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Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975
Taking its collective name from the wartime "underground press" of Europe's anti-Nazi resistance, the publications examined here were all members of the Underground Press Syndicate (later renamed the Alternative Press Syndicate), founded in 1967 so that member papers could freely share and reprint material. This utopian model resulted in an explosion of alternative publications worldwide as every small start-up had access to the work of soon-to-be famous writers, journalists, artists, and graphic designers. Among the notable figures whose work has appeared in these pages are Hunter S. Thompson, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ken Kesey, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman—to name only a few. The underground press documented everything from politics and art to film and fashion. Among the publications featured here are The Los Angeles Free Press (persecuted by the Nixon-era FBI for its antiwar views), The East Village Other (the first to adopt a psychedelic layout), Interview (founded by Andy Warhol and the first to feature homoerotic imagery), The Chicago Seed, Oracle, and The Berkeley Barb (famous for one cover showing a young man with a chain around his mind). The ideas unleashed in these now vintage publications continue to reverberate through society and influence public discourse and graphic design in the form of today's 'zines and online blogs.
- GenresArtCounter Culture
264 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 25, 2016
This book offers vivid full-colour reproductions of pages from underground newspapers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Underground Press Syndicate was a network of alternative newspapers from the United States and Western Europe that agreed to let each other republish material without payment or even acknowledgment, making the counterculture very international. The author Jean-François Bizot founded Actuel, a legendary French newspaper that was part of the UPS, and he was able to draw on his archives to bring readers so much Sixties material that has otherwise been lost.
The book starts with a foreword by Barry Miles, one of the founders of London's alternative paper IT, who sketches how the alternative press all came together. He notes his debt to John Wilcock, founder of the New York weekly Village Voice in the mid-1950s and essentially the father of the underground press, as Miles and company were emulating his example. The reproductions then follow, which are grouped under various themes such as drugs, women's rights, opposition to the Vietnam war, and sexual liberation. One final group of reproductions, rather poignant, is drawn from papers of the mid-to-late 1970s and shows how the alternative press passed from the hippies to a new generation now interested in glam and punk. Bizot closes the book with brief comments for each reproduction, and gives a chronology of the underground press during this time.
The material reproduced here varies wildly. Sometimes the page is formatted like a ordinary, respectable newspaper of the time except that the author advocates for counterculture ideas. At other times, the page is such an explosion of colour that the actual article text is hard to make out. There are a lot of comics, from the grotesqueries of Robert Crumb to psychedelia. There is also a lot of (tasteful) nudity and some graphic images of war. If you want a general idea of what you’ll find here, you can have a look at the digitized archives for IT (at the newspaper's own website) or OZ London (hosted by the University of Wollongong, Australia), but Bizot's compilation includes a lot of smaller newspapers from Detroit to New Orleans and Amsterdam that I probably would have never discovered anywhere else.
Readers should be aware that this is essentially a coffee-table book with a limited amount of text. If you want the context for all these images, the stories of how these newspapers came to be and what impact they had, then I'd recommend reading the autobiographies of underground press luminaries like John Wilcock, Jim Haynes, Richard Neville, or Barry Miles. All in all, for this reader who knows the context (because I have read exhaustively about the Sixties counterculture, mainly its London scene), I found Bizot's collection to be very enjoyable. The artistic talent that is sometimes on display is very moving, and readers today will be impressed that such technical ingenuity was pulled off in an era before computing.
This book exists in several versions. It was originally published in French as Free Press: La contre-culture vue par la Presse Underground. Once it was translated into English in 2006, it was published as 200 Trips from the Counterculture in the UK and Free Press in North America. I read the US edition (published by Universe Publishing), and I found the presentation quite enjoyable. Some have quibbled about the image quality, but the reproductions look fine to me.
The book starts with a foreword by Barry Miles, one of the founders of London's alternative paper IT, who sketches how the alternative press all came together. He notes his debt to John Wilcock, founder of the New York weekly Village Voice in the mid-1950s and essentially the father of the underground press, as Miles and company were emulating his example. The reproductions then follow, which are grouped under various themes such as drugs, women's rights, opposition to the Vietnam war, and sexual liberation. One final group of reproductions, rather poignant, is drawn from papers of the mid-to-late 1970s and shows how the alternative press passed from the hippies to a new generation now interested in glam and punk. Bizot closes the book with brief comments for each reproduction, and gives a chronology of the underground press during this time.
The material reproduced here varies wildly. Sometimes the page is formatted like a ordinary, respectable newspaper of the time except that the author advocates for counterculture ideas. At other times, the page is such an explosion of colour that the actual article text is hard to make out. There are a lot of comics, from the grotesqueries of Robert Crumb to psychedelia. There is also a lot of (tasteful) nudity and some graphic images of war. If you want a general idea of what you’ll find here, you can have a look at the digitized archives for IT (at the newspaper's own website) or OZ London (hosted by the University of Wollongong, Australia), but Bizot's compilation includes a lot of smaller newspapers from Detroit to New Orleans and Amsterdam that I probably would have never discovered anywhere else.
Readers should be aware that this is essentially a coffee-table book with a limited amount of text. If you want the context for all these images, the stories of how these newspapers came to be and what impact they had, then I'd recommend reading the autobiographies of underground press luminaries like John Wilcock, Jim Haynes, Richard Neville, or Barry Miles. All in all, for this reader who knows the context (because I have read exhaustively about the Sixties counterculture, mainly its London scene), I found Bizot's collection to be very enjoyable. The artistic talent that is sometimes on display is very moving, and readers today will be impressed that such technical ingenuity was pulled off in an era before computing.
This book exists in several versions. It was originally published in French as Free Press: La contre-culture vue par la Presse Underground. Once it was translated into English in 2006, it was published as 200 Trips from the Counterculture in the UK and Free Press in North America. I read the US edition (published by Universe Publishing), and I found the presentation quite enjoyable. Some have quibbled about the image quality, but the reproductions look fine to me.
February 21, 2013
A gorgeous way to read the highlights from the underground press. Probably the ideal format for this collection is an oversized tablet with linked annotations for every image in the book, each of which could be spun off into a contextual essay or book of its own. Bizot's notes at the end do a pretty good job. It'd be nice if there were more looks at the insides of some of these publications instead of just covers. Really, each publication represented deserves a treatment this nice.
December 5, 2007
Can you help out a young dude with no context? This book is rad, but i wish there was more critical text, or more readable excerpts from the original publications. I understand this is presented as a visual best-of, but I want to know more. How did the underground press relate to slightly more the mainstream weirdos at Esquire and Evergreen press? Thurston Moore's blurb had me wanting more.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews