PSYCHEDELICATESSEN
[#20711]
Collection of Sales catalogs of "Psychedelicatessen" the first headshop in New York to sell a wide variety of drugs, pipes, rolling machines, paper, scales, glass beads, all that was needed for smoking and tripping, Edited and produced by Rick Sanders Southworth and Susan Swede, illustrated by John Ka. New York: Psychedelicatessen, 1967. Unpaginated. 14 unbound sheets (printed on both sides, and 2 printed recto only in a variety of colours offset from holograph text and illustration, inside the pink silk screen printed wrappers). Together with two stamped and postmarked manila envelopes in which these had been sent to a customer in New Jersey (and two more wrappers). All sheets near fine, the two manila envelopes bear the signs of being through the mail. One envelope has a b/w illustration by psychedelicatessen, and both contain the psychedelicatessen stamp.
Psychedelicatessen was located at 164 Avenue A between 10th and 11th Streets - just up the block from Tompkins Square Park, around the corner from the Peace Eye Bookstore, and a few blocks from the Fillmore East -- the Pyschedelicatessen was at the center of psychedelia and counterculture on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This collection of sheets comes from the silkscreened catalogs of products offered for sale which were mailed to a customer in New Jersey.
"Opened in 1966, the store immediately drew widespread attention. Though open for less than two years, the Psychedelicatessen was written up in Time magazine, the subject of a photo-essay in OZ, and satirized on the NBC television program, Jack Benny’s Bag. It is described in some detail in Fug You, the memoir of Ed Sanders, and the Fugs even played at least one show there.The shop was also subject to police harassment from the very beginning and on June 22, 1968, the Psychedelicatessen was finally shut down.
Rick Southworth and Susan Swede were apparently not just proprietors of this early headshop, but also the leaders of a new religious movement / psychedelic cult, The Church of Mysterious Elation. As detailed in the New York Daily News ("Raid Hippie Cult, Seize $6M Dope", Friday, September 27, 1968, p. 5), their home and church, and then their store, were raided by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and "10 pounds of hashish, believed the largest haul of that drug in New York City; 11 pounds of marijuana; 4,500 tablets of LSD; 1,500 tablets of speed, 150 mescaline capsules and 150 tablets of various hallucinogens" were seized."
This collection of sheets comes from the silkscreened catalogs of products offered for sale which were mailed to a customer in New Jersey.
"Opened in 1966, the store immediately drew widespread attention. Though open for less than two years, the Psychedelicatessen was written up in Time magazine, the subject of a photo-essay in OZ, and satirized on the NBC television program, Jack Benny’s Bag. It is described in some detail in Fug You, the memoir of Ed Sanders, and the Fugs even played at least one show there.The shop was also subject to police harassment from the very beginning and on June 22, 1968, the Psychedelicatessen was finally shut down.
Rick Southworth and Susan Swede were apparently not just proprietors of this early headshop, but also the leaders of a new religious movement / psychedelic cult, The Church of Mysterious Elation. As detailed in the New York Daily News ("Raid Hippie Cult, Seize $6M Dope", Friday, September 27, 1968, p. 5), their home and church, and then their store, were raided by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and "10 pounds of hashish, believed the largest haul of that drug in New York City; 11 pounds of marijuana; 4,500 tablets of LSD; 1,500 tablets of speed, 150 mescaline capsules and 150 tablets of various hallucinogens" were seized."
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