Presented at Cardiff University's 'Livres d'Artistes: The Artist's Book and Theory and Practice' conference (4-6 December 2015). Adapted from chapter of MA dissertation.

1. Scenarios of the Revolution
Inventory Books as Sites of
Countercultural Representation
Leah Henrickson
MA Graduate, School of Advanced Study (University of London)

2. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

3. War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic
Situations That Could be Eliminated by More Feedforward (1968)

4. I Seem To Be a Verb (1970)

5. Herman Kahnsciousness: The Megaton Ideas of the One-Man Think Tank (1973)

6. Fast-paced verbal-visual collages,
intermedia hybrids, nonlinear “COLLIDE-O-
SCOPIC” look-arounds aimed squarely at
the contemporary scene and at younger
readers, INVENTORY BOOKS made the
rhythmic sequencing, laying, and
interleaving of photographic-textual
combinations their stock and trade.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), p. 27.

7. [Thought association] has an irreducibly
personal and private or “secret” dimension
to it. ... [but] at the same time, because most
of its building materials are common to all –
are in fact common places – thought-
association is also fully social and
political, a truly civic activity.
Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998; repr. 2008), p. 21.

8. Herman Kahnsciousness: The Megaton Ideas of the One-Man Think Tank (1973)

9. They don’t like reason, which differentiates
man from animal... They don’t see
themselves mirrored in the past. Some see
themselves as a new species.
Herman Kahn and Jerome Agel, Herman Kahnsciousness: The Megaton Ideas of the One-Man Think Tank (New York: New
American Library, 1973), p. 16.

10. Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution (1970)

11. The countercultural mode reveled in tangents,
metaphors, unresolved contradictions,
conscious ruptures of logic and reason; it was
expressly anti-linear, anti-teleological, rooted
in the present, disdainful of thought processes
that were circumscribed by causation and
consequence. Countercultural knowledge
can’t be accurately represented by a
straight line, or even the squiggly line; a more
evocative figure would be the matrix, or
perhaps the concentric circle.
Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, ‘Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s’ in Imagine Nation: The
American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, ed. by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.
5-14 (p. 13).

12. Thank you.
Leah Henrickson
twitter.com/bhilluminated