Paperback cover: 1969's "The Unicorn Girl"

Posting on a lazy Sunday during which President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 election, the cats are napping and we are awaiting desert thunderstorms...

• Title: The Unicorn Girl
• Additional cover text: "Give your mind a ride on the wildest trip in science fiction!"
• Series: Book 2 of the Greenwich Trilogy, or Greenwich Village Trilogy (more below).
• Author: Michael Kurland (1938-present)
• About the author: The book itself states: "Mister Kurland is a thin, tense young man with wire-rimmed glasses and the perpetually frightened look of a rabbit with an invitation to lunch at the Lion's Club. ... He has worked as a wire-stapler, a barrel-staver, a window-washer, a herring-kipperer, a Scotch-tippler and a peck-of-pickled-peppers-picker. This diversified background has given him the wealth of experience which has so far proved totally useless for writing sicence fiction. He is now living and working on a houseboat on the Dhama river in Northern Thibeth, but will soon be moving back to the United States as he finds it hard to concentrate during the six hours a day in which the boat is submerged." According to Wikipedia, Kurland, 86, now lives in San Luis Obispo, California.
• The Dhama river in Northern Thibeth? I think it's safe to say that's made up.
• Cover illustrator: William Hofmann (1924-1995). The back cover misspells his name and states: "Cover: Hoffman"
• Back cover text: "BLIP! Greenwich Village was a model of decorum compared to what went down when BLIP hit the cosmic fan — and scattered all time, space and sanity to the fourteen dimensions. Mike and Chester — fearless hippy explorers of a thousand incredible worlds — find that even their legendary powers are dwarfed by ... THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE UNIVERSE, THE FIRE SNORTING DRAGONETTES, THE MAGIC HASH PIPE, THE LAST UNICORN, THE MEAN METAL TANKS, THE ASSORTED FREAKS AND FUZZ."
• So, it's the MCU multiverse, but for flower children? Yes.
• Publication date: First printing, November 1969
• Publisher: Pyramid Books (X-1990)
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 159
• Cover price: 60 cents
• Dedication: "To my unicorn girl, who will return to me."
• First sentence: "It was a year after the butterflies."
• Last sentence: "Sir Thomas, if you read this, I can be reached through my agent, Seligmann & Collier."
• Random excerpt #1: "Part two: I had a strong reluctance to give up the contents of my pants pockets. After all, you could never tell when a bunch of credit cards and a set of keys to an apartment that didn't even exist in this time line would come in handy."
• Random excerpt #2: "A bored man in an American flag striped suit stood behind the raised ticket stand."
• Random excerpt #3: "When it was over we had learned certain spells and methods that would be of most use to us. How to disappear. How to blip from one place to another (excuse the word blip)."
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.84 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2022, Neil M wrote: "I first read this book when I was 15 and have reread it approximately every ten years since then. It's basically one of my favourite things in the whole world. Replete with dialogue and situations that live forever in the imagination, if you read it when you are young, I suspect it will never leave you."
• Another Goodreads review: In 2017, Normandy wrote: "I just discovered The Unicorn Girl all over again. Lines from it have been in my head for so many decades. And now, now, I remember where they come from. Still, so wonderfully whimsical."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.7 stars (out of 5) 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2022, Michael J. Atkinson wrote: "It starts with the best boy-meets-girl scene ever written. It has some of the most clever writing I've seen. ... The only science fiction book I have ever read with a mathematical appendix. The mysterious dedication. This book is an indescribable pleasure, one to read many times."

What's in the mathematical appendix? Formulas that I couldn't even begin to assess or verify:

About the trilogy

Book 1 is The Butterfly Kid (1968) by Chester Anderson.

Book 2 is The Unicorn Girl (1969) by Michael Kurland.

Book 3 is The Probability Pad (1970) by T.A. Waters.

Oddly, I found the most concise explanation of the series on the website TV Tropes: "The Greenwich Trilogy is a series of three humorous science fiction novels written by three separate authors, all of whom appear as protagonists of the series. Set in and written during The '60s, the series — especially the first book — was considered somewhat shocking for its positive and reasonably realistic portrayal of the hippie culture of the time."

Writing on PM Press in 2020, Jesse Jarnow calls the trilogy "psychedelic in the sense that the three books were written by, for, and about users of psychedelic drugs." 

They were "minor" and "light-hearted," Jarnow writes, compared to New Wave sci-fi by the likes of Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard. The Greenwich books are more ephemeral and disposable (even if some of the above reviews show how The Unicorn Girl, at least, made a lasting impression.)

Jarnow writes: "At their most basic, the books are artifacts of an earlier media era, when many more eyeballs sought kicks via the printed word. Then, as now, there was a remarkable and nearly infinite thirst for text, and it’s amazing to think of sheer variety of books and magazines that poured out news and lurid coverage of the countercultural explosion, occupying the racks for a few weeks or months as the world tumbled through radical changes. In the ‘60s, probably more Americans sought mind-expansion through textual approximations than LSD itself."