The Little Magazine in America, ca. 1950s–1980s: A Collection from the Golden Age of the Small Press Mimeo Revolution
This collection documents, with great breadth and depth, the intellectual, spiritual, and material diversity of poet-driven publishing in the US and, to a lesser extent, Canada and the UK from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. The collection has emerged in tandem with our ongoing projects to chronicle and archive the proliferation of avant-garde underground small press publications, including the acclaimed New York Public Library exhibition and book A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, curated and written by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips, as well as our new expanded resource website, From a Secret Location, launched in January 2017 by Granary Books.
The collection includes a strong representation of seminal works from various movements and groupings such as the New York School, British Poetry Revival, Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Ethnopoetics, Black Arts, Venice West, Meat poets, Wichita Vortex, and Language poets. Concrete and visual poetry is also well represented. Overall, it comprises more than 500 separate titles and more than 4,200 items. More than half of the 500 titles are in complete or all-but-complete runs. The magazines are largely drawn from the private libraries and collections of a wide range of poets, editors, and publishers.
The collection presents a remarkable opportunity for scholarly investigation into a range of disciplines, including: poetry and poetics, small presses, poet and publishing communities, print and design history, and counterculture studies.
The collection is sold.