Underground Press Digest was an obvious, although peculiar, idea. It featured “condensed” articles from the then active underground press: a sort of countercultural Reader’s Digest for the busy young radical. It was published by Robert W. Farrell, who had published comic books in the ’50s (including Captain Flight, Strange Fantasy, and Wonder Boy). By the […]

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True Weird was an exuberantly trashy magazine that offered articles on historical oddities and mysteries. It lasted three issues: November 1955, February 1956, and May 1956. Among the topics were the Count of Saint-Germain, zombies, werewolves, Nostradamus, Rasputin, haunted houses, the Bell Witch, and Patience Worth. Most of the material had been rehashed many times […]

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The Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom was edited and published by George Van Tassel, one of the livelier contactees of the 1950s. He and his wife Eva settled in Yucca Valley, near a large boulder called Giant Rock; there they held meetings for the Ministry of Universal Wisdom (originally the Brotherhood of Cosmic […]

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Roger Price led a curious career in the ’50s and ’60s. He contributed humor pieces to such magazines as Playboy and Mad, and put out several books of Droodles, simple sketches with droll titles. In 1958, he and Leonard Stern invented Mad Libs (actually a twist on such old amusements as Peter Coddle or Dr. […]

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Fillers was a small (3 1/2″ x 5″) magazine, edited by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. It had a cover story, usually of prurient interest, and pages of filler: jokes, quotations, brief articles on current events. Most of the fillers reflected Haldeman-Julius’s own brands of atheism and socialism. Issues of Fillers were also Little Blue Books, and were […]

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I recently picked up a packet of bawdy ephemera in an antique store: flyers, pamphlets, booklets, and sheets of sexual and scatological jokes and verses, all apparently from the 1930s. Eleven of them were published by the Swan Publishing Co., in Elizabeth City, N. C. An internet search turned up nothing about it. However, one […]

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The Hollow Hassle was a newsletter devoted to the idea that the earth is hollow, published by Mary J. Martin in the 1970s and ’80s. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I note that a collection has been published. There weren’t many hollow earth newsletters; it’s a fascinating glimpse of a curious subculture. […]

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At one time, many people were musically literate, and music was printed on calling cards. These two examples are 1 1/2 by 2 3/4 inches, printed in black, and colored by hand. People had better eyesight then too, I suppose. The music on the second one is rather badly printed; maybe it was intended simply […]

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The success of Fate, started in 1948 by Ray Palmer and Curtis Fuller, inspired many imitations. Among the trashiest was Beyond, which put out its first issue in September 1968, published by Bernard S. Adelman and edited by Keith Ayling. It began as a digest, changing to a larger format in September 1969. I don’t […]

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Happy New Year!  I’ll get started with a few pages from Illustrations and Designs for General Use, published by Speed-O-Print in 1944.  It’s a box containing a hundred sheets of artwork, to be traced for stencil duplication.  There are many graphic delights on those pages; here are three examples.  As always, please click to enlarge. […]

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