Including Ephemera, Broadsides, Posters, Street Sheets, Collections, etc. for the
San Francisco Diggers, Communication Company, Free City Collective,
Kaliflower Intercommunal Network, Free Print Shop, Planetedge Manifestation,
Earth/Life Defense Commune, &c.
Category = | Keyword = ALL | Group = ALL | Issue = ALL | New = ALL | Followup = ALL | Order = DATE | Search = EMPTY | Records = 1302 | Page = 13 of 53 [Browsing category-filtered records]
Click thumbnail for large size. Click again to return.
Cat. No.: CC-068A Full record BibCit: By Tyler, Steve. 6/7/1967. Broadside. Legal size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Collection: SOLA-x(SS) | SS-o(T). Abstract: A poem by Steve Tyler about a fantasy interracial riot that burns down Haight Street.
Cat. No.: CC-068B Full record BibCit: By Snyder, Gary. 6/7/1967. Broadside. Legal size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Collection: SOLA-o(PW,variant, letter size, 2 cop) | SOLA-o(AA, legal size) | SS-o(T) | SOLA-x(SS). Abstract: An incantation, war cry. Mentions the Ghost Dance. Signed "[Pisces-like symbol] SNYDER".
Cat. No.: NYCC-003 Full record BibCit: 6/18/1967. Broadside. Lt.. New York City: Communications Company/NY. Collection: SOLA-o(RS). Abstract: Announces a benefit for "Jade Companions Bail Fund" at 53rd and Broadway. $3
Cat. No.: NYCC-002 Full record BibCit: 6/19/1967. Broadside. Letter size. New York: Communications co.. Imprint: Comm's co./ N.Y.. Collection: SOLA-xx(SS) | SS-x(B). Abstract: Reprint with minor variations of CC-043. Signed "(Love) The Diggers". [Internal and historical evidence suggests this is a reprint.]
Cat. No.: CC-007 Full record BibCit: N.D., ca. 6/21/1967. Broadside. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: CC. Collation: 1/c, black ink on GrPa. Collection: SOLA-x(SS)/SS-o(L). Abstract: Title continues: ".. JUNE 21 POTLATCH|.| WHEN SAN FRANCISCO| WILL OPEN ITS| GOLDEN GATE" Ilustration at bottom depicts human figure carrying a load of possessions on the head. In bold letters: "POTLATCH"
Cat. No.: CC-177 Full record BibCit: By Anon. [Peter Berg]. 6/28/1967. Pamphlet. 7"x8-1/2". San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: Communication Company SF 2nd Edition. Collation: 2 sht. 8 pp.(each sheet Legal size printed lenthwise).. Collection: SOLA-o(BC 1977) | SOLA-o(PB).
Cat. No.: CC-040 Full record BibCit: N.d., ca. 7/17/1967. Broadside. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: CC. Collection: SOLA-x(SS) | SS-o(T). Abstract: Announces storytelling event: "Hole in a fence to a vacant lot across from the Blue Unicorn" with "razor doug .. brautigan .. peter's sam .. kirby .. coyote". "Monday, July 17, 5 p.m. and it goes on and on and on voice mirror"
Note: Typewritten. Handlettered Southwest Indian-design lines at top and bottom.
Cat. No.: CC-041a Full record BibCit: 7/28/1967. Broadsheet. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: cc (ups). Collection: SOLA-x(SS) | SS-o(T). Abstract: Advice on street behavior, police brutality, possibility of race riots. "Please: if anything starts to happen, cut out. .. Please maintain your cool. Don't panic. Just split. .. be advised".
R.s., in psychedelic lettering: "So what | ain't your blood | hobbit junkie | flower fucker | your safe no one hates a balless acid head"
Note: Two handlettered I Ching hexagrams (# 38 - Opposition, # 11 - Peace).
Cat. No.: CC-041b Full record BibCit: 7/28/1967. Broadsheet. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: cc (ups). Collection: SOLA-x(SS) | SS-o(T).
Cat. No.: CC-285 Full record BibCit: 8/4/1967. Leaflet. Lt.. San Francisco: Communication Company. Collation: 6 pp.. Collection: SOLA-o(BBk). Abstract: Chester's six-page reality check-in from Marin County, detailing collapse of the Haight community and dire warnings of coming dissolution.
Cat. No.: DP-023 Full record BibCit: Berkeley Barb, 8/18/1967, p. 1, 8-9. Collection: SOLA-o. Abstract: “Mutants Commune” is one of the most elaborate Digger statements of social jailbreak, extending the earlier “Inmates” language into a full-scale attack on the institutional forms that produce obedient identities: politics, economics, education, military life, religion, language, family, and even gangster systems. The text names these as “mental institutions,” each one a boxed hierarchy for coordinating “programmed corpses,” and answers them with the Digger idea of the nova: voluntary, fluid, one-to-one constellations of people who form, dissolve, and re-form outside fixed roles. What makes the piece especially important is the way it combines critique with speculative social design—free education, free distribution, free services, communal child-rearing, voluntary association, decentralized language, and a life beyond property, wage work, marriage, and identity. The “mutant” here is not a freak in the old sense but the new person produced by the technological, psychedelic, post-atomic world, the “fuck-leader youth” who refuses the inherited death forms and tries to create free, give free, take free, and be free everyways.
Cat. No.: CC-265 Full record BibCit: By Anderson, Chester. 8/19/1967. Leaflet. Letter size. 3 shts; 6 pgs. Corte Madera, Cal.: Communication Company. Imprint: includes ComCo/UPS ("in exile") from Corte Madera, CA and Hollywood, FL. Collection: SOLA-o(LH). Abstract: This six-page Haight/Ashbury Newsletter of August 19, 1967, written by Chester Anderson, reads as both street report and factional document from the breakup of the Haight underground. Issued under the Communication Company imprint, it moves through the split between Com/Co and the Diggers, the forced appropriation of Com/Co’s mimeograph equipment, the murder of Shobol, the atmosphere of retaliation and suspicion that followed, police pressure, speed, paranoia, and the steady unraveling of the Haight scene. The tone is immediate, aggrieved, and insiderly, mixing reportage, accusation, and political interpretation. What emerges is not the utopian Haight of popular memory but a movement world breaking apart over control of resources, authority, and the meaning of “free,” with Anderson writing from the wounded edge of that fracture.
Cat. No.: DR-007a/b Full record BibCit: 9/2/1967. Leaflet. Legal size. Collation: 2 sht; dual stapled along top edge. Collection: SOLA-x(PB). Abstract: This eviction-related notice, dated September 2, 1967, demands that Peter S. Berg pay back rent for August and September on the premises at 901 Cole Street or surrender possession. As a Digger-related document, it gives a stark glimpse of the material conditions surrounding the Trip Without A Ticket free store: even a space dedicated to Free existed within the ordinary legal machinery of rent, ownership, and eviction. Its importance lies in that tension between the Digger practice of Free and the property system pressing in around it.
Cat. No.: CC-246 Full record BibCit: By Bain, Willard. N.d., ca. 9/5/1967. Broadside. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Collection: SOLA-x(CSL). Abstract: This eviction-related notice, dated September 2, 1967, demands that Peter S. Berg pay back rent for August and September on the premises at 901 Cole Street or surrender possession. As a Digger-related document, it gives a stark glimpse of the material conditions surrounding the Trip Without A Ticket free store: even a space dedicated to Free existed within the ordinary legal machinery of rent, ownership, and eviction. Its importance lies in that tension between the Digger practice of Free and the property system pressing in around it.
Cat. No.: DP-024 Full record BibCit: By Martin Carey. n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. 23.3 x 27 cm. Collection: SOLA-o(MC). Abstract: A Spanish-language Digger poster announcing “Everything is free in the Diggers’ store,” likely made to invite the surrounding neighborhood into the Free Store experiment. Martin Carey’s dense black-and-white collage turns the Free Store into a visionary garden or altar of abundance, with flowers, moths, butterflies, frogs, eyes, and a saint-like central figure gathered into a field of metamorphosis. The poster is notable for translating the Digger idea of free into a language of beauty and wonder rather than ideology: the store appears not as a charity outlet, but as a magical commons where everything is available without money.
Note: Dating reflects the opening of the Digger Free Store in New York City as reported in the East Village Other, October 1, 1967, p. 18. Martin Carey was recognized as a graphic artists and a member of the NYC contingent of Diggers.
Cat. No.: FC-1-001 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. Legal size. 12 sheets (7 Bs, 5 bS). San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This is the cover sheet of two bound sets of 8-1/2" x 14" sheets printed on one or two sides that were each titled "Free City." The cover illustration depicts what the Diggers described as a Hopi "Running Man" symbol against a Sun-Ray mandala. The inside sheets contain news of the Free community, poetic pronouncements, and philosophical diatribes.
We can date the publication of this first set by an announcement in the Berkeley Barb. The September 29, 1967, issue contained a notice which read: "Free City," the San Francisco Diggers free newspaper-magazine-rap sheet, is due to hit the streets at any moment. A pre-release copy of the multi-color Gestetner publication reached BARB's hands."
Note: The first set of "Free City" is cataloged as FC-1-001 through FC-1-012.
Cat. No.: FC-1-002a Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. Legal size. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: Reads like a delirious dispatch from the edge where news, prophecy, parody, and insurgent desire all collapse into one another. It mimics the form of a newspaper only to sabotage its authority at every turn: “This is a political newspaper / This is not a political newspaper / This newspaper is your fantasy.” In that refusal, it announces a Digger understanding of politics not as platform or party, but as lived transformation—personal, collective, theatrical, and immediate. The piece moves restlessly from world revolution to Panhandle street scenes, from the ghost of Malcolm X to the coming “Free City,” from the Exorcism of the Pentagon to the Death of the Hippie and Birth of the Free Man. Its real subject is the dissolution of private property in every sense—material, sexual, spiritual, even artistic—and the emergence of a participatory social world in which ordinary life itself becomes liberated performance.
Note: Text in all capitals; paragraphs divided by ampersand rules; caduceus vignette at upper right.
Cat. No.: FC-1-002b Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. Legal size. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This striking and highly economical sheet functions less as a news item or argument than as a visionary invocation. At its center is a purple line drawing of a triple-faced, bearded figure—part saint, prophet, trickster, and street oracle—floating in a large field of textured paper. Around the margins runs a ring of incantatory text: “STRANGE ANGEL,” “YOU’RE AS HOLY AS YOU’LL EVER BE,” “FREE NOW, WHY NOT?,” “LET IT BURN,” “LET IT RUN,” “LET IT GO,” and “GROUND YOU STAND ON IS LIBERATED TERRITORY.” Other phrases—“HOLY IS A PEACOCK MIND,” “ANGEL IS A STATE OF GRACE,” and “ANGEL KARMA IS A COAT OF STARS”—give the piece the air of queer mysticism, absurdist prophecy, and countercultural mantra. Spare, talismanic, and theatrical, the sheet reads as a kind of portable street icon, fusing underground print aesthetics with a rhetoric of liberation, psychic unbinding, and transformed social being.
Cat. No.: FC-1-003a Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This sheet takes the form of a comic monologue but underneath it is a pointed critique of managed desire, technological delay, and the absurd promises of modern progress. Framed as a visit to a “framestore” in search of the long-awaited “1967 model,” the text parodies the logic of endless postponement, in which people are told to be patient, grateful, and content with obsolescence while the future is always deferred. The salesman’s oily reassurances—full of “you know” and pseudo-reasonable explanations—mock the language of authority and expose a world in which scarcity and delay are normalized. Visually, the sheet is anchored by a large stylized face with a vaguely solar or hypnotic force, interrupted by a clipped biographical fragment that gives the whole page the feel of collage-poetry assembled from the debris of print culture. The final turn, in which the speaker is busted after smashing an old model, turns the joke into a small parable of frustration and revolt in a world where even the sun has been bureaucratized.
Cat. No.: FC-1-003b Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: Mixing street talk, racial tension, police menace, and countercultural exhortation, this piece pushes toward a new awareness that will spread “like wildfire.” Its argument is less program than impulse: get close to your friends, give things away, listen to those who are already living free, and recognize that the power to act is already in your hands. At once volatile and visionary, the piece channels the unstable atmosphere of 1968 through a rhetoric of love, danger, solidarity, and imminent rupture, ending by shifting agency onto the reader: “YOU ARE THE LEADER.”
Note: Signed "Tumbleweed" — one of the pseudonyms for Bill Fritsch. See Ringolevio, p. 281 ff., for Emmett Grogan’s description of Tumble.
Cat. No.: FC-1-005a Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This Free City sheet is a comic, confrontational defense of long hair as a mark of beauty, freedom, and nonconformity, turning the period’s obsession with male hair length into a satire on sexual anxiety, social control, and straight society’s moral panic. Written in a deliberately mocking, conversational voice, it argues that hostility to “long-hairs” reflects jealousy and repression more than principle, while linking barbers, shorn respectability, and conventional masculinity to a broader culture of conformity. The page’s whimsical yet slightly menacing graphic border—serpentine forms, hybrid creatures, and ornamental fantasy figures—reinforces the text’s blend of camp, provocation, and countercultural style.
Cat. No.: FC-1-005b Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This Free City “Rap Sheet” serves as a decentralized directory of countercultural and underground resources, linking San Francisco to a wider network of free stores, free food programs, communes, legal aid, media, bookstores, and contact points across the United States and Europe. More than a mere list, it maps the infrastructure of an emerging Free City world: practical, mobile, improvised, and translocal, with addresses and phone numbers standing in for a new social geography of mutual aid and alternative institutions. The ghosted yellow figures behind the red type give the page a loose, processional quality, as if this network were not static but already in motion.
Note: Note that the two operating free stores in San Francisco at this point are the Trip Without A Ticket (Cole Street) and the Black People's Free Store (McAllister Street).
Cat. No.: FC-1-006 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This visually dense and sardonic broadside stages yet another symbolic death of Bob Dylan, not as obituary but as cultural exorcism. Through fractured typed verse, repeated funerary invocation, and biomorphic red-and-black imagery, it turns Dylan into a contested emblem—murdered, dispersed, and reclaimed by the overlapping projections of hip society, messianic longing, and psychic theater. The piece reads less as commentary on the man himself than as an attack on the making and unmaking of celebrity within the counterculture.
Note: See the article “Against the Stars” in Kaliflower, volume 3, for a resonant parallel to the idea behind this piece.
Cat. No.: FC-1-007a Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This piece is a dense, improvisational Free City collage of manifesto, lament, and ecstatic exhortation, layering typed polemic, handwritten slogans, scattered quotations, and found imagery into a vision of America in spiritual and political collapse. Against denunciations of money, hierarchy, false power, and the dead weight of official politics, the sheet counters with Digger-style affirmations—free food, autonomy, brotherhood and sisterhood, and the insistence that people stop merely surviving and begin living. Its splattered red ground and fractured composition give the page the look of something half-broadcast, half-erupted, as though consciousness itself were breaking through the ruins of the established order.
Note: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, was adopted by the Diggers as an early slogan. In Blake, the phrase suggests that wisdom comes not through prudence or restraint but through lived intensity. At the outset of Free Food in the Panhandle, it was painted on the side of the VW bus that delivered the hot stew every afternoon (Ringolevio, p. 249).
Cat. No.: FC-1-007b Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This Free City sheet is a direct organizing notice for the expansion of free food beyond the Panhandle into the communes, calling for a practical network of daily distribution and shared provisioning. Listing donated staples—meat, vegetables, dairy goods, fish, fruit, and greens—it presents food not as charity or relief but as collective property: “It’s free because it’s yours.” The airy feather- or peacock-like imagery softens the page visually, but the message is urgent and concrete, ending with an insistence that the work of feeding “the brothers and sisters in your house” must begin at once.
Note: Of note, this sheet marks the shift from the public sphere to a more inward communal sharing. Grogan describes the “Free Food Home Delivery Service” in Ringolevio, p. 440.
