When I picked this up on a lark at a book sale in Lancaster, the dust jacket was tattered and beyond salvaging. So I trimmed it down to a portion that I could save for posterity. You can see what the full dust jacket looked like here.
- Title: The Stoned Apocalypse
- Author: Marco Vassi (1937-1989)
- Author's full name: Marco Ferdinand William Vasquez-d'Acugno Vassi
- Designer (presumably of the dust jacket): Jack Jaget
- Publisher: Trident Press, New York
- Publication date: 1972
- Pages: 251
- Format: Hardcover
- Back cover excerpt: "By the time he was thirty, Marco Vassi had worked as a translator of Chinese, a New York public-school teacher, a psychotherapist, an editor of men's magazines, a librarian, and had been in a Franciscan monastery deciding whether he wanted to be a priest. The following three years — the subject of this book — took him through a period of chaos during which he engaged in a coast-to-coast, surreal wrestling match, and observed the spiritual death of the psychedelic sixties."
- Should I send the kids to bed now? Probably.
- First sentence: "Are you ... searching?"
- Last sentence: I have stopped searching.
- Random sentence from the middle #1: We all flashed the existential dilemma of our reliance on the sun, that source of all life which is so obvious we come, stupidly, to take it for granted and forget, each day, to reel in the wonder of its existence.
- Random sentence from the middle #2: And now the two of them were flying to Chicago to confront the dragon and come away with booty.
- Well, that's not so bad. Just wait.
- Random sentence from the middle #3: We began making animal noises, and making the big bed squeak with our thrashings.
- Um. You were warned.
- More about Vassi: According to Wikipedia, he "was an American experimental thinker and author, most noted for his erotica. ... Vassi was born and lived most of his life in New York City. He was married three times, but was well known for sexual, drug, and alternative-lifestyle experimentation. He viewed life as the theory and practice of liberation, an exploration of being sexual, that is an all-sexual being, bisexual, and homosexual. Vassi coined the term metasex, which meant any sex outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage."
- Goodreads rating of The Stoned Apocalypse: 4.06 stars (out of 5)
- Goodreads review excerpt: In 2009, Lena wrote: "The book also served as an intriguing window into a world that was mostly over before I was even aware of its existence. Vassi's depictions of the drugs he took while bouncing between hippie crash pads is colorful to say the least. In the midst of expanding his mind, he also expanded his sexuality, moving through various stages of denial and experimentation before finally accepting his own bisexuality."
- Amazon review excerpt: In 2012, Sarah wrote: "After I read this I had a much better understanding of the 1960's and the mindset that was innocent enough to believe there was still such a thing as a free ride, a free life, a free mind and body."
- Opposing Amazon review excerpt: In 2014, Ian wrote: "He gets involved in a few spiritual movements, takes LSD and meanders though the 1960s. He's a shallow vessel and the book becomes tedious. I gave up about half way through."
- Best title of a Vassi novel: The Devil's Sperm is Cold
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