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 2023 writer, art historian and theorist Shruti Belliappa and writer Joshua Rothes began a publishing project reimagining the Hanuman Books legacy. New authors are being added to the original series and some original authors's books are being reissued, like 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. All of the books had the same 3 x 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."