BOWART, Walter H. (ed.).

£175 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Omen. The first of only two issues of this ecological counterculture magazine, inscribed by the editor Walter Bowart on page three, "Tommy and Suzanne: May your OMENS be many. With love, Walter B. 3.23.70", additionally stamped "complimentary copy". A leader in the 1960s American counterculture movement, Walter Bowart (1939-2007) founded and edited the first underground newspaper in New York City, the East Village Other, in 1965. After moving to Tucson three years later he founded Omen Press, a publishing house for metaphysical books. The Press initially intended to publish Omen monthly (except for June, July, and August) but only two issues were realized: volume one, numbers one (1970) and two (1971). With this first issue Bowart intended to prophesy "the pending doom of the planet and the subsequent aversion of that doom by wise human action" (p. 47), pairing articles and poetry on conservationism, population growth, and pollution with striking and provocative artwork. Important notices on legislation and new research findings were also reprinted from magazines like BioScience, Science, and Scientific American.Contributors to the first issue include Gary Snyder, the Tucson botanist Richard Felger, the Beat poets Lew Welch and Dan Propper, the Sufi scholar Abdol Reza Arasteh and astrologer Dane Rudhyar, and José Argüelles, the Mexican-American New Age author and artist who founded the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970 and was one of the originators of the Earth Day concept.

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