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Thursday, February 20, 2020

RAW and the origins of Boing Boing



In connection with the publication of Ishtar Rising by Hilaritas Press, Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing reprinted the piece Christina Pearson, RAW's daughter, wrote for the official email announcement of the book. It's a great piece, which I assume many of you already have read, as I linked to it earlier on this blog. But I also wanted to draw attention to what Mark wrote in his intro:

As you might know, Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) is one of Boing Boing's patron saints. Raw's humor, skepticism, optimism, and ability to reveal the deep weirdness underlying almost everything were deeply influential to Carla and me when we launched bOING bOING as a zine in 1987. In fact, we kind of started the zine as an excuse to interview RAW at his house in Santa Monica that year. I'm very grateful I was able to get to know RAW, and honored that he wrote a regular column for bOING bOING. I'm also grateful to have become a friend of Bob's daughter, Christina, a delightful person who is active in keeping her father's books in print. Here's an essay Christina wrote about a new edition of Ishtar Rising, a book originally published by Playboy Press called The Book of the Breast. — Mark

I didn't know a desire to interview RAW helped launch the whole Boing Boing publishing empire. You can get that first issue with the RAW interview and other issues at the Internet Archive.

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