The Love Book

Lenore Kandel

Beat poet Lenore Kandel (born 1932) wrote at the very heart of the Beat Movement. Because only two of her books have ever been published, this one and Word Alchemy, she is generally not well known, or known only as one of Gary Snyder's ex-girlfriends or as the basis for Kerouac's character Ramona Swartz in the novel Big Sur, but she is nevertheless highly regarded by many modern poets.

In 1966 she synthesized the essence of the Free Speech Movement and the nascent Hippie Movement/Love One Another vibe that was to grow into 1967's Summer of Love, writing and publishing this incendiary erotic masterpiece of modern poetry. The Love Book's four poems celebrate the divine nature of sexuality, offering a potent and eloquent testament to physical, sexual love, succinct and full of explicit language.

That explicit language led to the book being confiscated by San Francisco police in November 1966, with raids on City Lights Bookstore and the Haight-Ashbury District's Psychedelic Shop which led to the arrest of three booksellers. The obscenity trial that followed was at the time the longest running trial in San Francisco history. That court's guilty verdict was appealed all the way to the California Supreme Court, which upheld the obscenity ruling in 1967. Despite that conviction being overturned by a Federal District Court in 1974, The Love Book was never reprinted until 2003, when, after 37 years, Lenore Kandel allowed the tiny poetry publishing house Superstition Street Press to republish the book in this limited-to-500 copies fine letterpress edition. Each edition is hand numbered.

This timeless, genre-defying hymn to lust and love was banned as part of an illegal program of harassment, arrests, and mass confiscations instituted by then-governor Ronald Reagan. Now The Love Book is back in all its notorius glory to claim its rightful place in San Francisco Bay Area literary history. This edition features a newly designed three color cover, hand-stitched binding, a printing history, and archival quality paper.

"When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell."
&Lenore Kandel

2003 reprint of 1966 book, three-color cover, 7" x 8 3/8", 16 pages, publishing history. Published by Superstition Street Press.
ISBN 978-0-9665313-1-2  paper

$20.00