Ever since its foundation in 1953 by Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights has been a seminal publishing house and a leading independent bookstore. Named after the Chaplin film City Lights, the store started out in San Francisco as the first all-paperback bookstore in the US and its press as the publisher of early works by San Francisco Renaissance poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Ferlinghetti himself. In…
“The first push towards Joglars came in the summer of 1963 at Vancouver in Warren Tallman’s kitchen. Charles Olson was telling a bunch of young poets how we ought to start a magazine to publish poets’ correspondence, specifically that between Charles and Bob Creeley. So Fred Wah, Michael Palmer, and I began discussing a possible three-way editorship. But when we all got home the plan broke in two, Fred starting Sum in New Mexico and Michael and I Joglars…
German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf in 1941. After having studied painting at the University of Arts & Design in Linz, Austria in the 1960s he turned to reproduction techniques and the appropriation of photographic material. Feldmann’s critical attitude to the art world and to notions of originality and unicity have found expression in the many artist’s books, prints, magazines and multiples that he has published…
Bardo Matrix started out as a psychedelic lightshow team in Boulder, Colorado in the second half of the 1960s. Of its original members (John Chick, Craig Love, Dana Young and Greg Sharits) Chick and Young followed the hippie trail to Kathmandu in 1969, where the former started his Spirit Catcher bookstore on Freak Street. It was from that bookstore that Chick continued Bardo Matrix as a printing press for Western travellers and American expats. When…
A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor, subtitled Black Workers Power in Detroit by Michael Hamlin with Michele Gibbs is a personal narrative in which Hamlin candidly talks about the horrors of growing up black in America from a Mississippi sharecropper’s plantation to Korean War soldier, and ultimately truck driver for the Detroit News and his increasing rage at the system. Hamlin, a key organizer of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and a leader of…