The Invention of the Letter-- a rare hand-drawn book by Beat poet and Zen teacher
Philip Whalen. Though lesser-known than his peers
Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg, Whalen was a wonderful and subtle poet who was also one of the first Americans to study Zen in Japan. (He appears in Kerouac novels like
The Dharma Bums under pseudonyms like Warren Coughlin and Ben Fagin, "a quiet, bespectacled booboo, smiling over books.") He met
Gary Snyder and
Lew Welch at Reed College, where he studied calligraphy with the illustrious
Lloyd Reynolds. While in Kyoto in 1966, Whalen sketched out a charming fable about the invention of language in the Garden of Eden that was eventually published by pioneering communard
Irving Rosenthal and given away for free at a 1968 reading in San Francisco.
The Invention of the Letter has since become extremely scarce and is now available
online for curious scholars and Beat fellow travelers.
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