Please Plant This Book.
San Francisco / Santa Barbara: [Graham Mackintosh for Richard Brautigan], 1968 Stock Code: 148029
Complete with the eight seed packets
First edition, sole impression, a scarce complete set of these eight poems by Richard Brautigan printed on the back of coloured seed packets.Copies were issued for free with the injunction that they be planted: "The time is right to mix sentences, sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and the rain with verbs, and for worms to pass through question marks, and the stars to shine down on budding nouns, and the dew to form on paragraphs". Each packet bore planting and growing instructions, and was "packed for the 1968-1969 season". The project was printed in a relatively large edition (between 1,500 and 6,000 copies have been estimated), but since most were planted very few survive. Please Plant This Book is, as a collectable, perhaps the perfect poetic encapsulation of the spirit of the "Flower Child" generation and the summer of 1969 - though it is of course an irony that the most valuable surviving copies are of necessity the least fulfilled. Brautigan (1935-1984) was also at the time involved with the Haight-Ashbury Diggers, who helped with the distribution of the book, and the project was in some sense a performance piece in homage to Wallace Berman's Semina magazine (1955-64).
Description
Original square white card folder, front cover lettered in brown with 3 oval photographic illustrations by Bill Brach above, complete with the 8 coloured paper seed packets within.
Condition
A hint of wear and toning to extremities, inner flaps unglued, slight spotting to a couple of seed packets, otherwise bright.
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