To F*ck is to Love Again

Between 1962 and 1965, Ed Sanders—Beat poet, Fugs band member, and owner of New York’s East Village Peace Eye Bookshop—published 13 issues of the mimeographed journal / art zine called Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts.

Warhol, Burroughs, and Ginsberg were among the many contributors to this gritty Sixties zine…

Join in giving a shout-out to the crew at Boo-Hooray for releasing the above video and the spirited accompanying description (quoted below) exploring the many faces and collaborative forces behind the cult zine.

The run of Fuck You Press publications that blazed through New York City’s underground scene between 1962 and 1965 still resonates with an almost supernatural vibrancy, urgency and what the Greeks coined as enthusiasmos. There were 13 issues of Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, printed from 1962 through 1965. In addition, Sanders published a multitude of mimeographed poetry titles during these years, alongside broadsides, manifestos and handbills.

Fuck You was founded by Ed Sanders—Beat poet, Fugs band member, and proprietor of the East Village underground Peace Eye Bookshop. Ed Sanders’ editorial voice and execution resulted in a poetry ‘zine that was fearless, sexually provocative and experimental.

Contributors included Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg (also of the Fugs), Carol Bergé, John Wieners, Andy Warhol, Ray Bremser, Lenore Kandel, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Julian Beck, Frank O’Hara, Leroi Jones, Diane DiPrima, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Robert Kelly, Judith Malina, Carl Solomon, Gregory Corso, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Gilbert Sorrentino, and many others.
Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts was a mimeographed journal, printed on a Speed-o-Print and later an A.B. Dick stencil duplicator (mimeograph), in an edition size of roughly 500 copies. Printing on a mimeograph was a cumbersome labor: All the gathered texts needed to be transferred to stencils, the illustrations cut meticulously by hand-held metal-tipped styli into the page of text, the sticky, awkwardly shaped stencil then attached to the drum of the mimeograph which supped on ink and spat some back.

If one multiplies the paper sheets needed for an issue of the publication, (36 x 500 = 18,000 sheets), that needed to be collated and stapled to complete one issue, it truly baffles that this was a one-man operation. This ‘zine was dedicated to free expression, defying taboo subjects, celebrating sexual liberation and the use of psychedelics years before the Summer of Love.

Sanders and his collaborators bridged the Beats of the Fifties and the counterculture of the late Sixties, and helped define many of the differences between the two—the latter building on the breakthroughs initiated by the former.
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