Existing comment:
Wallace Berman (1926–1976, American)
Semina no. 1, 1955
Semina was a loose-leaf journal of collage and poetry -- a proto-zine -- produced by Wallace Berman for his friends between 1955 and 1964. Each copy of the nine issues was hand-printed, hand-assembled, and designed to be read in no distinct order. Semina no. 1 contained a drawing by the artist Cameron, two photographs by Walter Hopps, and poems by Jean Cocteau, Marion Grogan, and Hermann Hesse, among others. The front cover features a photograph of Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel), the mysterious underground darling with whom Berman became friends in the early 1950s. Cameron was a notorious occultist, and both she and her husband, Jack Parsons (a key founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, student of Aleister Crowley, and former collaborator of L. Ron Hubbard), were investigated by the FBI for their practices in sex magic.
-- Lizz Hamilton |