Acid Dreams. The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain
Fourth printing of the first Grove Press paperback edition, 1985
This paperback cover combines Hobo with a trippy 3D variant called Bas Relief F. The latter is part of Photo-Lettering’s Bas Relief, a series of effect variants derived from existing styles, shown in their One Line catalog from 1971. PLINC mentioned they could add such extruding effects to any solid letter. The shown ready-made styles are Bas Relief B (derived from PLINC Madison), C (a gothic), D (a square sans), E and F (Hobo), G (Cooper Black, 1969), and K (a bold grotesk). Bas Relief A might have been skipped in the numbering for Henrion Relief, an all-caps slab serif with a similar effect that was advertised already in 1954.
More info about the book’s content, from the back cover:
Few events have had a more profound impact on the upheavals of the sixties than the psychedelic revolution spawned by the spread of LSD. Here is the full astounding story—part of it hidden in secret Government files—of the role the mind-altering drug played in our turbulent history and its continuing influence today.
And what a story it is, beginning with LSD’s discovery in 1943 until It spilled into public view some twenty years later. In the intervening years the CIA officials had hoped that LSD would revolutionize the spy trade; young pyschiatric pioneers came to believe that “acid” would shed light on mental illness; and young writers and artists had given birth to the LSD sub-culture.
Acid Dreams is the complete social history of the psychedelic counter-culture that burst into full view in the Sixties. The authors reveal how the CIA became obsessed with LSD during the Cold War until the drug spread into popular culture. Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, Timothy Leary, the Diggers, William Mellon Hitchcock, G. Gordon Liddy, Abbie Hoffman, the Beatles—these are just some of the characters who stride through the pages of this compelling chronicle—a history of a time still only dimly understood though hardly forgotten.
First printing of the first Grove Press paperback edition, 1985. The subtitle and the authors’ names are arranged in a different, less readable way. The synopsis and blurbs on the back are set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic, the credits in Helvetica.
