OPEN CITY No. 54, May 31–June 6, 1968 — Bukowski's Weird World, Jim Garrison JFK Investigation, Iron Butterfly, H.P. Lovecraft

An issue of the Los Angeles underground weekly in the full broadsheet format, featuring Charles Bukowski's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." Titled "The Weird World of Charles Bukowski" and presented in an extraordinary typographic layout with his name rendered in bold wave-form lettering, the column is a sustained portrait of Sanchez, a genius who lives in a hand-built two-story shack with his own plumbing and a free-feed phone line, surrounded by women who say very little and 10,000 tapes of conversation. Bukowski visits him regularly, confessing eleven years on the same job with the hours dragging over him like wet shit. The column is interspersed with aphorisms attributed to Dutch Schultz on his deathbed, Al Capone, Sitting Bull, Leibnitz, Wallace Stevens, and Marcel Duchamp. It ends in a late-night scene upstairs, the first flaxen straight-string-hair woman, Bukowski translated into seven languages, and the morning after — old, starlit sun, walking out.

The front cover leads with David Lifton and Kerry Thornley's investigation into Jim Garrison's New Orleans JFK assassination case, in blue and black two-color. The back cover is an elaborate illustrated puzzle page — rebus, maze, coin trick, and an Alice's Restaurant mushroom and escargot recipe — printed in purple and brown spot color. Concert listings include Iron Butterfly and H.P. Lovecraft at the Kaleidoscope on Sunset Blvd. Full broadsheet format, 22.5" x 15.5", blue and black spot color on cover, purple and brown on back cover, black and white throughout interior.

Provenance: Mailing label on front cover addressed to John E. Bryan, 22420 Edgecliff Drive, Euclid, Ohio — the editor's father at his home address.

Small hole where the vertical and horizontal folds meet. Uneven folds result in some pages sticking out from the cover. Tears and browning to the bottom of the rear cover.