Horseshit : the offensive review. Number two.

Hermosa Beach, CA : Scum Publishing Company, 1967. “Fourth printing” (inner lower wrapper). Quarto (280 x 215 mm), original stapled pictorial wrappers, pp. 48, extensively illustrated, and with additional text and illustration on the inner wrappers; a very good copy.

Horseshit was a counterculture magazine produced by brothers Robert and Thomas Dunker. Robert was responsible for the layout and the majority of the artwork – his imagery is often surreal and sometimes sexually explicit – and Thomas for most of the textual content, which, though humorous, is essentially a string of eviscerating commentaries on American society and politics. A total of four issues were published at intervals over several years in the mid to late 1960s.

The Dunkers, writing in the third person, outlined their reasons for publishing the magazine, and also gave some insights into their production process, on the inside front wrapper of the first (1965) issue: ‘… there was a real need for a magazine that would combine strong, fearless, humorous drawings with witty, intelligent, outspoken writing … [the brothers] have to be unmarried so they can do what they want without asking permission, they have to have a passionate belief in their own ideas and they also have to be skeptical about their own ideas, they have to be nuts.’