01
PLATE 01 / BEFORE 1970Before the image
Liquid, tablets, sugar cubes, gelatin, and the practical emergence of absorbent paper as a carrier.
View chapter→A COMPENDIUM OF BLOTTER ART
The image,the grid,the underground.
A chronological and thematic history of blotter art—treated as visual culture, material evidence, and a living print medium.
CHRONOLOGY
Five chapters in an unfinished history.
PLATE 01 / BEFORE 197002
PLATE 02 / 1970–1976Marks of origin
Early printed signs, words, symbols, and characters begin identifying batches and building an underground visual vocabulary.
View chapter→03
PLATE 03 / 1977–1989The sheet becomes a field
Perforated grids standardize; offset color, repeated icons, comics, mysticism, and countercultural emblems proliferate.
View chapter→04
PLATE 04 / 1990–2009Collecting the ephemeral
Undipped editions, signed sheets, legal scrutiny, archives, exhibitions, and specialist print culture make the medium newly visible.
View chapter→05
PLATE 05 / 2010–NOWFrom evidence to edition
Contemporary artists, publishers, museums, books, and digital tools reconsider blotter as an independent print format.
View chapter→CROSS-INDEX
Browse across the timeline.
No single chronology can hold the whole story. These indexes connect people, images, objects, places, methods, and evidence.
01
PEOPLE
Artists, printers, chemists, collectors, publishers, photographers, and chroniclers.
02
IMAGES
Cartoons, mystical systems, popular culture, portraiture, geometry, words, and visual signatures.
03
OBJECTS
Sheets, tabs, perforators, print plates, frames, books, evidence binders, and archival storage.
04
PLACES
San Francisco, London, festivals, mail networks, galleries, courtrooms, and private archives.
05
METHODS
Printing, perforation, dosing history, editioning, signing, UV treatment, preservation, and display.
06
SOURCES
Oral histories, court records, journalism, catalogues, books, collections, and object records.
METHOD
A history with its seams showing.
Each entry is designed to separate documented fact from recollection, attribution, inference, and folklore. Object records note whether a sheet is dosed, formerly dosed, undipped, or of unknown status when the source makes that distinction.
- Inline citations and a full bibliography
- Object dates separated from publication dates
- Attribution and confidence labels
- Corrections and revision history
- Image rights and provenance notes
FOUNDATION SHELF
Start with the medium itself.
Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium
Erik Davis · MIT Press
LSD Blotter Art
Thomas Lyttle · MAPS Bulletin
Institute of Illegal Images
Mark McCloud · San Francisco
Jesus on LSD: When California Blotter Acid Got Religion
Jason S. Sexton · Boom California
Joshua Levy Illustrated Prints of Jerry Garcia
Library and Archives · Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Chapman v. United States, 500 U.S. 453
Supreme Court of the United States
The published site should link directly to primary and authoritative sources wherever available and license or clear every reproduced image.