Tom Wolfe

An Art Edition of ’60s psychedelia.

In 1964, famed writer Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters set off across America on a “Transcontinental Bus Tour,” headed for the New York World’s Fair, drinking (still perfectly legal) LSD-laced orange juice along the way. Kesey’s journey, in the company of his Merry Pranksters, lies at the heart of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an as-if-first-hand account of the group’s antics and ethos by Tom Wolfe, wunderkind of the New Journalism movement. Celebrated as a classic of American literature as well as the hippie movement, the text explores both the esoteric experience of hallucinogens and fundamental societal shifts of 1960s America.

This Art Edition presents Wolfe’s era-defining text in letterpress, along with facsimile reproductions of his manuscript pages, ephemera of the period, and photographs of the acid scene by Lawrence Schiller and Ted Streshinsky. The accompanying print, The Hollywood Acid Test, February 25, 1966 by Lawrence Schiller, captures a defining event in the LSD craze. While The Grateful Dead provided the live music, Pranksters including Lee Quarnstrom and Mountain Girl curated the movies, “audioptics,” and “stroboscopic ballet machine.”

The costumed revelers dancing into the small hours of the night endures as one of Schiller’s most iconic images from his coverage of the LSD scene. It was the lone color photo reproduced in the best-selling book LSD (1966) and featured on the cover of the Capitol Records LP of the same name and year. Schiller brought his own strobe light to hang high in the rafters so he could shoot the picture at a slow shutter speed, simultaneously capturing the natural light and multiple images under the effect of the strobe. It was three days before he saw the images from that adrenalin-filled night, one of the color frames catching his eye. “This image is alive,” he says. “Nothing else matters.”

Marking the year of original publication, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is limited to 1,968 signed copies.

This Art Edition is signed by Tom Wolfe and limited to 100 copies (No. 101–200), each with the print The Hollywood Acid Test (1966), signed by Lawrence Schiller.

Also available as a second Art Edition (No. 1–101) with an alternative signed print, and as a signed Collector’s Edition (No. 201–1,968).

The photographers: Lawrence Schiller began his career as a photojournalist for Life, Time, and Paris Match, photographing some of the most iconic figures of the 1960s, from Marilyn Monroe to Barbra Streisand, from Ali and Patterson to Redford and Newman. His book projects include five New York Times best sellers, Marilyn & Me, Barbra, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer. He has directed or produced 20 motion pictures, including the documentaries The American Dreamer and the Oscar–winning The Man Who Skied Down Everest. Among his films for television, The Executioner’s Song and Peter the Great won five Emmys.
Ted Streshinsky (1923–2003) was a photojournalist best known for his coverage of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s in California, from migrant worker strikes to antiwar protests. His wide-ranging portrayal of the counterculture in San Francisco included the hippies, and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on the high-voltage night of the Acid Test Graduation.

The author: Tom Wolfe (1931–2018) is the author of a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, and I Am Charlotte Simmons.