The author's first work
PELIEU, Claude; [Mary BEACH (translator)]. Automatic Pilot. San Francisco: Fug Press. 1964.
4to. Original white wrappers, front and rear covers lettered in black; half-tone portrait of the author on front cover; stapled binding; minimal pen stain to front cover; foxing to edges; internally clean; otherwise very good.
First edition, first printing, of the extremely scarce first book of the French Beat poet, printed at Ed Sander's Fuck You Press and sold by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books.
The blurb to Automatic Pilot reads, "Claude Pelieu…when asked for biographical info, ..replies with phantom calligraphy". The French artist, poet and translator, Claude Pelieu met his future wife Mary Beach, translator of this work and also the owner of Beach Books, Texts and Documents, in 1962. Following exchange with Allen Ginsberg, as well as the prolific Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Publishing House, they were eventually persuaded to move to San Francisco- the very epicentre of the blossoming Beat movement. In the late 1960's, they relocated to New York and established intimate connections with an exciting variety of revolutionary collaborators- writers and artists such as William Burroughs and Ed Sanders. Sanders was a pioneer of the mimeograph revolution Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts which represented the agenda of the movement with its preference for accessible production and its printing of erotic poetry; free love an act they perceived to be as fierce as political dynamite.
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