San Francisco Oracle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, [1] was an underground newspaper published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city. Allen Cohen (1940–2004), the editor and Michael Bowen, the art director, founded the publication. The Oracle was among the founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate.
The Oracle combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury. It was arguably the outstanding example of psychedelia within countercultural "underground" press, noted for experimental multicolored design. Oracle contributors included many significant San Francisco-area artists of the time, including Bruce Conner and Rick Griffin. It featured such beat writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure.
At its peak, the publication's print run was about 125,000, but its editors estimated that ample pass-around readership brought their circulation above half a million.
The colorful pages were a result of putting different inks on the press: perhaps red at the left, and blue on the right. As the press printed, the inks would mix into purple at the center. Many publications followed this lead, including Sydney's Tomato Press run by Pat Woolley, an early distributor of the San Francisco Oracle.
A spin-off in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Oracle, existed for a short time.
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