# Hanuman Books

Hanuman Books (named after the Hindu monkey god Hanuman) was originally a 50 book series of very small books, formatted to resemble Indian prayer books. In 1986 Hanuman Books was founded and published by American art critic Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Clemente in New York City. The original series ran from 1986 to 1993 out of the Chelsea Hotel.
The series concentrated on avant-garde cultural values of the 1980s and included Dada writings, Beat poetry, Naropa Institute poets, Andy Warhol's Factory scene, San Francisco's North Beach literary scene and members of New York's art and literary scene, such as Patti Smith. Radical French authors, such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux, René Daumal and Francis Picabia were mixed with Lower East Side writers like William Burroughs, Nick Zedd and Gary Indiana.
The series has since acquired a cult following and in 2014, writer and art historian Shruti Belliappa founded Hanuman Editions, reimagining the Hanuman Books legacy. She co-edits the project with writer Joshua Rothes. As of 2023, new authors like McKenzie Wark, Vivek Narayanan, Bora Chung, Enrique Vila-Matas and Raymond Pettibon are being added to the original series and some original titles are being reissued, like Eileen Myles' Bread and Water and Cookie Mueller's Garden of Ashes.

## History

Artist Francesco Clemente drew the Hanuman logo and conceptualized the overall design of the book series. Twelve books a year were published with Foye often selecting American writers like Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, Robert Creeley and Taylor Mead while Clemente often chose French texts in English translation by writers such as René Daumal and Henri Michaux. Hanuman also published texts by visual artists Max Beckmann, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Jack Smith and Francis Picabia.
In India at C.T. Nachiappan's Kalakshetra Press, located at Madras (now Chennai), Hanuman Books were printed on a letterpress and shipped by boat to New York City. Nachiappan’s expertise gave Hanuman volumes a distinct look and feel, a tactile object-like quality that grounded their critically deconstructive approach to the countercultural currents of the late twentieth century. All of the books had the same 3 in × 4 in (76 mm × 102 mm) dimensions, except for René Ricard's larger book God with Revolver.
Besides being sold for four or five dollars on an informal basis from the Chelsea Hotel, Printed Matter, Inc. and occasionally from art museum bookstores and art galleries in Manhattan; book distributors Sun and Moon Press (in Los Angeles) and Small Press Distribution (in Berkeley) placed Hanuman books in West Coast bookstores, such as City Lights Bookstore and in contemporary art museums, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

## List of titles
### Series I (1-6)

    John Wieners, Superficial Estimation
    David Trinidad, November
    Eileen Myles, Bread and Water
    Taylor Mead, Son of Andy Warhol
    Francis Picabia, Who Knows
    Henri Michaux, By Surprise

### Series II (7-12)

    Amy Gerstler, Primitive Man
    John Ashbery, The Ice Storm
    Herbert Huncke, Guilty of Everything
    Manuel Rosenthal, Satie, Ravel, Poulenc
    René Daumal, A Fundamental Experiment
    John Wieners, Conjugal Contraries & Quart

### Series III (13-18)

    Bob Flanagan, Fuck Journal
    Willem de Kooning, Collected Writings
    Cookie Mueller, Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls
    Sandro Penna, Confused Dream
    Vincent Katz, Cabal of Zealots
    Alain Danielou, Fools of God

### Series IV (19-24)

    Edwin Denby, Willem de Kooning
    Max Beckmann, On My Painting
    Gary Indiana, White Trash Boulevard
    Jean Genet, Rembrandt
    David Trinidad, Three Stories
    Allen Ginsberg, Your Reason and Blake's System

### Series V (25-30)

    René Guénon, Oriental Metaphysics
    Eileen Myles, 1969
    Gregory Corso, Mind Field
    René Daumal, The Lie of the Truth
    Elaine Equi, Views Without Rooms
    Ronald Firbank, Firbankiana

### Series VI (31-36)

    David Hockney, Picasso
    St. Teresa/Simone Weil, On the Lord's Prayer
    Jack Smith, Historical Treasures
    Cookie Mueller, Garden of Ashes
    Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, Pouf Pieces
    Bob Dylan, Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan

### Series VII (37-42)

    Richard Hell, Artifact: Notebooks from Hell 1974-1980
    Henry Geldzahler, Looking at Pictures
    Francis Picabia, Yes No
    Robert Creeley, Autobiography
    Dodie Bellamy, Feminine Hijinx
    Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven Dead

### Series VIII (43-48)

    Candy Darling, Candy Darling
    Nick Zedd, Bleed Part One
    Patti Smith, Woolgathering
    William Burroughs, Painting and Guns
    Robert Hunter, Idiot's Delight
    Robert Frank, One Hour

### Unnumbered

    Jack Kerouac, Manhattan Sketches
    René Ricard, God with Revolver

## Recognition

"...the Hanuman canon, a publishing endeavor that articulated a new vision of a possible avant-garde lineage in its short life span between 1986 and 1993, linking the energies and efforts of the eighties Lower East Side with threads from earlier poets, painters, musicians, and thinkers. If you were to line up the whole Hanuman pantheon on a shelf chronologically and take a random core sample of a few titles ... you would be mining several distinct trajectories of literature, art, music, and underground culture from the past century."