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81.
HOME GROWN #1-10 (London: Alchemy Publications, June 1977 - Winter 1981) - all published + original cartoon artwork by Ed Barker + more.
Each 34pp.-62pp. Illustrated throughout with colour and b/w photographs, cartoons and drawings. Edited and published by Lee Harris.
A complete run of Europe's first dope magazine, including the re-issue of #1 from Winter 1982/83, which features some additions and deletions. Both these editions of the first issue, as well as the last, have been SIGNED by Lee Harris.
His opening editorial stated the magazine’s aim as “presenting an enlightened and informative, as well as entertaining, attitude to dope and related subjects - views and approaches not expressed by the popular press and other media.”
Includes contributions from, and/or interviews with: Timothy Leary; Michael Hollingshead; George Andrews; Steve Abrams; Mick Farren; Peter Tosh; Patti Smith; Alexis Korner; Gilbert Shelton; Peter Stafford and Bruce Eisner.
Other contributors include Mim Scala (introduced to Lee Harris by Michael Hollingshead) on the Gnaoua trance musicians; Mervyn Harris (author of "The Dilly Boys"); Ron Reid; John May (co-editor of the early issues); Brian Barritt; Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons (on New Wave and speed); Max Handley (on the Operation Julie trial); George Melly (“A Jazzman's View of Dope”); Heathcote Williams (“The Psychedelic Pogrom”); Antonil; Bill Levy; Simon Vinkenoog (host of the first International Cannabis Legalisation Conference in Amsterdam, “The Kosmos”, co-sponsored by Home Grown and High Times); Don Irving; Harry Podlewski (of the Release collective); Robert Randall (a member of NORML’s advisory board); Harry Shapiro (his first appearance in print); Paul Krassner; Tim Malyon (“Bibles in the Ganja Fields”, 7pp.); Lee Harris (Harry Anslinger’s “Assassin of Youth”, a guide to Amsterdam’s coffee shops, and more); and artwork and cartoons by Ed Barker, Antonio Ghura (whose spoof advert on the back cover of the premiere issue brought lawyers' letters from a tobacco company), John Higgins, Bryan Talbot, Cliff Harper, Mikki Rain, and others + ads. for head shops (including Lee Harris’s own store, Alchemy, which first began trading on the Portobello Road in April 1972); the Legalise Cannabis Campaign (inaugurated at a public meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster in London on June 3, 1978); purveyors of smoking paraphernalia; and coffee shops in Amsterdam.
All issues Very Good plus to Near Fine.
Together with:
i) Ed Barker’s original artwork for his cartoon spoofing Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine habit, as published on page 7 in the fifth issue of Home Grown. Eight panels drawn in black ink on artist board (36x14.5cm.);
ii) layout for the ad. for Proto-Pipe, as published on page 4 of the second edition of the first issue (32x22.5cm.);
iii) original colour separation negatives for the Home Grown logo (designed by Hamish Orr), and the front covers of issues #7 and #8 (five sheets in total);
iv) Alchemical Almanac & Handbook of Herbal Highs. London: Alchemy, 1972. Wrps., 48pp. Illustrated. Printed in different colour inks. Lee Harris’s first publication, a descriptive guide to wormwood, skullcap, betel, snakeroot, mandrake et al, plus illustrated texts on tantric badges, ancient amulets, and ads. for the Cannabis Action Reform Organisation, the Third Ear Band, and the Alchemy catalogue (Harris named his head shop after the Alchemical Wedding at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968, the poster design for which is reproduced on the booklet’s back cover);
v) Guide To The East. London: Alchemy Publications, 1973. Wrps., 54pp. Maps. The second Alchemical Almanac, a hip guide to hitching from Istanbul to India (“common sense on everything from the Taj Mahal to Tampax!”), with sections on Goa and Nepal, and advice on local transport, dope prices, etc. (+ promo flyer);
vi) two flyers relating to Lee Harris’s arrest and jail sentence in 1990 for “stocking pipes, papers and accessories alleged to be used by drug takers” (quashed on appeal);
vii) Alchemy - 30 Years of Counter Culture (London: Arkadia Productions, 2002). CD compilation produced by Lee Harris featuring contributions from Howard Marks, Brian Barritt, Youth, Raja Ram, Harris himself, and others. As new.
The first issue of Home Grown was published on the same day in 1977 as a Release-organised group of about 500 people lobbied Parliament, and quickly sold out. The print run for the second issue was expanded to 25,000, aided by distribution in the US, and then to 30,000 for the third, the first to be made available in Europe and elsewhere. Production quality and page count increased along the way, but the reluctance of retailers to stock it and its failure to make money eventually proved unsustainable, leading to its demise after only ten issues.
Lee Harris later wrote that “Home Grown was my ‘labour of love’ and it captured the spirit of the times. It covered diverse subjects; the plight of cannabis smugglers languishing in prisons abroad, Free Festivals, the biggest LSD bust, Operation Julie, the Smokey Bears picnics, the campaign to legalise cannabis, the CIA drug experiments, the coffee shops of Amsterdam, Rastafarians and reggae, and the first International Cannabis Legalisation conference at the Kosmos in Amsterdam in 1980.”
A superb set of this pioneering drug publication, described by historian Andy Roberts as “more than a drug magazine... Home Grown was a rallying call, a pulse of psychoactive weirdness”.
