The Unicorn Bookshop

Brighton: Advance Screenprint, 1967. 19 ½ x 29 ½ in. Screenprint poster. With several pinholes to corners. One corner appears as though price-clipped. Nevertheless, the print is in very good condition. Item #POS164

Unicorn Bookshop, located at 40 Gloucester rd. in Brighton, was started in 1965 by the Spokane Washington-born poet Bill Butler and a partner. It was well known for an eclectic stock of hippy, occult, beat, and counterculture works, as well as being one of the loci of the late-1960s debate over freedom of speech, when following a raided by the Brighton police (wherein copies of Evergreen review were seized) Butler was fined and charged with distributing obscenity. Less well-known, perhaps, is that Butler penned a work under the pseudonym Sabbah Hassan (after the Nazari Ismaeli ruler of the assassins popularized by Burroughs and Gysin) called Leaves of Grass: a Compendium of Marijuana, a book not unlike the famous Hashish Cookbook of Panama Rose.

Sold