Bore Hole
Joe Mellen
184pp / 210mm x 135mm
Illustrated
Limited sewn, clothbound hardback edition of 300
Paperback / Hardback
£14.99 / £25.00
What this book, I hope, will do is give an answer to the question why do people want to take drugs, as they always have throughout history.
— Joe Mellen
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Joey Mellen’s memoir has achieved a legendary status that reaches far beyond the 500 long-vanished copies he printed in 1970. It has been hailed as the blueprint for the next step in human evolution, denounced as a tragic example of the dangers of drug experimentation, and retold endlessly as an irresistible anecdote of high craziness. It has become the ne plus ultra of consciousness expansion, the extreme high water mark of the psychedelic sixties.
— From the introduction by Mike Jay
A heavily expanded edition of Joe Mellen’s legendary, long out-of-print auto-trepanation memoir, Bore Hole takes us deep into the dawning of the UK’s psychedelic counter culture, and into a mind breaking free from the confines of a traditional English upbringing.
Travelling to Morocco and Ibiza, then back to the first spring of swinging London, Joe Mellen discovers the pleasures of hashish, is captivated by the visionary intensity of LSD and, after meeting the Dutch psychedelic guru Bart Huges, attempts the ultimate head trip, the bore hole.
As well as a selection of unseen archive photographs, this edition includes a new postscript, essays, appendices and a 1967 interview with Bart Huges.
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About the author
Joseph Mellen (born September 1939), commonly known as Joey Mellen, is a British author and countercultural icon best known for his 1970 memoir Bore Hole, which chronicles his immersion in the 1960s psychedelic scene and his pioneering self-trepanation procedure to achieve a permanent state of expanded consciousness.
