Euro blotter art / anonymous artist (cause he/she might get busted)

Click for larger. Artist unknown. Typography & text beneath the blotter is mine.

In searching for images to filch for my Albert Hofmann Memorial Quilt, I discovered a huge worldwide underground treasury of Blotter Art -- easily in size and popularity and intense devotion the rival community to the Faux Postage / Mailart community.

Unlike the Mail Artists, almost all Blotter Art is anonymous, because most of the artwork began life as perforated sheets of blotter paper impregnated with tiny but highly effective doses of Dr. Hofmann's naughty "problem child," LSD-25.

LSD, of course, is banned all over Planet Earth for Fun Purposes, and banned for psychiatric therapeutic use, too, so those who manufacture and sell LSD are criminals, and the artists they hire to make their particular batch of LSD distinctive on the market are a little leery about splashing their names all over the sheets of blotter paper destined for the underground commerce.

Living in the USA during the 1960s can give you the false perception that LSD consumed for Fun is an overwhelmingly American Thing. Nope, it's not an American Thing. From the moment the formula leaked out of the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratories in Switzerland, Europeans have been tossing it down their maw and wiggling to the craziest music and doing the most erratic things exactly like Americans (Northern Californians the most passionately).

This blotter art is Euro stuph, each perforated square will send you

"From the land
beyond beyond
From the world
past hope and fear
I bid you, Genie,
now appear."

(1 slice plain: What movie is that from?)

If you've ever taken some of this Bicycle brand of blotter acid, please Leave A Comment and a product review.

If Americans have any special claim to LSD for Fun, this is due to the pioneering efforts of a Harvard psychology professor, Timothy Leary, who, in his respectable suit-and-tie young professor days, became a test subject for early experiments, and very quickly concluded that LSD was the greatest Happy Gift to insufficiently happy humanity since nude sex. For the rest of his life he became a Loud and Ceaseless Public Prophet for and Champion of LSD, regularly in Deep Shit with the law, and the cultural, musical and political life that exploded into the 1960s would be unimaginable without Leary and a few other like-minded figures at the Center of the Cyclone.

If I got this right, Leary was the first husband of the mother of Uma Thurman, the family stayed close, so Leary was always Uncle Timmy as Uma was growing up. Dad is a professor of Oriental philosophy and religion, I think now at Columbia University.

A world without LSD -- unimaginable. Or imaginable: Colorless, gray, unthrilling, boring, routine, ordinary.