Boog published its first zine, ManAlive!, on the autumnal equinox in 1992. Articles and reviews went on the outer pages, and the inside section, housing all of the poetry and prose, was called Booglit—short for the press name, Boog Literature, and something that sounded like booklet, maybe even spellchecked that way, i don’t quite remember.
After doing ManAlive! through 1995, in 1996 I transitioned from a digest-sized zine to a letter-sized one, which I called Booglit. At first it started as a free East Village newsprint publication (sound familiar?) with a glue binding. We printed a few thousand copies, but ads were hard to come by then, so for the next issue it shifted back to a digest-size zine that sold for $3 or so.
Come the third issue, I shifted gears again, moving back to a letter-sized zine, but this time with a bxw glossy printed cover with a spot color, a docuteched guts, and a 100-copy print run. By issue 5, our tribute to our late teacher, Allen Ginsberg, we shifted to a full-color cover, which was painted by longtime friend and Boog artist Madeleine Hope (Meg) Arthurs, a piece that still wows me everyday when I walk by copy of it in my apartment. Inside were words I gathered with a big assist from Brendan Lorber, featuring work from (in order):
Herschel Silverman
Bob Rosenthal
Indigo (Wako Sato)
Bob Holman
Kent Fielding
Ben Schafer
Beau Sia
Tom Devaney
Rani Singh
Barry Gifford
Allen’s brother Eugene Brooks
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Eliot Katz
and Mr. Lorber himself
Plus Bob Rosenthal was real kind to get us a piece written by Allen less than two weeks before his death.
My edit, with some notes from my journal from the day Allen passed, concludes the issue.
So here, for the first time since the late nineties, it’s Booglit 5: Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997.