Brian Kirby and Essex House (1 Viewer)

Tender Buns, Blown, Ravished, Queen of Heat, Whacking Off, Thrill City... An interesting kind of literature.

Thanks for the links.
 
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I was working at the company that published the Essex House books. I was very good friends with Brian Kirby who was the editor. At the same time I was art director of “Open City Underground Newspaper” and would read the articles that Bukowski would bring in for the paper, I love doing collages of his series “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”. I collected section of his writings and brought it to Brian to read and he liked them enough to publish the Essex House volume of his writings. I was lucky enough to have one of my collages as the cover of the book. I have most of the Essex House books in my library they, were all erotic literature from many of our greatest science fiction writers and books that were not being published elsewhere in the USA. Brian also published writers that were writing for the paper.

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I've been an artist and photographer all my life. I'm not that good of a writer to bring together all that I have heard and seen in both the erotic publishing and the underground scene in Los Angeles during the times of the 60s. It's always fun to sat at a bar having a beer and talking about some of my antidotes during that period of time.
 
So you were/are a designer/artist. What did/do you think of Buk's little sketch drawings? As a totally seperate answer, what about his paintings?
 
I wrote Season of the Witch for Brian, via a recommendation from Norman Spinrad, under a variant of my then legal name.

I brought the writers Roger Lovin, Jane Gallion, Gil Lamont and Alice Louise Ramirez (Tiny Alice) to him. After he left Essex House he became very reclusive.
 
Maybe, never wrote for Jaybird but lots for a husband and wife team there who edited sex ed type mags, and also for Brian at Free Press and The Staff.
 
Interesting thread. I've been curious about Buk and his weekly column. How did he submit copy? By post or was it delivered or collected? Was there any editing? Were any texts rejected? What happened to the MSS? Any ideas where I could find out about that info?
 
Buk would come into the office with his manuscript. We usually set and talked for a while and I would read his column and then sent it upstairs for Chris Bunch to typeset. There was no editing that I was aware of. I liked to do a collage out of things in his story, that was one of the joys I had being art director of the paper.
 

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