This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, founded in San Francisco in 1970 and formed from the libraries of several private collectors, was a preeminent collection of drug-related literature. Upon its closure, it was acquired by Julio Santo Domingo, substantially bolstering his own collection on the subject; the merged collections formed the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library, now residing here at Harvard as the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
The eponymous Fitz Hugh Ludlow, for his part, was the American author of The hasheesh eater, first published in 1857, and the first English-language work about the hashish experience. With The hasheesh eater, Ludlow followed in the footsteps of Thomas de Quincey, whose 1821 Confessions of an English opium-eater pioneered drug and addiction literature in the English-speaking world. The Santo Domingo Collection naturally includes numerous editions and printings of The hasheesh eater, including this one: a 1975 publication from San Francisco’s Level Press, edited by Michael Horowitz, a writer, archivist, associate of Timothy Leary, and one of the Ludlow Memorial Library’s founders.
This folio-sized edition features an Art Nouveau book design, with decorative borders around the text, and illustrations by Wilfried Satty, a German-born artist and collagist who made San Francisco his adoptive home in 1961.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow. The hasheesh eater. San Francisco : Level Press, c1975. PS2350.L5 H37 1975x (A).
Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.