Set of Four Original Dope Posters
Orange Background – Black Text
First and Only Legitimate Printing - From Publisher's Collection
(Designed and Published in Our Family Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California Summer, 1967)
A Set of Original Drug Posters from 1967
From the Only Printing
Set of Four:
Opium, Heroin, Cocaine, Sniff Glue
Also See Rarer “LSD Railroad”
1960s Drug Poster
Published by Esoteric Posters 1967
See Our Other Poster Listings
Original Posters from 1967
From the Only Printing
See Our Other
Poster Listings
20" x 13"
Psychedelic Posters
Published by Esoteric Posters
Designed by Robert Wendell
Published by Esoteric Posters in 1967
100% Original- Not Reprints
New Old Inventory
These Posters Have Been Wrapped and Stored Since Printed
Never Out of Family Possession
Stored Flat & Out of the Light
Excellent Mint to Near Mint Condition
Shipped in Sturdy New 3"or 4" Diameter Tube for $9.50 in
U.S.A.
Purchase Multiple Posters for a Single Shipping Fee
We Ship Direct to Canada, Europe and U.K. for $24.50
Please Ask for Quote to Other Countries
A Brief History of the Esoteric Poster Company
(1959-Present)
Howard Morseburg (1924-2012) began his career in the art business
in the 1950s. He was a World War II veteran who had served in the Merchant
Marine and later worked in the book and magazine business. As a young officer
during the war, Morseburg was on the “Murmansk Run” to the Soviet Union and
other perilous wartime voyages through the submarine-infested North Atlantic.
It was one of Morseburg’s friends from this time, a young skipper named Jim
Greenberg, who was to introduce him to the art business. After the war, this
friend became a ship’s captain on the Atlantic route and began importing
paintings by European artists to the United States. In Europe, which was still
suffering from the economic aftereffects of the war, there was no appreciable
market for these artists’ work. During the 1950s Greenberg began selling the
paintings he imported to galleries, furniture stores and interior
designers who were then developing a wider consumer market for art
than had existed before the war. From his base in Seattle, where he and his
young family were then living, Howard Morseburg followed suit, and he began
selling paintings imported from Europe throughout the western United States.
In addition to the European paintings he received, Morseburg began
representing young American artists. He also became involved in the West Coast
printmaking movement, especially with the publication and distribution of serigraphs. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he started to represent
young artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Elton Bennett and Mel Ramos, who created
their own hand-pulled prints. It was this interest in printmaking that helped
lead to his next venture.
The Beatnik Posters
About 1960, Morseburg became interested in creating humorous and
satirical posters. At this time, the “beatnik” movement was in full swing and
coffeehouses and jazz clubs were full of beatniks spouting free-form poetry to
the beat of bongo drums. To Morseburg, the beatnik movement found in Greenwich
Village, Seattle, San Francisco and the East Bay was ripe for satire. He met a
talented young Disney artist and Imagineer named Roland Crump at a gift shop in
the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. Crump was a brilliant and
eccentric young artist and designer who became one of the most important Disney
“Imagineers.” Crump was already producing some hand-pulled beatnik
posters before he met Morseburg, but once the association began, Morseburg had
larger quantities of some of the posters published using the photo-offset
process. Crump designed a series of images that satirized the
drug culture that was developing among the Beats, which Morseburg took on the
road, traveling down the coast from Seattle to San Diego. In that era, drug use
was not widespread and they were chiefly popular with musicians and beatnik
hipsters. So, Esoteric Poster’s first releases were “Smoke Marijuana,” “Fly
High, Fly Heroin Airlines” “Cocaine” and “Opium.”
The next posters were “The Green Gasser,” which poked fun at a
Beatnik club, and “Big Liz,” which was a colorful poster of a Beatnik princess.
Those 30″ x 24″ posters were silk screened in three colors and for posterity’s
sake they cost $0.50 to produce, were sold to bookstores for only $1.00 and
retailed for $1.95.
In the course of his frequent sales trips to visit art galleries, Morseburg personally distributed Esoteric’s posters. His primary outlets for the posters were the bookstores along the west coast that catered to college students in Berkeley, Stanford, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego. Morseburg realized that students were the ideal consumers for posters because of their frequent moves and limited budgets that would not allow them to purchase more expensive items. When he began selling to bookstores, none of the bookstores were actually selling posters, and Morseburg showed them how they could display posters by stringing clotheslines along the walls and hanging the posters with clothespins. He also sold his posters to stores on upper Grant Street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, at the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles, and later at the Seattle World’s Fair where the Beatnik posters went home with foreign visitors. Morseburg has long felt that his early designs, which were displayed in venues popular with artistic young people, influenced other artists and contributed to the creativity that was seen in the poster designs of the psychedelic movement later in the 1960′s.
The Cold War Posters
The next series of Esoteric’s posters were political in nature and
reflected Morseburg’s firmly held belief in freedom and human rights. As a
young man, Morseburg was one of the few Americans to visit the Soviet Union
during the Second World War. As a young officer, Morseburg met a
Polish survivor of Stalin’s gulags and a female translator who predicted that
she would be sent to a Gulag or executed because her liaison work with the
British and Americans had exposed her to western ideas. He lost
any false illusions he may have had about the benefits of the Soviet
system. Serving in Europe and meeting those who survived the Nazi
regime turned Morseburg into an opponent of all totalitarian systems that
denied freedom to their citizens.
These experiences gave Morseburg and Roland Crump the impetus to
begin a series of posters satirizing life in the Soviet Union and Castro’s
adoption of Soviet methods in post-revolutionary Cuba. These satirical
political posters sold well in college bookstores, until, ironically, those
bearing the images of totalitarian leaders like Ho Chi Minh, Mao and
Lenin replaced them! In Berkeley, Mario Salvio and the perhaps no-so-well-named
“Free Speech Movement” demanded that the Berkeley Bookstore (still located
across from Sproul Hall) stop selling the Esoteric line of posters. It was a
matter of “free speech for me, but not for thee.” The sixties were a
time of excess and radicalism and no place embodied the sixties ethos more than
Berkley. However sadly, the Berkeley Bookstore complied with Salvio’s
censorship request and discontinued the sale of Esoteric’s Posters, much to the
dismay of a faction of students.
As interest in his satirical posters waned due to changing times,
Morseburg worked hard to develop his art gallery and kept working as an
artist’s agent, selling paintings to galleries in seven western states. The
gallery’s initial Los Angeles location was in the old Westlake Park
neighborhood, just one block from the venerable Chouinard Art School and a few
blocks from the Otis Art Institute. These were the major art schools in Los
Angeles, and the young art students — such as the future psychedelic start Rick
Griffin — often came by the gallery to look at the work of established artists.
Esoteric’s Rock & Roll and Psychedelic Posters
As the sixties gathered steam, Morseburg began to collaborate with
Robert Wendell, a talented young graphic artist and poster designer. Wendell
was a gifted printmaker, and in 1967 he designed several posters and updated
some of Crump’s earlier designs. Some of these later posters were published by
Esoteric Poster Company and printed using the silkscreen process, hence the
names “Saladin” “Gawdawful Graphics” or “Blue Light Press” that often appeared
on the individual posters with the Esoteric name.
During the 1960s, one of Howard Morseburg’s gallery accounts was the Moore Gallery on Sutter Street in San Francisco. The famous “Joint Show” was held at the Moore Gallery in July of 1967. The “Joint Show” was a group exhibition of work by the five most famous San Francisco poster artists, including Alton Kelley, Stanly Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and Wes Wilson. Morseburg viewed the exhibition and in lieu of the money that Moore owed him, Morseburg accepted a selection of the Joint Show posters, which were eventually stored with his own remaining inventory.
Unfortunately, Esoteric’s psychedelic poster business was not a financial success. The company did not have a highly evolved method of distribution (like Chet Helm’s Family Dog or Bill Graham’s Fillmore). Furthermore, the silkscreen method of printing is a fine arts process, which is slow and costly and does not lend itself to producing large quantities of prints. Esoteric Poster’s rock and roll and satirical drug posters never received the mainstream distribution or the recognition that they deserved. By 1968, the poster venture was finished and the remaining stock ended up in Howard Morseburg’s basement on Wilshire Boulevard.
Eventually, Howard Morseburg gave the poster inventory to his
three children with the idea that they might eventually find a market for them.
In the early 1970s, Jeffrey Morseburg carefully packaged all of the remaining posters
as he began to realize that eventually there was a collector market for these vestiges of
the psychedelic era, just as there was for the Art Nouveau posters of the Belle Epoque. The Morseburg family remained active in the fine art
business, but had neither an efficient means of distributing its remaining
inventory of posters nor the time to invest in the selling of them. It is only
now, with the direct access that the web affords, that it has become possible
for sellers and collectors to find each other in an inexpensive and efficient
way. And so we are pleased to bring to you these rare, original examples of
1960s’ psychedelic posters.