With a beautifully decorated colourful slipcase of mushrooms and butterflies and flowers, slip out the heavyweight hessian cloth backed 24 x 32cm hardback and you are in for a treat. The Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, 50,000 plus books, manuscripts, posters, photographs and ephemera, was placed on long-term loan at Harvard University in the summer of 2012 by his family. The bulk of the collection explores drug use by individuals with emphasis on the 1800s and 1900s in America. Domingo (1957-2009) was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world's greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic and rock and roll. A library of more than 100,000 items, it contained everything from rare manuscripts and photos to posters, bottles, letters, opium pipes, pinball machines, newspaper articles, Allen Ginsberg's stars and stripes paper top hat, posters for Andy Warhol's films like Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), a large cardboard stand of Brigitte Bardot to small rather beautiful booklets, rare posters and book jackets, Japanese erotica or shunga, love letters and pictures of naked girlfriends. It included the work of diverse figures including Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, the Rolling Stones, Aleister Crowley and many more. There are huge full page images of vintage medicine boxes and bottles, some containing cocaine and the government report on Coca-Cola from 1907 on its chemical breakdown. One poster says Attention Coke Lovers - Freebase: The Greatest Thing Since Sex! A veritable cornucopia organised by the following chapters: Stones, Weed, Beat, Pop, Acid, Erotica, Coke, Revolt, Occult, Opium, Mots et Images and Rock. At once fantastical, informative and hallucinatory, this is a rare art book with a difference. 24 x 32cm, 480 pages dripping with quality colour images, a real trip down the rabbit hole of libraries.
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