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Typed Letters Signed
1967. Two typed letters signed from Watts to his agent, Henry Volkening. Watts discusses instructions for handling an article, an introduction he has prepared for a book on the counterculture, and plans for reprinting Watts's own title -- The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. The first letter is on the stationery of the Gopher Campus Motor Lodge in Minneapolis and concerns the sale of the introduction for Book of the Love Generation and promotion for The Book itself: "I look forward with pleasant horror to seeing the kind of promotion he [Eugene Schwartz] will concoct. The RH [Random House] people think he is quite insane to take on a book of this kind." The second letter is written from the UK and concerns the dispositions of the people handling Watts's book. "Schwarz [sic] is going to promote under the headline `THIS BOOK WILL ABOLISH YOUR FEAR OF DEATH!' The things I have to live up to!" This letter bears the underlinings of the recipient and is folded for mailing. The first letter bears a few numbers in pencil; otherwise each letter is fine. Watts's title -- The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are -- was a synthesis of his writings up to that point, incorporating much eastern philosophy and much in the way of analysis and metaphor derived both from everyday experience, the psychedelic experience, and the new experimental therapies that were sweeping the West Coast at the time. Watts, whose early experiments with psychedelics were chronicled in his 1962 book The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness, was a counterculture "superstar" by 1967, and these letters give an indication of how much he was in demand at the time. [#030875] SOLD

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