CONTACT 1-6

New York: Red Room Books, 1972. Stab-stapled quartos all in pictorial card (1-4) or glossy (5-6) wraps with illustrated versos. Mimeographed to rectos only. 29pp; 25pp; 29pp; 28pp; 49pp; 46pp. Good to Very Good (+); all in sound bindings and with at least light soiling and toning but clean within; mild dampstaining to edges of 3 and 5, issue 4 heavily dampstained to rear wrap and decreasingly through last few pages.. Near-complete run (missing issue 7) of the seminal flash-in-the-pan literary journal from Jeff Goldberg and "Bockris-Wylie", the sandwiched identity of Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie. Published all within a period of two months, CONTACT serves as one of the more concentrated and stellar examples of the feverishly immediate and spontaneous production and publication so inherited by and from the "second generation" New York School and Warhol's Factory Scene. As noted in Steve Clay's bibliography From a Secret Location on the Lower East Side, "The attitudes and poses of the cover stars gave the magazine a tinge of rock glory or Rimbaudian flair, most evident in the first three issues, which focus on the work of Goldberg ("A Week in Philadelphia" in all three) and his friends Ken Bluford and Marty Watt, Philadelphians all.". From there the magazine shifted focus to individual external poets, with pieces from a widening cast profiling poets Larry Fagin (4), Anne Waldman (5), and Tom Pickard (6). Contributors across this second-half of the journal's span include Ted Berrigan (4, 5), John Wieners (4-6), Anne Waldman (4-6), Ron Padgett (4), Joe Brainard (5), Otis Brown (4-6), Robert Bly (6), and more. Scarce on market, especially in so full of a run.


Although not marked physically to any of the copies, all issues from the collection of musician and poet Tom Verlaine. When asked if he remembered Verlaine acquiring them from him, editor Jeff Goldberg related to this book dealer: "I didn't give them to him, nor do I think that Bockris or Wylie did. He must have forked over the 50 cents per issue as they rolled out. Both the St. Marks and the Phoenix bookstores carried it.