Klacto No. 23 -- Photograph, One Uncollected Poem, Three First Appearance Charles Bukowski Poems (1967)

Published in 1967, Klacto No. 23 featured five Bukowski poems:

An Action Afternoon
Communists
Escape
Finish
Worms

Escape has yet to be published again.

An Action Afternoon would appear on the recording 90 Minutes in Hell (1977)

Communists and Worms would appear in The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (1969).

First published in Wormwood Review No. 20 (1965), Finish would become a Bukowski standard, appearing the books, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (1969), Heat Wave (1995), and The Pleasures of the Damned (2007), as well as the recordings Poetry: Charles Bukowski, Steven Richmond (1968), A Cold Turkey Press Special (1972), 90 Minutes in Hell (1977),  and 12 Great Americans (2006).

This issue also includes an early Sam Cherry photograph of Bukowski.

Klactoveedsedsteen (Klacto for short) was founded by Carl Weissner in 1965 in Heidelberg, Germany. Through his own PANic Press, Weissner published five issues of Klacto from June 1965 to the fall of 1967.

Box 13

In March 1966, Weissner read Bukowski for the first time in Iconolatre, a magazine out of West Hartlepool, England. He got Bukowski’s address and began a correspondence that would last decades. He published five poems by Bukowski in klacto 23, but that was just the beginning.

Weisner first translated “Notes of  A Dirty Old Man” and “Post Office” in German, but they were failures from a sales perspective. But persistent paid off when Weissner translated “Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8th Story Window.” The resulting sales made Bukowski famous in Germany a truly profitable writer for the first time. By 1998, 2.5 million copies of Bukowski’s books had been sold in West Germany.

This copy is in Near Fine condition with some small creases and bumps to the covers.