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19.
The Yage Letters.
SF: City Lights, 1963. First edition. 12mo. Wrps.
SIGNED and inscribed by Burroughs on the title page: “William S. Burroughs June 13, 1995 to William Gambell”. Gambell was a friend of Burroughs and a former associate of the Merry Pranksters (and, as he once told this cataloguer, apropos of nothing, a fan of Norton, BSA and Triumph motorcycles).
The book takes the form of an epistolary narrative documenting Burroughs’ seven-month journey through the Amazonian jungles of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru in 1953, and its second section features Ginsberg’s “reply” to Burroughs, reporting his own experiences with the drug in Peru seven years later. The epilogue prints a brief letter from Burroughs to Ginsberg (originally published in Floating Bear #5), and a cut-up text, “I Am Dying, Meester” (first published in City Lights Journal #1).
Wrappers somewhat rubbed and creased, o/w Very Good.
