LSD : The Age of Mind

Los Angeles: Wilshire Book Company, 1969. Reprint (possible fourth printing?) of a title first published in 1963. 8vo, perfect-bound in pictorial wraps. 172pp., with bibliography and index.Soft diagonal crease to front cover. Moderate corner and hinge wear. Mild soiling to textblock edges and half-title. Very good, with secure binding.

Solid reading copy of this work on LSD (and other hallucinogens) by an author with an interesting and rather checkered place in American psychedelics history. Roseman and fellow chemist Bernard Copley are acknowledged as the first underground chemists to produce and distribute black-market LSD, circa 1962. They claimed that their product, which wanted in quality compared to that of Swiss laboratory Sandoz, was imported from Israel. Fellow psychedelics pioneer Myron Stolaroff reported them to the FDA in 1963, presumably out of concerns about impurity. Roseman and Copley were subsequently busted by an FDA agent and arrested, not for manufacturing LSD (which wasn't declared illegal in the state of California until 1966) but rather for smuggling it into the country—their lie about Israel having come back to haunt them. Sentenced to seventeen years in prison, they posted bail and fled to South America, where they were later apprehended and sent to federal prison. This book with cover design, illustrations, and hand lettering by Marcie Roseman.