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During the fall of 2025, I spent much of my time digging into the Ed Sanders Papers at the Special Collections department of the Harvey S. Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University. My intent was to gain as much insight as possible into the operations of Sanders’ independent publishing venture, “FUCK YOU Press.” For readers unfamiliar with Ed Sanders, he is a poet, musician, artist and activist who—more than any other individual—personifies the American counterculture born of the Beat Generation in the early 1960s which reached its peak in the era of the anti-war/free love/psychedelic hippie movement. The collection of Sanders materials exceeded all of my expectations. My research resulted in the discovery of Sanders-produced magazines, poetry chapbooks, gig fliers and protest handbills from the “Mimeograph Revolution” that I had never seen before. As the dates of the material moved along the timeline of the 60’s, I was also reminded of the rapid descent from the utopian ideals of the “Summer of Love” to the paranoia of the Manson/Nixon years. New media, produced by Sanders and other indie journalists, exposed the diseased, black heart of Amerika. The same grotesque and predatory virus continues to infect this society, and sadly, much of the material from the dark days of the 1970s struck me as more relevant than ever. We are engaged in a race to the cultural, political and intellectual bottom, and now, we are all complicit. We rely on our hand-held oracles, outsourcing our ideas and opinions to technology that is designed to quite literally do nothing but generate conspiracy theories… an infinite series of strings and pushpins, constructed by a sociopath to confirm our darkest fantasies. Coming of age in the era of punk collage and Burroughs-inspired cut-ups, I have always used the non-linear cut-and-paste juxtaposition of visual media and text in my own analog attempts at cultural divination. After reading Ed Sanders manifesto on “Investigative Poetics,” I set about compiling this magazine.
–Rich Dana Obsolete Press
