John McMillian chronicles the underground press in Smoking Typewriters

GSU history professor John McMillan kicks off his book tour for Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of the Alternative Media in America at the Georgia Center for the Book tonight. Smoking Typewriters is a thorough account of the early, heady days of anti-establishment newspapers and radical politics, carefully tracing the history of papers like the Berkeley Barb or Austin’s Rag alongside stories of Students for a Democratic Society, smoking banana peels, the free speech movement, and so on.

Georgians will be pleased to know that the The Great Speckled Bird, the Atlanta-based hippie rag of yore, makes it way into the pages, including a great picture of Moe Slotin hustling the Bird on an Atlanta street corner. Creative Loafing even gets a mention near the end, in a passage expressing anxieties about “the coming corporatization of the medium.” (Give us a call anytime if you’re still worried, John.)

Those looking for an introduction to McMillian’s work could do no better than his fantastic 2005 essay for the Believer, ELECTRICAL BANANAS: An epistemological inquiry into the great banana hoax of 1967, which is drawn on for part of Smoking Typewriters.

The reading gets started tonight at 7:15 pm at the Decatur Library. More details at the Georgia Center for the Book.