8 LSD BLOTTERS THAT DEFINED PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE

This is the acid hall of fame

I recently got to catch up with countercultural scholar Erik Davis about his acid book Blotter, which has been getting rave reviews in the underground as one of the most interesting books on LSD ever made. We dove deep into several lysergic myths and mythologies, as well as why he wanted to tell a different kind of story about LSD. I also quizzed him about several of the wildest and most influential LSD blotters in history—including some gold-leaf creations that literally made me gasp when I first saw them. Check out the collection below, along with Erik’s wild tales of how they got made. Buy Blotter on MIT Press, and make sure to like/share/subscribe to Rave New World so you can catch the rest of our interview, which I’ll drop later this week.

(PS: Erik also writes the newsletter Burning Shore, which is all about California consciousness culture and other High Weirdness. You should definitely check it out)

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8 LSD BLOTTERS THAT DEFINED PSYCHEDELIC CULTURE

1. ‘Bike Rider,’ by Ed Visser (Amsterdam, 1994)

“This is one of the most famous blotters ever. And it’s really just a piece of clip art that the designer got from the internet. It’s based on Albert Hoffman’s famous bicycle ride after he first synthesized LSD. The designer worked at Paradiso club in Amsterdam in the 70s, and made a lot of their posters. One of the things you might not notice is that the numbers are silk screened on top of an offset printed image, which are usually not combined. He did that to make it harder to copy. And he added glitter to some of the numbers too, so people couldn’t just steal the design. 

It’s also just a great image of acid. I just love that sense of movement and dynamism of the bike. It seems very appropriate for LSD’s sense of movement and dynamism, and the modernity of it.”

2. ‘Japanese Crests (reissue),’ original by Bernard Hassall (mid 1980s)

“This was a mid-1980s reissue of an earlier sheet of acid, known on the street as “samurais” and based in Monsho: Family Crests for Symbolic Design by Isao Honda. They were made by Bernard Hassall, who was friends with Terence McKenna and was busted. He was particularly artistic in his approach to making blotter, and the originals were a series of Japanese seals protected by a shiny black cover. These sheets came in a box, and one had a higher dose than the others. That one was touched in gold so the user would recognize the difference. The manufacturer, Leonard Picard, did a number of high-quality issues in the 80s and this was one of them.”

3. ‘Camouflage’ by Sarah Matzar (mid-1980s)

“This one is by Sarah Matzar, a woman who was involved in an LSD family in the Grateful Dead scene that was one of the core upper-crust crews. It was a family called the Bolinas girl gang, because they were mostly women. She's very much still around, and went through some legal trials; she definitely paid her dues. This is one of her designs, and she also wove quilts, so one of their code names for acid blotter was “quilts.” I like the fact that it’s abstract, and that’s it’s pink. Not all of these things have to be made by mustachioed freak artists. This one has a nice twist.”