Although in some cases these publications are previously unpublished juvenilia by Richard Brautigan, they represent, most accurately, speciality publications of Brautigan's works for rare book dealers and collectors, or Brautigan fans. See also limited editions of several of Brautigan's works.

The X-Ray Book Company publishes X-Ray magazine, an innnovative magazine of art and literature edited and assembled by Johnny Brewton.

Limited Edition; 26 lettered copies
2.5" x 4.25"
Hard Cover; Boards covered with gold cloth; Issued without a dustjacket
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton

Limited Edition; 250 numbered copies
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed wrappers; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton

Printer's proof copy printed on chipboard
14 pages; 2.5" x 4.25"
Letterpress chapbook
Printed wrappers; Handsewn binding
Designed and printed by Johnny Brewton

LEARN more about this chapbook at the X-Ray website.

Described as "an unpublished manuscript by Richard Brautigan," the book was transcribed from a three-page manuscript (two pages of fourteen poems; one page with a dedication "for Linda") typed by Brautigan. Originally titled "Linda," the manuscript was sent to The Macmillan Company who rejected it for publication in 1956.


Contents in order of their appearance: "love is where you find it," "when I was a piece of death," "please," "stars," "once upon a time," "love is not a house," "a lion," "linda," "I knew a gal who was cold as death," "come dreamers and lovers," "desire in a bowl of potatoes," "hey," "the spider," "somewhere in the world."

Of the fourteen poems included in this book, only "stars" and "hey" were titled. The titles for the remaining poems suggested here are comprised of the first line or phrase.

First publication of these poems written by Brautigan in the mid-1950s, except "Please" and "Desire in A Bowl of Potatoes," both first published as mini-broadsides in previous X-Ray publication projects. Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Limited Edition; 26 lettered copies
4.75" x 6.25"
Typeset (Souvenir typeface) and hand-printed on Somerset text by Jim Camp
Printed wrappers on Rives BFK paper; Handsewn binding
Given away to friends of the press
The remainders were marked "out of series" and sent to Ianthe Brautigan.

VIEW a larger image of the front cover.

Reprinted four Brautigan poems

• "November 3"
• "December 24"
• "December 30"
• "At the California Institute of Technology"

all from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

LEARN more about this chapbook at the Synaesthesia Press website.
No stated publisher, but possibly Pacific Red Car Press.
No printing, place, or date information.
5" x 9"; Printed wrappers; Stapled binding

Reprinted ten Brautigan poems: "A Legend of Horses," "A Moth in Tucson, Arizona," "Hinged to Forgetfulness Like a Door," "Heroine of the Time Machine," "The Buses," "Period Piece," "Psalm," "Towards the Pleasures of a Reconstituted Crow," "The Memoirs of Jesse James," and "Love's Not The Way to Treat a Friend" and the story "What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees."
X-Ray 6 Winter 1996.
Published by X-Ray Book & Novelty Company as a letterpress chapbook printed by artnoose.
4.25" x 5.5," 4 pages
Printed wrappers
Limited Edition; 326 copies; 300 numbered and 26 lettered A-Z and signed by Jack Micheline
Of this limited edition, 200 numbered copies and the 26 lettered copies were issued as part of X-Ray 6 (laid into magazine). The remaining copies were issued separately. Later, an additional 100 copies were discovered and issued separately.

X-Ray is an innnovative magazine of art and literature edited and assembled by Johnny Brewton. This issue also featured a back cover fold-out broadside by Micheline plus work by Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish, Mark Faigenbaum, David Gregor, Neeli Cherkovski, and Alan Catlin.

First publication of this small novel written by Brautigan in the mid-1950s. Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

LEARN more about this chapbook at the X-Ray website.

LEARN more about this issue of X-Ray at the X-Ray website.
San Francisco: Arion Press, 2003.
Limited Edition; 426 copies

The 25 September 2003 announcement in The New York Review of Books, at left, notes the price of $450.00.

Arion Press is run by printer-publisher Andrew Hoyem.
Includes a portrait photograph of Brautigan by Edmund Shea and in half the copies, a color lithograph by Wayne [Jack] Thiebaud (one of the creators, along with Brautigan, of the photocopy magazine The San Francisco Public Library).

Preface by long time friend of Brautigan, Ron Loewinsohn.

READ the full text of this preface.

LEARN more about Arion Press at its website.

Benson, Heidi. "Fishing for Brautigan Stories." San Francisco Chronicle 7 September 2003: Book Section M2.
Describes the release party for a limited edition of Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America published by Arion Press. Andrew Hoyem, founder of Arion Press and publisher; Virgina Aste, Brautigan's first wife and typist for the first edition of Trout Fishing in America; and Ianthe Brautigan, Brautigan's daughther and author of You Can't Catch Death all offer amusing stories about Brautigan.

READ the full text of this review.

READ this article at the San Francisco Chronicle website.


An exhibition featuring photographs by Michael Carboy of the production facilities at Arion Press and related ephemera celebrating Brautigan's life was sponsored by the Arion Press 25 August-31 October 2003.

VIEW Carboy's photographs from this exhibition at his website.

Berkeley, CA: The Bancroft Library Press, 1995.
Limited Edition; 50 numbered copies. Some unnumbered copies are reported and probably are part of a printing over run.
16 pages; Uncut
Printed wrappers slightly larger than the pages; Binding handsewn with numbering in pencil on the inside back cover
Front cover illustration by Philip Kuznicki
Handset and printed on the Berkeley Albion handpress by Zackary Todd Baker, Kevin James Carpenter, Alice Kim, Kristin Ann Low, Julie Malork, Alexis Masnik, Sean Quach, Cynthia Neuhaus Wardell, and Yau-Fen You under the direction of Peter Koch.

This "novel" is prescient of the themes Brautigan explored in his later work: loneliness, isolation, alienation, and death.

The introduction by Burton Weiss details how he acquired previously unknown and unpublished Brautigan materials from Edna Webster in October 1992. Burton says the original manuscript for this book was a 6" x 8" spiral-bound, lined notebook in which Brautigan wrote the entire final text by hand, including title, dedication, and chapter headings. It consisted of 78 pages, 16 left blank.

Dedication reads:

for Edna

Edna Webster was Brautigan's surrogate mother. Her daughter, Linda Webster, was Brautigan's first girlfriend. Her son, Peter Webster, was Brautigan's best friend. Brautigan gave many of his high school writing manuscripts to Edna on 3 November 1955.

First publication of this novel written by Brautigan in the mid-1950s. Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.
I Watched the World Glide Effortlessly Bye and Other Pieces
Fairfax, CA: Burton Weiss and James P. Musser, 1996.
Limited Edition; 100 copies, all printed by Marie C. Dern at the Jungle Garden Press in Fairfax, California, and bound by John DeMerritt of Berkeley, California
Hard Cover; Issued without dust jacket

The introduction by Burton Weiss details how he acquired previously unknown and unpublished Brautigan materials from Edna Webster in October 1992.

Six copies were bound in full blue leather by John DeMerritt and numbered I-VI.

Each copy contained a bumper sticker on which the poem "Phantom Kiss" was printed. See below.

Twenty-six copies were hard cover; quarter-bound in cloth and paper; issued without a dust jacket; lettered A-Z.

Each copy contained a bumper sticker on which the poem "Phantom Kiss" was printed. See below.

Sixty-eight copies were hard cover; quarter-bound in cloth and paper; issued with a dustjacket; numbered 1-68.

Contents include three novels

• I Watched The World Glide Effortlessly Bye
• The Conscripted Storyteller
• a visit from jake

and three poems

• "Nature Lover, or Something"
• "a woman's eyes"
• "Phantom Kiss"

All contents were collected in The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings, published in 1999.


Each copy of the leather bound (6 copies) and lettered versions (26 copies) contained a 13" x 4" bumper sticker on which the poem "Phantom Kiss" was printed.

Black ink printed on white stock.

Only 32 copies of this bumper sticker were produced. Each copy was numbered.

The poem reads:

"Phantom Kiss"

There
is no worse
hell
than
to remember
vividely
a
kiss
that never occurred.

Previously unpublished stories and poems written by Brautigan in the 1950s and allegedly submitted to both Random House and Charles Scribners publishers in hopes they would publish them as a collection. Neither publisher accepted the work.

Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

Box Closed Box Open

"Please" X-Ray 9 Summer 2003. Special edition of 126 numbered copies; letterpress broadside. Published by X-Ray Book and Novelty Company, Ventura, California, and included with a flex-disc, various small broadsides and chapbooks, photographs, and art objects in a 8.5" x 7.75" cardboard box with printed wrap-around band as an art assemblage. Also issued separately. Also included in this issue of X-Ray was work by Charles Bukowski, Thurston Moore, Dan Fante, Billy Childish, and others.

First publication of this poem written by Brautigan in the mid-1950s. Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

The poem reads:

please don't come and see me
when I am dead and buried
under spring and stars
and little children laughing.
    please.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

LEARN more about this issue of X-Ray at the X-Ray Press website.
X-Ray 8 Summer 2001.
Limited edition of 126 copies; 100 lettered and 26 lettered and signed; 4" x 4" letterpress broadside.
Included in this issue of X-Ray and also issued separately.

Published by X-Ray Book and Novelty Company, Ventura, California, and laid into a 5" x 5" box with other items as an art assemblage. The box itself featured a letterpress wrapper. Also contained several letterpress broadsides featuring work by Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante, Billy Childish, Michael Montfort, Bern Porter, Gerald Locklin, A.D. Winans, and others.

First publication of this poem written by Brautigan in the mid-1950s. Brautigan gave this work, along with other writings, photographs, and personal items, to Edna Webster on 3 November 1955.

LEARN more about The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings.

LEARN more about this issue of X-Ray at the X-Ray Press website.
Volta (1) March 2000.
Limited edition of approximately 150 copies; 50 laid into Volta the rest given away to friends of the press.
Published by Jim Camp, Synaesthesia Press.
The poem "Hey, Bacon!" was printed on 2" x 3.5" cardboard cut from cereal boxes, shown here actual size. The poem was printed on the blank side (inside) of the ceral box cutout. The already printed portion of the cereal box formed the reverse.

According to Camp, Volta is a direct descendent of Wallace Berman's magazine Semina, a free-form art and poetry journal that Berman published between 1955 and 1964. Each of the nine issues was printed on a handpress and then hand-assembled by Berman who glued artwork, photographs, small poems and other items inside. Sometimes the enclosed items were loose, laid in between the magazine's pages, or tucked into inside pockets without prescribed order or sequence. Each issue was extremely limited, a few hundred copies, ephemeral although focused on a loose theme, personal, and distributed mostly via the U.S. Mail to a very select group of recipients who were often the contributors as well. As a literary journal, each issue of Semina was a loosely assembled compendium of the most interesting artists and poets of the time, staking out a new cultural context for the evolving literature and art counterculture.

Camp continues this tradition with his magazine, Volta. He prints and sends out each issue when it is complete. None of the issues can be bought. They simply arrive.

LEARN more about Synaesthesia Press at its official website.
Lexington, New York: Art Awareness Gallery, 1979.
Oblong folio broadside
Limited Edition; 50 numbered copies signed by Brautigan, Judd Weisberg, and Leonard Seastone, the printer
Printed at Tideline Press, illustrated with a color serigraph by Judd Weisberg
Reprints a chapter from Brautigan's novel, Trout Fishing in America
11" x 17" broadside
Featured six poems by Brautigan: "I Lie Here in a Strange Girl's Apartment," "A Mid-February Sky Dance," "After Halloween Slump," "Comets," "The Pomegranate Circus," and "Let's Voyage into the New American House"—all from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

As he has for a number of years, Richard Brautigan goes on living and writing in San Francisco. He is now 43 years old and the author of such books as Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, and others. This edition of Aura Broadside Series presents selections from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which is currently out of print. A copy of the book was obtained through Jan Susina, a graduate student at the University of Indiana, where they have a Rare Books Department. "Mid-February Sky Dance" appeared previously in Thunder City Press Broadside. Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books, and newspapers if they are given away free.

11" x 17" broadside
Featured eight poems by Brautigan: "December 24," "Milk for the Duck," "Star Hole," "Love Poem," "A Mid-February Sky Dance," "Hollywood," "All Watched Over by Machine of Loving Grace," and "Nine Things"—all from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

THE THUNDER CITY PRESS BROADSIDE SERIES is published six times a year by Steven Ford Brown. Subscriptions are $1.00 per year. For information write 2008 Magnolia Avenue South, Birmingham, AL 35205. Published in a special editon of 500 February 1976. Permission is granted to reprint any of these poems in magazines, books, and newspapers if they are given away free.

As he has for a number of years, Richard Brautigan goes on living and writing in San Francisco. He is now forty-one years old and the author of such books as TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, THE ABORTION, THE HAWKLINE MONSTER and his most recent WILLARD AND HIS BOWLING TROPHIES. This edition of the Broadside Series presents selections from ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE which is currently out of print. I obtained a copy of the book thru [sic] Jan Susina, a graduate student at the University of Indiana, where they have a Rare Books Department.

The Cowell Press: University of California at Santa Cruz, 1974.
Limited Edition: 10 copies

A collection of six works by Brautigan, each printed as a separate 6" x 8.5" broadside with embossed color etchings by Ellen Meske.
Included a separate title page.

Title page

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

A passage from In Watermelon Sugar (pages 38-39)

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"The Fever Monument"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"Cyclops"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"The Nature Poem"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"The Symbol"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"The Harbor"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

"The Galilee Hitch-Hiker"

VIEW a larger image of this broadside.

In Watermelon Sugar

Broadside; 17" x 11"
Printed in black with red border on beige paper for the International Antiquarian Book Fair, held in New York City, Spring 1971.

Featured five poems

• "A Legend of Horses"
• "Toward the Pleasures of a Reconstituted Crow"
• "A Moth in Tucson, Arizona"
• "Death Like a Needle"
• "Heroine of the Time Machine"

All save "A Legend of Horses" collected in Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork.
Limited Edition; 300 copies
Broadside; 12.75" x 20" on heavy cream-colored paper
A single story; Illustrated by Richard Correll
Signed by both Correll and Brautigan (although Brautigan did not sign all copies).

Part of a collection of ten broadsides printed for the San Francisco Arts Festival Commission and contained in a folio-sized folder. The other nine similiarly-sized broadsides were all illustrated by Correll and signed by him and their respective authors (except for David Meltzer who refused to sign his contribution).

The other nine broadsides are

• James R. Broughton, "I Heard in the Shell"
• [Burgess] Jess Collins, "When Did Morning Wind Rip Callow Flowers in May"
• Max Finstein, "There's Always a Moon in America"
• Andrew Hoyem, "Stranger"
• Lenore Kandel, "Vision of the Skull of The Prophet"
• Joanne Kyger, "The Parsimmons Are Falling"
• David Meltzer, "Station"
• Gary Snyder, "Across Lamarck Col"
• George Stanley, "The Rescue"

Sum (3) May 1964: 23.
Subtitled "A Newsletter of Current Workings."
Mimeographed; 7" x 8.5"; 33 pages counting insisde front and back covers; folded and stapled.

Published in Albuquerque, New Mexico, December 1963 (issue #1) - April 1965 (issue #7). Edited by Fred Wah of the English Department at the University of New Mexico. Ron Loewinshohn, John Keys, and Ken Irby were contributing editors.

Also included works by David Bromige, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Frank Davey, Drummond Hadley, George Bowering, Carol Berge, David Cull, Jim St. Jim, Denise Levertov, Alan Kimball, Ken Irby, Steven Slavik, Sam Abrams, John Keys, Richard Brautigan, a review of Louis Zukefsky's Found Objects by Fred Wah, Ed Sanders, Paul Blackburn, Sylvester Pollet, Pat **?**, Gael Tunbull, and Fred Wah, in that order.

"Notes," on the inside front cover say, "Richard Brautigan is copyrighting his prose from San Francisco."

Revenge of the Lawn