Bardo Matrix: A Kathmandu Beat Poetry Press Hot Sale Online

The Bardo Matrix Press was founded in Kathmandu in the early 1970s by Velvet Underground drummer, artist, and poet Angus MacLise, alongside the poet and photographer Ira Cohen. Under the Bardo Matrix banner, MacLise and Cohen issued pamphlets, booklets, posters, books, and broadsides authored by themselves and fellow travelers. And yet, while at once remotely located in Nepal, the press also managed to publish some of the most important names in Western post-war literature: Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, and Charles Henri Ford.

The publications were printed in editions of anywhere from a couple of dozen to a few hundred, usually utilizing fine printing techniques such as wood blocks, letterpress, special inks, and handmade paper. There was a built-in audience for these publications on “Freak Street” in Kathmandu, where people in the circle of Bardo Matrix operated a small bookshop which did decent business selling wood-block printed headshop posters alongside poetry broadsides, these publications, as well as second-hand English language paperback books.

This pamphlet includes a bibliography of the press, some select illustrations, as well as essays by Ira Cohen and Johan Kugelberg. It was published on occasion of a 2014 exhibit at the Grolier Club in New York City.

Editor: Johan Kugelberg
Publisher: Boo-Hooray
Page Count: 24pp
Size: 5 x 8
Notes: saddle-stitched, b/w