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 | Order = DATE | Search = EMPTY | Records = 983 | Page = 8 of 40 [Browsing category-filtered records]
Click thumbnail for large size. Click again to return.
Cat. No.: CC-040 Full record BibCit: N.d., ca. 7/17/1967. Broadside. Letter size. San Francisco: Communication Company. Imprint: CC. Collection: SOLA-xSS | SS-oT. 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-xSS | SS-oT. 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-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.: 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).
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.
Cat. No.: FC-1-008 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This striking Free City page juxtaposes a dry, encyclopedic list of sexual positions with an Egyptianizing central image and a brief lyric meditation on absence, desire, and haunted space. The effect is neither pornographic nor purely comic; rather, it turns erotic taxonomy into collage material, setting clinical enumeration against mythic imagery and poetic interiority. In the context of the Free City project, the piece reads as part of a broader effort to break down conventional boundaries between the sacred and the profane, information and art, body knowledge and visionary play.
Cat. No.: FC-1-009 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: Reads as a fevered prose poem of urban dread and countercultural refusal, contrasting the deadened routines of downtown work, media fear, and official paranoia with a visionary language of night, risk, grace, and collective release. Its jagged shifts—from Cleveland race panic and atomic dread to “Risk Food” and “Risk Roof”—suggest a world in which the administered realities of wage labor, news, and authority are already collapsing into absurdity. The mysterious letterforms and occult-like graphic framing deepen the page’s prophetic tone, as though the sheet were proposing an alternate script for those trying to escape the living death of ordinary America.
Cat. No.: FC-1-010 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This piece reads as a dream image or mythic interlude within the Free City sequence: a nude female figure stands beside or confronts a bird-headed, serpent-bodied creature in a lush, peacock-haunted environment. Printed in a dense monochrome blue, the image has the soft, degraded texture of a reproduced collage or altered illustration, which gives it an oneiric, half-submerged quality. In the context of Free City, it seems less like an argument than an atmosphere piece, bringing together eroticism, metamorphosis, fantasy, and the decorative excess that runs through much of the project’s visual language.
Cat. No.: FC-1-011a Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: A blistering attack on the Underground Press Syndicate, accusing the alternative press of reproducing the same hollow structures of mediation, editorial control, and false representation as the mainstream media it claimed to oppose. Mixing polemic with firsthand grievance, the text argues that underground papers do not arise from the concrete needs of their readers but from an abstract, self-important culture of editors, popularity, and packaged dissent. Its answer is the characteristic Free City reversal: do not look to newspapers, managers, or cultural intermediaries to speak for you—“you are your own alternative,” and San Francisco itself must become a free city through direct action and self-organization.
Cat. No.: FC-1-011b Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadsheet. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: Combines blurred photographic images, typed verse, and a handwritten dream fragment to create an atmosphere of solitude, mortality, and psychic unease. The repeated reclining figure, the stark portrait, and the lines about being alone and the interchangeability of life and death give the piece the feel of a dream document or private visionary notebook rather than a polemical broadside. In the context of Free City, it suggests the extent to which the project could also make room for intimate, haunted, inward material alongside its more public calls to action.
Cat. No.: FC-1-012 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 10/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: As the parting image in Free City Set #1, this sheet recasts San Francisco itself as the terrain of a Free City imaginary, overlaying a street map with the large hand-drawn words FREE CITY and a central female figure poised like an emblem, muse, or tutelary spirit of the place. The belt or banner at her waist, bearing the word “NEWS” links that figure directly to the project of Free City as an alternative mode of communication, suggesting that the liberated city is not only inhabited but spoken, circulated, and imagined into being. The effect is both declarative and visionary: the existing grid of official geography is overlaid by a counter-map of freedom, desire, and collective possibility.
Cat. No.: FC-2-001 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 11/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This opening sheet of the second Free City set marks both a conceptual and technical leap. The occult seals, the passage from Revelation, and the split-fountain mimeograph printing on the Gestetner inherited from the Communication Company cast the Free City as more than a social experiment: it appears here as a visionary commonwealth, at once mystical and communal. For David Simpson and Freeman House to pull off this effect on that machine must have been a first.
Note: The passage from Revelation referencing the New Jerusalem is found at 21:18 and 21:25.
Cat. No.: FC-2-002 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 11/1/1967. Broadside. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This piece collapses the usual boundary between reporting and revelation. By declaring that news is “fact” and “prophecy” at once, the sheet presents itself not as neutral chronicle but as an active force within the making of the new social body it depicts. The angled crowd scene—apparently drawn from the world of Bruegel, or at least evocative of that dense, collective peasant tumult—reinforces the sense of history in motion, as though the paper itself were both witness to and instrument of the Free City.
Note: The idea of this sheet predates the first Free City News sheets by several weeks. (I have never been able to figure out the dating of this set of Free City, except that it was the second set published by the Free City Collective.)
Cat. No.: FC-2-003 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 11/1/1967. Broadside. Legal size. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This sheet places the Free City in a much longer historical arc, linking the medieval town’s promise of refuge from feudal bondage to the countercultural hope of urban liberation in the present. The great red ring, the unsettling Black face, and the fragments of cityscape turn the page into an emblem of passage: a crossing into civic freedom that is at once communal and apocalyptic. “City air makes a man free” is invoked here not as quaint historical motto but as a charged proposition, suggesting that the city—if truly remade—might become a zone of release from inherited servitude.
Cat. No.: FC-2-004 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 11/1/1967. Broadside. Legal size. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This sheet turns on the improbable image of Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson locked in an embrace, an image that works at once as political satire and as queer provocation. Read from a queer perspective, the piece becomes more than an absurd reconciliation of enemies: it stages forbidden male intimacy across one of the most militarized and hypermasculine divides of the era. The deadpan caption, “And then, of course, the cops came,” pulls that embrace back into the familiar machinery of repression, where geopolitics, sexual anxiety, and the policing of the body converge.
Note: For those unfamiliar with the context, Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson were, in 1967, the respective leaders of the two countries at war in Vietnam.
Cat. No.: FC-2-005 Full record BibCit: n.d., ca. 11/1/1967. Broadside. Legal size. San Francisco: Free City Collective. Collection: SOLA-o; SS-o (MH). Abstract: This sheet is a gleefully abrasive assault on decorum, self-importance, and the hypocrisies of polite society. Its litany of bodily acts and sensations, paired with appropriated Japanese erotic imagery, collapses the distance between obscenity, comedy, and liberation, insisting that the body in all its appetites and indignities must be brought back into view. In the context of Free City, it reads as a deliberately offensive manifesto of anti-refinement, aimed at shattering the managed sensibility of both straight respectability and hip pretension.
