Thanks to efforts from Mike Gathers and Bobby Campbell, several out-of-print Timothy Leary ebooks have become available. Here are the relevant download links (also currently on the home page of RAWilsonfans.org):
zipped Neurologic.epub or Neurologic.pdf
zipped StarSeed.epub or StarSeed.pdf
The Periodic Table of Energy recovered
Michael Horowitz’s An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary.pdf
zip of Confessions of Hope Fiend.epub
some context behind and a summary of Timothy Leary’s Confessions of a Hope Fiend
zip of Leary’s Jail Notes.epub (not much editing or formatting)
head over to archive.org for much more
Of course, other Leary books remain commercially available, and I've bought some of them, including the Hilaritas Press edition of Terra II, a Way Out.
Bobby Campbell got the ball rolling by recovering and the publishing The Periodic Table of Energy, from what he found at the Timothy Leary archives at the New York Public Library. Mike Gathers has made the other ebooks available. Here is some background from Mike (personal correspondence):
"Jail Notes could use some formatting to match the original document, and everything (the epubs), particularly Hope Fiend, could use a thorough proof reading, but I'm not that. I had a burst of activity and now it feels done.
"As you know I've been writing on the history of the 8C model, which became a deep dive into Leary's thinking from his 1950 PHD thesis through the seventies, so I had accumulated a few things beyond the epubs and figured I'd put them all in one place or two places, I guess - it's all right up front on the home page now... Plus Bobby's recent monumental score on PToE. But I'd been putting bugs in Rasa's ear about reprinting the out of print Leary stuff for years, but the Leary stuff is out of print for a reason. The copyrights are all tangled up with others. Michael Hauchard owns the full copyright to Hope Fiend. The Leary estate, from what I gather, seems rather ephemeral. It seems to have ended up back in Zach Leary's hands by default, and when Rasa asked if there was anything more Hilaritas could do after Terra II, he mentioned Neurocomics. Well that was co-written by Leonardo DiCaprio's father and the point there is that it's not a Leary estate item, and the original publisher is still around, but so far unresponsive.
"Then finally I re-remembered - when you mentioned epub conversion of Neurologic - that you can just do things. So I started working on Hope Fiend, which didn't convert well, and took some effort to restore and surely still has a lot of artifacts that I missed, and then I tried converting StarSeed to take a break from Hope Fiend, and it converted beautifully. Jail Notes converted well but has a lot of formatting changes that I just don't feel like dealing with.
"There is a politics book, The Curse of the Oval Room, from that same early seventies time period, but it's ultra rare and I have yet to find a pdf. High Times holds the copyright allegedly and it seems they have a strong team of lawyers backing that. And PToE indicates that there's a proto-Exo-Psychology called Interstellar Neurogenetics out there, but I have not seen a single trace of that document and have become somewhat skeptical of its existence.
"Another out of print book that is, I think, still owned by Ronin, is Changing My Mind. Maybe Ronin made a sacrificial offering of that one when they generated the bastardized crap they put out today. Plenty of cheapish used copies of that available, it's just curious to me that Ronin has it listed on their website, but keeps it out of print.
"Aside from interviews and talks, there isn't all that much of Leary's to collect and organize like a RAWFans.org or RAWArchive.de. Penner's Leary: The Harvard Years filled in a lot of the gaps from 60-65 and I think what I just put up fills many of the remaining gaps that can be filled. The rest of his written material can be found in books scattered about with various publishers still in print or available used or here: https://archive.org/details/leary_timothy_detailed. I'm sure there are some exceptions - a paper or three such as a somewhat infamous 1973 Psychology Today paper based on Politics of Ecstacy/Hedonic Imperative talks he was giving in late 1969 - but those are few and far between. A part of me now wants to track that down, and the other part of me says, meh, just read Politics of Ecstasy."
When I asked Mike if I could quote all that, he said yes, and added this bit: "Neurologic and StarSeed are both rather short. Hope Fiend is really the only one of the four that I think would be worthwhile for Hilaritas but who knows who holds the copyrights today. I didn't read Jail Notes, but it's apparently got a Joycean flavor to it and.. well... I asked Flatley about it and he didn't seem impressed. "
1 comment:
Very cool.
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