Gandalf’s Garden magazine

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Issue One.

It’s taken a while but this short-lived underground magazine has finally been scanned and posted online. (It’s actually been available since 2019 but I only just discovered it.) Gandalf’s Garden was a small British publication, edited by Muz Murray, that preferred the definition “overground” to “underground”. Six issues were published in London from 1968 to 1969. There was also an affiliated shop of the same name situated in the World’s End area of Chelsea.

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Issue Two.

Having only seen a few sample pages before now it’s been good to look through the magazine’s entire run. The editorial attitude was very different to the often strident and aggressive Oz, with whom it shared a cover artist, John Hurford. Political revolution was a recurrent obsession in the pages of Oz—for some of the writers, anyway—and for a few months seemed like a tangible possibility following the events in Paris in May, 1968. The political stance of Gandalf’s Garden was more concerned with a revolution in the head, reflecting the philosophical side of hippy culture: Eastern religion, occultism, Earth mysteries and so on; issues four to six were subtitled “Mystical Scene Magazine”. The most well-known contributor was BBC radio DJ John Peel who wrote a short column for the first couple of issues, a reminder that the Peel public persona in the late 1960s was very different from the sardonic champion of all things punk ten years later. “Never trust a hippy” unless that hippy can make you famous by playing your singles on his radio show…

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Issue Three.

Peel doesn’t say much about music in his columns, but music was a staple subject of the underground mags, so Gandalf’s Garden has interviews with the Third Ear Band, Marc Bolan, The Soft Machine and Quintessence. Meanwhile, Donovan pops up in the letters page, sending the staff good wishes and his greetings to “Lemon” Peel.

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Issue Four.

There’s also a letter from Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, asking to be put on the magazine’s mailing list. Trench was a notable flying-saucer obsessive (previously) who I expect would have enjoyed the features by Colin Bord about the UFO worshippers of the Aetherius Society, and the lost continent of Mu. I only found out recently that Bord began his writing and photography career in these pages (see this Wormwoodiana post which leads to this interview with Janet Bord). Janet and Colin Bord put together a series of popular guides in the 1970s and 80s to Britain’s mystic and mythic sites, good books on the whole if you approach them with a sceptical frame of mind. The Bords never ventured as far into the crankosphere as John Michell but they follow the Michell thesis about Alfred Watkins’ ley lines being channels of “Earth energy” rather than trading routes. (Archaeologists have never accepted any of these theories.) The readers of Gandalf’s Garden were the target audience for this kind of thing—issue four has a feature about Katharine Maltwood’s spurious but fascinating “Glastonbury Zodiac”—and sure enough there’s an ad for Michell’s landmark treatise, The View Over Atlantis, in the final issue. In this respect the magazine was probably ahead of its time, folding just as a wave of general interest in all manner of esoteric subjects was about to break. With better funding (and a replacement for its franchise-baiting title) Gandalf’s Garden might have found a niche as an early New Age publication.

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Issue Five.

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Issue Six.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Oz magazine online
The Trials of Oz
Early British Trackways
The art of John Hurford

Crank book covers

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Cover art by Tony Roberts, 1974. A book I received as a present for Christmas, 1974. Also the first place I encountered the words “Popol Vuh”, before discovering the music of Florian Fricke and co. a few years later.

Yes, “crank” is a pejorative word but it’s used with some degree of affection, as in “harmless crank”. It’s also a convenient umbrella term for the books referred to in the weekend post which embrace diverse subjects, from lost continents and “Earth energy” to ancient astronauts and flying saucers.

The prime crank decade was the 1970s, a period when publishers were falling over themselves to cash-in on the massive popularity of Erich von Däniken’s dubious investigations, while also catering to the by-products of the hippy era and the occult revival. Books by Charles Fort, Immanuel Velikovsky and James Churchward (the Mu series) all received reprints, with some appearing in paperback for the first time. The British editions of these books were published by imprints like Corgi, Panther and Sphere who were also publishing large quantities of science fiction, a situation that led to many crank titles being packaged as though they were fiction or fantasy. Sphere was in the vanguard, presenting a wide range of books with the same cover designs, cover artists and Novel Gothic typeface as their SF titles. A cynical move, no doubt, but it also makes the crank books seem more like fiction than their authors might have intended.

This post presents a selection of crank titles with cover art by SF artists but there are many more examples out there. (Watch the skies!) I’ve limited the selection to British publishers but the same syndrome was evident in American publishing, as documented at Absolute Elsewhere. And I’ve included a couple of books by sceptics John Sladek and Dr. Christopher Evans. These were intended to dismantle the claims of L. Ron Hubbard, Erich von Däniken and co. but were still packaged in paperback to resemble the books they were attacking. The major demolition of Von Däniken is Ronald Story’s The Space Gods Revealed but covers for that one have always been relatively restrained.

Missing from this list are three paintings by SF artist Peter Jones for books by Dr. Celia Green. The art may be seen in Jones’s Solar Wind collection but I couldn’t find any of the printed covers, which suggests they had a limited run if they were printed at all. These are odd for being typical fantasy imagery attached to serious studies of lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences. Dr. Green is a philosopher and science researcher (she coined the term “out-of-body experience”) so she doesn’t belong on a crank list in any case. Also absent is the most popular British cover illustrator of the decade, Chris Foss, who would have been too busy working through his fiction commissions and creating designs for feature films.

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Cover art by Tony Roberts (?), 1974.

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Cover art by Bruce Pennington, 1974.

Evans was a computer scientist, an occasional contributor to New Worlds magazine, and also the model for the deranged Vaughan in JG Ballard’s Crash. Cults of Unreason investigates crank sects such as the flying-saucer worshippers of the Aetherius Society (hence the cover art), and the Scientologists who caused a stir in Britain in the 1960s when L. Ron Hubbard set up an outpost at East Grinstead.

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Cover art by Colin Hay, 1974.

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Cover art by Angus McKie, 1979.

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