BETTER BOOKZ. London, 1967

In the 1950s and 1960s, London underwent a cultural revolution, which altered forever the trajectory of contemporary art and gave rise to a radical re-formulation of artistic production. United in their distrust of culture, the emerging generation of post-war artists, poets and writers were searching for new ways of responding to their alienation from the previous generation and the smothering geopolitical anxiety of the cold war.

Many of these artists found each other while taking refuge at Tony Godwin's Charing Cross bookshop, Better Books. 

Under the successive management of Bill Butler, Barry Miles, and Bob Cobbing, Better Books became guardian and sanctuary, platform and voice for the explosion of radical gesture in London, providing platform, meeting space, idea generator and voice for a host of avant-garde artists, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and writers.

All photos, by Simos Tsapnidis,1967. 
Text written by Rozemin Keshvani, curator of the exhibition Better Books: Art Anarchy and Apostasy.

http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$8199

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/better-books-art-anarchy-and-apostasy/

http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/68/