In the late 1950s in Paris, at the famed Beat Hotel – 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur – writer Roger Knoebber was living amongst a community of creative people, including the core of what became known as the Beat Generation – Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg, and others. In this bohemian center of exploration Roger became intimate friends with the artist, writer and mystic Brion Gysin…
In 2024 Jan van Toorn’s Slowscan was about to release a double-LP with previously unpublished material from the Lora-Totino archives, when the pressing plant went bankrupt. Only 57 copies of the intended 200 double albums appeared to have been pressed and printed. 99 LPs were left orphaned. Slowscan has now released those 99 as a single 12″ vinyl edition, with cover art by Arrigo Lora-Totino and a hand numbered obi strip. Beautiful stuff, friendly priced too.
Stroker was a magazine of literature and arts that ran from 1974 to 1994. It was published from New York – and later from Nagano, Japan – by American artist and author Irving Stettner (1922-2004). Stettner, a friend of Henry Miller’s, lived many years as an ex-pat in France, Morocco, Japan and other countries. Apart from Henry Miller, who contributed to Stroker during the last two-and-a-half years of his life, leading authors such as…
”If you only know one photograph of the Beat Generation, you know this one. It’s the single most famous picture of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. But who took it, when, where, and why? What are its secrets, and how can it be a crime scene? Whatever you think you know is almost certainly wrong, so to unravel its mysteries and find out where all the bodies are buried…
August Stramm (1874-1915) was born in Münster and educated in Aachen, Germany. After he had graduated from grammar school, Stramm held various positions in the German Postdienst and regularly travelled between Germany and the USA after having been promoted to a position in the Seepostdienst in 1897. Stramm married journalist Else Krafft in 1902 and moved to Berlin three years later. In the German capital…