Please Plant This Book.

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).