¡DEATH, BROTHER OF SLEEP; HOLY PRIMAEVAL KING! [caption title]

[New York]: Hand set & Printed at Uranian Press by R.O.T. [i.e. Richard O. Tyler], 1960. First Thus. Broadside. Near fine. [ca. 1960]. Broadside, 11 x 8 1/2 inches. Printed in black on salmon paper. Embossed seal of the Uranian Press and rubber stamp of Uranian Tract Society in lower margin. Two horizontal folds, else fine.Fine

An early "tract" broadside printed by the Uranian Press and issued in a slightly different form in the 1960 DEATH TRACTS broadside portfolio. In the Uranian Press tract style, two lines of text (here, "¡Death, brother of sleep;" and "Holy Primaeval King!") are printed above and below a relief print. The print adds the text, "INJECTED IT INTO HIS VAIN | SEE WHETHER THE SHOTS WILL HELP THE DISEASE," around a fairly inscrutable image.

Richard Oviet Tyler (1926-1983) established the Uranian Press in 1958 in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side where, by 1960, he had installed four printing presses. Under the Uranian imprint, Tyler, his wife, Dorothea Baer Tyler, and friends produced chapbooks, broadsides, and artist's books through the mid-1960s. Tyler was a fixture in Greenwich Village during this period, selling the Press's wares from a pushcart in the yard of Judson Memorial Church, a nod to both contemporary Jewish peddlers of the Lower East Side and the chapmen of Elizabethan England. He played an important, if still underappreciated, role in the nascent expanded arts movements of the New York avant garde scene with both the Press and its performance arm, the Uranian Alchemical Players. The Uranian circle expanded into a quasi-religious collective incorporating Jungian and Gnostic ideas of creativity and consciousness, LSD, Western astrology, alchemy, Tibetan Buddhism, and the political thought of Charles Fourier, becoming known officially in 1974 as the Uranian Phalanstery.

OCLC records no copies of this separate edition.