. Signed by poet Diane Wakoski at her contribution. This number of the venerable literary journal chiefly edited by Joseph J. Friedman features the final interview with the legendary French Existentialist writer-philosopher Albert Camus. As noted, "The sixteen questions comprising the interview were sent to Camus in August 1959. Camus' reply, dated December 20, 1959, was received here on December 26..... More
[Item #3241]