The Zero-Tolerance Factor and Other Poems
Urgent Beauty Squad

The Zero-Tolerance Factor and Other Poems

Regular price $20.00

Richard Inskip Mayes (writing here as L. J. Brutus) was a Princeton-educated poet from Metuchen, moonlighting as an English Lit professor in Chicago. Mayes developed his Beat sensibility over drink with Allen Ginsberg at the San Remo Room in NYC in the late 1950s. Later, Mayes took his family to San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

His son, David Mayes, was there for the adventure. The younger Mayes is now a key fixture in the printing industry in Los Angeles. He put together this touching, fascinating, and time-travelling artist book.

It's as much a book of photography as it is a book of poems. The poems are photographs of the elder Mayes' original typescripts, along with candid photography from the period. The poems react to the Vietnam War, baseball, dancing girls, fistfights, cars, academia, and bar-maids. Read the story of how it was designed by Stefan G. Bucher / 344 Design here.

The book is a portal into the tumultuous period from the late 1950s to the 1980s. So glad we found it!

Perfect bound. 92 pages. 6.5" x 7.5"


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