A.D. Winans and The Holy Grail: Bukowski & Second Coming (Lettered, Signed)

Description

A.D. Winans was a core San Francisco small-press lifer—poet, editor, photographer, and the force behind Second Coming Press, where he championed outsider voices long before they were safe bets. He wrote with a plainspoken immediacy and printed with a street-level sense of mission, documenting the North Beach orbit that ran from coffeehouses to readings to late-night arguments. Winans’ books and broadsides, like the magazine he steered, fuse poem, document, and scene report; they’re primary sources from the ground floor of Bay Area counterculture.

Winans knew Bukowski not as an abstract legend but as a working writer and friend: he published Buk in Second Coming, introduced Buk at readings, and watched the myth accrete around the man. The Holy Grail is his candid, eyewitness chronicle of those years—Bukowski’s rise, the small-press skirmishes, the personalities (Jack Micheline, Linda King, Michael McClure, John Lee Hooker cameos), and the way a mimeograph revolution helped build an American literary phenomenon. It’s part memoir, part press history, and part corrective—human-scale Bukowski from someone who was actually there.

Scarce lettered copy of Winans’ essential insider account of Bukowski and the small-press engine that helped launch him. A cornerstone for Bukowski and small-press adjacent shelves. Grab it while it’s here.