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Yesterday’s book purchase was a small poetry collection from the magical year of 1967, edited by Peter Roche. Despite its Beatles cash-in title, Love, Love, Love: The New Love Poetry, not everything here is lightweight fare, Adrian Mitchell’s Peace is Milk is aimed more at the war in Vietnam than some object of affection. Among the other contributors there are the poets one would expect such as Roger McGough and Michael Horovitz, also Pete Brown who wrote lyrics for Cream and later had his own band, Piblokto. And there are contributions from Libby Houston, the wife of Mal Dean, an artist notable for his illustrations for Mike Moorcock’s books of the period and (later) some album sleeves for Pete Brown and others. Some of Libby’s poems appeared in the 50th anniversary edition of New Worlds magazine, along with an illustration by yours truly.

Contents aside, I picked this up mainly for the cover which I guessed was the work of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, aka Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, along with Martin Sharp the leading psychedelic artists in the UK during the late Sixties. This proved to be a good guess as the book can be seen on this Hapshash page and if I’d have looked closer while in the shop I’d have seen their name written in tiny letters on the purple “O”. Not a difficult guess, their swirly lettering designs are very distinctive. See the full groovy cover here.

• A Hapshash and the Coloured Coat gallery

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dutch psychedelia
• Family Dog postcards
• The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream revisited