ASPEN: The Magazine in a Box

Complete first-edition, 10-issue run of this elaborately produced and hugely influential artists' magazine, one of the defining publications of the 1960s.

• Sold as a set of 10 volumes.
• Edited by Phyllis Johnson.
• New York: Roaring Fork / Aspen Magazine, 1965-1971.
• Also includes: original 1965 subscriber's letter and nine clipped advertisements for Aspen.

Intricate and ornate, Aspen appeared irregularly over the second half of the 1960s and through 10 issues assembled one of the most impressive rosters of writers and artists to appear in any magazine of the time: J.G. Ballard (an excerpt from Crash), Roland Barthes ("Death of the Author"), Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, John Cage, John Cale, Merce Cunningham, Willem De Kooning, Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Dan Graham, Al Hansen, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, John Lennon, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Marshall McLuhan, Jonas Mekas, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Lou Reed, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Susan Sontag, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and La Monte Young, to name only a fraction.

Yet where Aspen truly excelled was in its innovative design: "Commissioning contemporary artists to design and guest-edit the magazine, [Johnson] transformed Aspen into a miniature traveling gallery [that attested] to the potential of the magazine as a new kind of artistic medium" (Allen 43). Johnson described Aspen as "the first three-dimensional magazine"; issues came in a variety of enclosures and formats, and included numerous flexi-disks of both spoken word and music (13 in all), puzzles and other elements for readers to assemble, die-cut inserts, flip books and even a Super-8 movie. While never a financial success (what little advertising was sold was relegated to entirely separate portions of each issue and hence were easily overlooked by readers), ASPEN has gone on to wield enormous influence on subsequent publications, from Nest, to Avalanche, to McSweeney's. It remains an important document of "minimalism, conceptual art, and related practices" (ibid). A quintessential magazine of the era.