Out now! "Selected American Advertising"

Do You Remember Magazines? (with apologies to The Ramones)

This book presents a curated collection of advertisements from three influential fringe publications: the Los Angeles Free Press, Soldier of Fortune, and Mondo 2000.

From adult classifieds and mercenary training schools to nootropics and virtual reality headsets, these ads tell the story of American counterculture from the 1970s through the 1990s. The Free Press charts the evolution of the underground press movement, when radical politics shared page space with massage parlor ads and occult bookstores. Soldier of Fortune captures the rise of paramilitary culture in the post-Vietnam era, its classified sections offering everything from military surplus to mercenary opportunities in global conflict zones. Mondo 2000’s techno-utopian advertising heralds the dawn of the digital age, when Timothy Leary declared computers “the LSD of the 1990s” and Silicon Valley counterculture promised consciousness expansion through smart drugs and virtual reality.

These advertisements reveal the strange paradox of rebel movements funding themselves through commercial enterprise. Militia gear sits alongside personal ads, revolutionary tracts next to mail-order aphrodisiacs. The ads themselves range from amateur hand-drawn flyers to slick corporate campaigns, each one an artifact of its particular moment in outlaw culture. This collection documents how America's fringe movements marketed themselves—and how the commerce of counterculture helped shape the mainstream it claimed to reject.

95 pages. $13.95. Full color. Order now from Amazon. (I’ve kept the price low so that the twisted oligarch doesn’t make any money off of this.)