ABSTRACT

In the 1960s the book as an artefact, and literature as a project, seemed to be in crisis. In 1964 media guru Marshall McLuhan would write:

But intimations of the death of the book actually augured a rebirth, of the literary paperback in particular, as the decade saw books entering new markets and contributing to the formation of new cultural environments. The fortunes of the book and the domain of ‘the literary’ were caught up in the period’s accelerating movements of symbolic exchange and cultural mutation in ways that, while transfiguring books, made them and their iconicity central to the new pop and subcultural environments. In a 1997 radio retrospective on the paperback in the sixties, Richard Neville, once editor of the underground magazine Oz, stressed the ‘talismanic significance’ of books during the period and Andy Martin suggested that ‘The key fashion accessories, the badges of enlightenment of the sixties were books. Hesse or Huxley, sticking out of the back pocket of your jeans, were pure spiritual chic’ (Paperback Writers 1997). The book came to function as an ‘accessory’ in the pop environments of the sixties, but an accessory that also signalled access to culture, democratising territories which were previously guarded preserves with controlled functions, becoming iconic reference points on an emerging bohemian cultural map.