Cobweb of Trips by Robert Dickins

PRE-ORDER NOW: OUT 30 JUNE, 2024

LTD ED. HARDBACK

Cobweb of Trips by Robert Dickins is a literary history of psychedelics that catches a sublime aesthetic weaving its way through mid-twentieth century Britain, and beyond. Spinning a psychospiritual thread from literature and the history of medicine, this story brings to light how the question of psychedelics and the trips people had were animated by the era's cultural transformations.

The sublime in psychedelic literature reveals a complex entanglement of postwar medical research with mescaline and LSD, spiritual reimagining, political agitation, and the counterculture of the 1960s—ultimately exposing a society with one foot in the past, another in the future, and ill-equipped to deal with the hopes, dreams and fears of people exposed to psychedelia in the present.

From key figures such as Aldous Huxley and Dr Ronald Sandison, through lesser known ones like Dr Effie Lilian Hutton, Monica Furlong, and Harry Fainlight, Cobweb of Trips is a poetry emerging when the psychedelic experience alighted in modern history.

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Robert Dickins is a literary historian and publisher. He lives in the Vale of Pewsey, Wiltshire