Jack Spicer’s J ran for eight issues: Nos. 1–5 were edited by Spicer in North Beach where contributions were left in a box marked “J” in The Place, a bar on Grant Avenue in San Francisco; Nos. 6 and 7 (an Apparition of the late J) were edited by George Stanley in San Francisco and New York City respectively while no. 8 was edited by Harold Dull in Rome. Spicer believed that poetry was for poets and the magazine had a small circulation but cast a long shadow.
While working at the Lewis Meyer bookstore on 37th and Peoria in 1959, Ron Padgett had an idea. Taken with the work of the era’s literary giants and New York-based “little mags” like the Evergreen Review, Padgett, barely 17 and still a junior at Central High School, decided that he would start his own avant-garde lit journal. He and his best friend Dick Gallup would be co-editors…
Bill McArthur studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, then took a degree in Fine Art at Edinburgh University. At Edinburgh he became known as an illustrator and cartoonist in the student press, and editor of the student magazines Gambit and Cleft.
In the Fall of 1961, Jon and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb published the first issue of their avant-garde poetry and prose magazine, The Outsider. Hand-set and letterpress printed, the journal straddled the line between traditional books and modern works of art, and the journal made an outsized impact on the literary world, shining a light on the talents of Beat Generation, Black Mountain and other avant-garde and counterculture poets, writers, and artists of the era…
My Own Mag was produced by Jeff Nuttall, a larger than life figure in the history of the British counterculture, who edited it while working as a secondary school art teacher. Many prominent underground, Beat and related writers of a usually modest reputation, but not always, contributed to it. These included Anselm Hollo, Alan Brownjohn, Charles Plymell, Jim Haynes, William Wantling, Douglas Blazek, Bill Butler, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Criton Tomazos, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg.