Cultural critic George Case explores how the Occult craze permanently changed American society, creating the cultural framework for the political power of the religious right, false accusations of Satanic child abuse, and today’s widespread rejection of science and rationality. An insightful blend of pop culture and social history, “Here’s to My Sweet Satan” lucidly explains how the most technological society on earth became enthralled by the supernatural.

    Through a collection of fast-paced interlocking narratives, it animates the tale of an alternate America and its wide-eyed citizens: the LSD-slinging graffiti writers of Central Park, the Dead-loving AI scientists of Stanford, utopian Whole Earth homesteaders, black market chemists, government-wanted Anonymous hackers, rogue explorers, East Village bluegrass pickers, spiritual seekers, Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, pranksters, pioneering DJs, and a nation of Deadheads.WFMU DJ and veteran music writer Jesse Jarnow draws on extensive new firsthand accounts from many never-before-interviewed subjects and a wealth of deep archival research to create a comic-book-colored and panoramic American landscape, taking readers for a guided tour of the hippie highway filled with lit-up explorers, peak trips, big busts, and scenic vistas, from Vermont to the Pacific Northwest, from the old world head capitals of San Francisco and New York to the geodesic dome-dotted valleys of Colorado and New Mexico. And with the psychedelic research moving into the mainstream for the first time in decades, Heads also recounts the story of the quiet entheogenic revolution that for years has been brewing resiliently in the Dead's Technicolor shadow.Featuring over four dozen images, many never before seen-including pop artist Keith Haring's first publicly sold work-Heads weaves one of the 20th and 21st centuries' most misunderstood subcultures into the fabric of the nation's history. Written for anyone who wondered what happened to the heads after the Acid Tests, through the '70s, during the Drug War, and on to the psychedelic present, Heads collects the essential history of how LSD, Deadheads, tie-dye, and the occasional bad trip have become familiar features of the American experience.

    You may find it hard to believe that the majority of envelopes arrived at their intended destinations, but they did, and all have postmarks to prove it! Their safe delivery is a tribute to the heroic postal employees who rose to the challenge.

    Marking Miller’s first collaboration with watercolor artist Lynn Varley (Ronin, The Dark Knight Returns) in over a decade, 300 was a gritty reimagining of a battle in which 300 Spartan soldiers fought to hold back the entire Persian army. The series won five Eisner Awards, including Best Limited Series, Best Writer/Artist (Miller) and Best Colorist (Varley).300: The Art of the Movie takes you behind the scenes as director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) adapts 300 to the silver screen. With 200 pages of production photos, concept art and much, much more, 300: The Art of the Movie is sure to delight Miller fans and movie buffs alike.

    We multi-task, switch between screens, work faster. When was the last time you paused to consider a beautifully made object or stunning natural landscape? Yet this is when our spirits lift, our soul is restored. Designer Alan Moore invites us to rethink not only what we produce – whether it’s a website, a handmade chair, or a business – but how and why. With examples including Pixar, Apple, Yeo Valley and Blitz Motorcycles, we are encouraged to ask: Is it useful and considered. Is it a thing of beauty? Do Design will inspire you to: • Improve your creative process • Raise the quality and craft of your work • Consider the experience as much as the product • Adopt simplicity, utility and honesty as guiding principles We are creative beings. We love to make things. This book will inspire you to create better things for better reasons. Things that people will love – for a long time to come. Some say beauty is a luxury. But what if it is key to creating a better world for us all? Alan Moore has designed and created everything from books to businesses. He has a unique grasp on the forces that are reshaping our world and how to creatively respond to them. Working on six continents, Alan has shared his knowledge in the form of board and advisory positions at companies such as Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Coca Cola, workshops and speaking as well as teaching in institutions as wide ranging as MIT and Reading University’s Typography Department, Sloan School of Management and INSEAD. He is the author of four books on creativity, marketing and business transformation including No Straight Lines: Making sense of our nonlinear world (2011). He still works as an artist. He tries everyday to lead a life as beautifully as he possibly can.

    This is the story of the passions, and obsessions of the creator of type; of the influences of wars, persecution, and political upheaval, and the effects of business and technological breakthroughs on fonts and typography. From Gutenberg's first moveable type to the Internet, Simon Loxley tells the stories behind the letters, giving readers a cultural history unlike any other. After reading Type, readers will never look at the printed word in the same way again.

    Although most books we use are produced commercially, many of us are drawn to the book form in its various guises, and are interested in exploring how to make books of our own, whether as a vehicle for telling stories, as scrapbooks, or as notebooks and journals.This guide provides the essential ingredients for designing and making your own books, from simple binding and finishing techniques to complex complete products. Projects are designed to suit a variety of skill levels from beginner to advanced, and use a step-by-step approach to learning the necessary skills.Each project begins with basic techniques and progresses through to thought-provoking applications of those techniques. Each technique includes an example of a finished book that fully and beautifully utilizes the methods described by the techniques.This book explores more experimental binding and page treatment techniques, and has a comprehensive gallery of ideas outlining the skills and materials needed to apply techniques often reserved for professionals.

    It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from shelves.We are fondly introduced to each potential rediscovery from lost Victorian voices to the twentieth century writers who could well become the next John Williams, Hans Fallada, or Lionel Davidson. Whether male or female, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favorites, including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world. This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening, and entertaining guide.

    Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece.Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    Longtime skateboard artist Sean Cliver put together this staggering survey of over 1,000 skateboard graphics from the last 30 years, creating an indispensable insiders' history as he did so.Alongside his own history, Sean has assembled a wealth of recollections and stories from prominent artists and skateboarders such as: Andy Howell, Barry McGee, Ed Templeton, Steve Caballero, and Tony Hawk.The end result is a fascinating historical account of art in the skateboard subculture, as told by those directly involved with shaping its legendary creative face.

    He was less an actor than a symbol, the most popular pop icon of the 20th century, & one of the most important political figures in America. People shaped their lives or adopted political stands to conform to him as a template of authentic Americanism. Wayne became the lens which people saw their own & their country's history. In this groundbreaking study of the relationship between politics & popular culture, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wills focuses on the manufacture of "John Wayne" from the raw materials of Marion Morrison, the person born in Iowa who became a myth, his own reality swallowed up in his meaning as master directors such as John Ford crafted films that made him a personification of America's frontier myth. Unlike other actors & actresses with whom we associate political views, Wayne embodied a politics of large meanings--a politics of gender (male), ideology (patriot), character (self-reliant) & personal responsibility. It was a politics of implicit dogmas often transcending his own views & behavior. Altho Wayne avoided serving in WWII, he became, thru screen roles, the model of the American soldier. Likewise, altho his popular image is that of a staunch anti-Communist, in reality he avoided taking a stand in the ideological war that raged in Hollywood until after the issue had been decided. He acquired his larger political meaning gradually, as he moved from one film role to the next: from the young, individualist cowboy hero (Ringo Kid in Stagecoach) to the middle-aged authority figure weighed down with responsibility (Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima) to the cool, determined patriot in the midst of Cold War dangers (Davy Crockett in The Alamo) to the elderly lone survivor of a past heroic time (Rooster Cogburn in True Grit). Wayne himself became aware of his larger political meaning only thru a progressive act of self-identification, in much the same way that his fans came to associate their ideals with his screen personae. In this work, the biography of an idea, Wills shows how Wayne & the Hollywood image factories distorted or ignored important facts of his life to create his myth. Wills shows how Wayne, thru his screen characters, spoke to the needs of his audience at crucial periods in history, & how in response Americans invested their emotions in that embodiment of their deepest myths. John Wayne's America traces the way Wayne's countrymen became "entangled in his story, by the dreams he shaped or inhibited in us or in others, by the things he validated & those he scorned, by the particular definition he gave to 'being American.'"

    The only difference between Ann and every other eighteen-year-old in the United States was that she was the editor of Tiger Beat, the hottest teen magazine in the country. Ann traveled the world, interviewing the Monkees, Paul Revere and The Raiders, David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, the Bee Gees and the Osmonds. She schmoozed with the rich and famous in Hollywood, Hawaii and London, visited Elvis on the set of one of his movies, and joined the hottest rock stars in the recording studio. As a correspondent for the London-based New Musical Express, Ann covered America’s “British Invasion” from these shores. She jetted to San Francisco with Jefferson Airplane, and photographed the Rolling Stones and the Who. She made dinner for Harry Nilsson, rode in Bobby Sherman’s Rolls Royce, and had her heart broken by a superstar—a story she’s kept to herself until now. In Meow! My Groovy Life with Tiger Beat’s Teen Idols, Ann Moses is breaking her silence—about that heartbreaking rock-star romance, as well as what it was like to spend every day with the stars we all loved as kids, besides. She’ll squeal on Bobby Sherman (was he really that nice?), David Cassidy (was he really that snotty?), and the Monkees (which of them was a big meanie?). She’ll tell you everything she couldn’t tell you in the pages of Tiger Beat, back when it was her job to fuel your fantasy about your fave raves.

    Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major “family friendly” leisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire. Well Met approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now—our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments. In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire’s innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

    Cultural critic Michael Bronski collects a sampling of these now little-known gay erotic writings—some by writers long forgotten, some never known and a few now famous. Through them, Bronski challenges many long-held views of American postwar fiction and the rise of gay literature, as well as of the culture at large.