cance of Rampartsand Evergreento the history of design is not as form
givers but as conduits for various graphic forms in the service of politics
and culture.
Evergreen Reviewwas founded in 1957 as a quarterly literary
magazine that published writers and poets whom its parent company,
Grove Press, was already publishing in books. In 1952 Grove Press was a
small, insignificant New York publishing house which was bought by
Barney Rossett, a sympathizer of alternative politics and aficionado of
radical literature whose tastes were influenced by progressive European
writers. Grove was the first to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer,
William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
in America. Each book challenged America’s puritanical values and
intellectual standards; for in those days descriptions of the sexual act were
veiled, and four-letter words were forbidden by the major publishing
institutions. Rossett busted taboos and thwarted convention.
Evergreenbegan in a quarto format, at first publishing Grove’s
authors and expanding outward. Fred Jordan administered to the
unillustrated layout of the quarterly and a few years later the bimonthly.
In the late 1950 s he used art photographs, including pictures by Robert
Frank, as the primary illustration, and eventually he introduced ribald
cartoons by one of Grove’s author/artists, Tomi Ungerer, the black humorist
from Alsace-Lorraine who became the golden boy of American illustration
in the 1960 s. In 1964 , with issue # 32 , Rossett relaunched the magazine as a
monthly, called it simply Evergreen(from a tree that grows in the grove),
and filled it with stories and art designed to provoke the establishment.
Evergreenwas the vortex of cultural flux. “We printed subway and wall
posters showing covers of the magazine with the tagline, ‘Join the Under-
ground,’” recalled Jordan.
That same year, 1964 , Dugald Stermer was hired as art director for
Ramparts. Founded in 1962 ,Rampartswas published by Edward Keating, a
lawyer who had sunk a private fortune into a magazine that he described as
having an anticlerical, liberal Catholic bias. Those early issues of Ramparts,
which Stermer says was named for the “Ramparts We Watched,” looked
like a college literary magazine, with its unrelated typefaces, amateurish
illustrations, and unsophisticated layouts.Rampartswas not a threat to the
body politic. Keating was not an America basher, but rather a concerned
citizen who saw aspects of America turning sour.
Rampartswas the “soft wing” of the left. This began to change in
1964 when Warren Hinckle III, then Ramparts’s brash promotion director,
and Howard Gossage, a veteran San Francisco advertising man (who was also
on the Rampartsadvisory board), gradually took control away from Keating.
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