During the final stages of An Anthology’s design and assembly, George Maciunas corresponded with Jackson Mac Low and La Monte Young from Wiesbaden, West Germany, where he worked as a graphic designer for the U.S. military. In a series of letters written between late 1961 and early 1963, we see Maciunas offering multiple design ideas for An Anthology’s cover and binding, including several that would deliberately create a difficult reading experience, and pleading for copies to be sent to him for distribution in Europe. The stamps and markings in red show Young’s emphatic rejection of certain of Maciunas’s ideas. (Mac Low and Young ultimately chose a conventional perfect-bound paperback format whose cover features the book’s title repeated tightly in black against a vibrant red background.) These letters also show that Maciunas was already busy collecting materials for a new series of anthologies that would be published under the name of Fluxus and include many of the same artists brought together in An Anthology.
Courtesy of Billie Maciunas.
