Various (Moe, David; Breit, Luke; Cherkovski, Neeli; Winans, A.D. et al.)

Love Lights Vol. 3 No. 44 (1975)

San Francisco, CA: Love Lights, 1975. First Printing. Folded Single Sheets. Offered here is Vol. 3, Issue 44 of David Moe’s Love Lights magazine, of which little is known. The late American post-Beat poet, Andy Clausen (1943-2024), however — who commiserated & toured beside the original giants of the Beat Generation, along with their related colleagues & progeny, since the late 1960s — wrote of Love Lights in his memoir, Beat: The Latter Day of the Beat Generation (TMB Item No. 4290). Of LL, he writes: "In the seventies he [Moe] had a newspaper called Love Lights. He'd sell it in the newspaper coin machines next to the SF Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, Bay Guardian, East Bay Express, Penny Saver, and the omnipresent porno, hot date, newsprint periodicals the Internet has largely replaced. Well, Love Lights always had nudity and sexuality on the cover. Folded in half through the news box window one could see only the nakedness and the Love Lights masthead. In the lower unseen half, maybe a TV set or toaster would cover the genitals. The bottom half informed one—lo and behold—inside it was all boho Bay Area poetry and illustrations. He'd sell maybe four thousand an issue. A lot of paper racks sustained damage." No one knows how many issues of LL were published: one can’t even be entirely sure of David’s claims that there were as many issues printed of LL as the Vol. & Issue count says there are. What is true, however is that this is an exemplary publication of the Second San Francisco Renaissance & probably closer to d.a.levy’s famed Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle & Tibetan Stroboscope than anything in Second San Francisco Renaissance canon. The interior of the magazine, which features exclusively poetry, also reminds one of Harold Norse’s incredible Bastard Angel, with its juxtaposition of several different typefaces alongside each other with collage & other forms of artwork clustered around & beside. Work by Neeli Cherkovski (1945-2024), LL's editor, David Moe (1937-2013), Luke Breit, A.D. Winans (b. 1936) & several others feature in this issue of Love Lights — an increasingly rare production that we at TMB are sure will only grow rarer with time. From the archive of Thomas Rain Crowe, the legendary American poet and co-authorial founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our book, Starting from San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books (Item No. 3071) & the catalog for the Crowe archive (Item No. 1010), which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents, which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site. Tabloid-format paper printed on newsprint: the first-&-only printing of Love Lights Vol. 3, Issue 44 — a long-forgotten San Francisco periodical. In Good-Very Good condition with moderate-to-significant age-toning, bumping, creasing, & some chipping to select locales throughout; slight gouge & loss of paper at leftmost fine-edge of paper when folded (& center-fold when open), otherwise clean. Good-Very Good. [Item #7430]

Price: $100.00