BLOTTER ACID ART
Those of us who were familiar with blotter acid back in the 1960s know that the little squares of blotting paper onto which LSD was added were almost always decorated with crudely-printed images — flying saucers, Mickey Mouse, loons on a lake, sphynxes, abstract symbols, geometric op-art patterns, the face of Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Crumb’s Mr. Natural (naturally).
I never gave much thought to those images until I read about acid archivist Mark McCloud, who became enamored with the multitude of eye-catching logos used by the manufacturers of blotter LSD to label, differentiate, and decorate their particular brands of hallucinogen.
To McCloud, the miniature printed images were “examples of true American folk art, like whittling,” and he decided to collect and frame them, thus insuring their salvation from the ravages of time. As a result, little by little, the walls of McCloud’s San Francisco apartment became crammed with these tiny patches of psychedelic history.
