"YOU'RE EITHER ON THE BUS OR OFF THE BUS"

WOLFE, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (Cologne): Taschen, (2016). Small folio, original pictorial cloth, original slipcase, original shipping box. $700.

Signed limited edition, one of 1768 copies (out of a total of 1968 copies) of Wolfe's dazzling reinvention of the non-fiction novel, with photographs by Lawrence Schiller and Ted Streshinsky, signed by Wolfe.

"Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to an LSD enthusiast, to the messianic leader of a mystical band of Merry Pranksters, to a fugitive from the FBI, California police and Mexican Federales. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a celebration of psychedelia, of all its sounds and costumes, colors and fantasies… It is an astonishing, enlightening, at times baffling and explosively funny book" (New York Times). "In this Collector's Edition, signed by Tom Wolfe, an abridge Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is published in traditional letterpress, with facsimile reproductions of Wolfe's manuscript pages, as well as Ken Kesey's jailhouse journals, handbills, and underground magazines of the period. Interweaving the prose and ephemera are photographic essays from Lawrence Schiller, whose coverage of the acid scene for Life magazine helped inspire Wolfe to write his story, and Ted Streshinsky, who accompanied Wolfe while reporting for the New York Herald Tribune. These photographs—together with those of poet Allen Ginsberg and other photographers who covered the scene—paint a vivid picture of the counterculture world that set Wolfe's scene" (Taschen).

Fine condition.