Letterist International - Publications

Publications

The LI published four issues of the Internationale Lettriste bulletin between 1952 and 1954, followed by twenty eight issues of Potlatch from 1954 to 1957. A further two issues of Potlatch appeared in November 1957 and July 1959, now with the revised subtitle "Information bulletin of the Situationist International". Each issue comprised between one and four mimeographed sheets. Les Lèvres Nues, though not an LI publication, published some of their most important articles. All of these texts, together with a few other miscellaneous tracts, are reprinted in Documents Relatifs A La Fondation De L'Internationale Situationniste (Editions Allia, 1985).

Debord's 1959 collaboration with Asger Jorn, Mémoires, was directly concerned with the early days of the LI. The new Gallimard edition of his Oeuvres gathers many LI texts, including some never before published. Michèle Bernstein's novels, Tous les chevaux du roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961), present fictionalised accounts of her life with Debord during this period. Patrick Straram's Les bouteilles se couchent was a semi-fictionalised contemporary account of the scene, written in 1953 but lost until recently: it was published by Editions Allia in 2006. Also recently published by the same house are a biography of Ivan Chtcheglov and a separate collection of his writings. In October 2010, an unpublished text from the LI has just been released that recalls the adventures of the letterists between 1945 to February 1953 : Visages de l'avant-garde (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, éditeur, 2010).

Sources in English

• Mension, Jean-Michel. The Tribe (London: Verso, 2002). The most compendious source of information on the LI.
• Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces (London: Penguin, 1989).
• Home, Stewart. The Assault on Culture (Stirling: Ak Press, 1991).
• Hussey, Andrew. The Game of War (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).
• van der Elsken, Ed. Love On The Left Bank (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999). Ed van der Elsken was a Dutch photographer, who captured the scene around Moineau's during the period. Included among the people depicted in this book (first published 1956) are a few members and associates of the LI (particularly Mension and Papaï).

Other Sources

• Vachon, Marc L’arpenteur de la ville: L’utopie situationniste et Patrick Straram. (Les Éditions Triptyque, Montreal, 2003) ISBN 978-2-89031-476-4.