last wednesday, i was honored to be at a book signing event for a rather momentous and very important little poster book project. scott mcdougall is one of the best experts i’ve ever met on all things psychedelia. his own artwork (he desgned the cover, for instance) is enough to entrench him into the hall of fame. that’s him in the first photogrpah (on the left side. the guy on the right is glenn bebee, who did all the production work on the book).
the book is called “Split-Fountain Hieroglyphics” and is a documentation of the art of the PYSYCHEDELIC CONCERT POSTER in the northwest. it’s a pretty extraordinary collection (which i helped put together over the years. this book took 30+ years to pu together!). it documents the history and displays as complete a collection as is possible to assemble. and, it’s amazing. nobody ever spent a lot of time looking at seattle psychedelia, so all this stunning work has been virtually ignored except by collectors of the arcane.
scott’s collection of all these astonishing posters into one volume is one of those things that every red blooded poster fan or any stripe should thank him for. the final photo shows me (i wrote the foreword) on the far left, ben marks (the editor) is in the middle and on the far right is the legendary John Moehring – who is the undisputed heavyweight grand master of seattle psychedlic posters. i would imagine that maybe as much as half of the book is his poster work!
john flew up from houston (where he lives now) to autograph copies of the book. it was so much fun telling him how important his poster work has been to so many people (he was a huge influence on me, for instance). HE HAD NO IDEA! his poster work from that era was completely forgotten about and left in the past by john. to find out his old poster work was avidly collected and admired and (now) well documented came as a total SURPRISE to him. he seemed like he was on the verge of tears all evening. it was so sweet.
