The Hashish Cookbook (First Edition)

First edition. Staple bound illustrated wrappers, 20 pages (viii) 8 vo. One of the most elusive and mythologized artifacts of the 1960s counterculture, The Hashish Cookbook occupies a singular position at the intersection of underground publishing, Beat expatriate culture, and the emergent psychedelic movement, and carries with it a provenance story as intriguing as any in the literature of the period. "Panama Rose" was the pseudonym of Rosalind Schwartz, an American living in Tangier with her partner, the poet, filmmaker and publisher Ira Cohen, with whom she was embedded in the city's extraordinary expatriate community from around 1961 to 1965. Their circle included Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and the painter, and writer Brion Gysin. It was Gysin who suggested Schwartz write the cookbook; it was Gysin who contributed the "Hash Fudge" recipe included within its pages; and it was Gysin who had, years earlier, passed the same recipe to Alice B. Toklas, where it appeared to considerable scandal as "Haschich Fudge" in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954). Cohen published the book upon returning to New York in 1966, within six weeks and over time, problematically allowed credit for authorship to migrate to himself, Cohen's obituaries in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Independent all credited him as Panama Rose, a myth only dismantled after his death in 2011, Produced in a small print run with deliberately minimal production values, staple-bound, unpretentious, and designed to pass from hand to hand. The book's fugitive physicality is inseparable from its meaning. Its contents move between Moroccan majoun traditions, Indian bhang preparations, Andalusian confections and Gysin's Hash Fudge, presenting themselves as a practical culinary guide while functioning simultaneously as a document of a specific, unrepeatable cultural moment.…