WHO ARE WE?
"bumper books started as a wild dream to put out books we wanted to read, to give their authors a fair share of the recommended retail price, and to stop their exclusive insights disappearing into the remainder bins. our solution was simple --- desktop publishing using computers and lasers, handbound and screenprinted covers, small printruns that could be repeated as demand warranted; low-rent but hi-fidelity. the numbers looked good for the authors.

six years later bumper books continues. we have more than a dozen authors, more than a dozen titles, some handbound editions some perfect-bound, another three or four titles in production this year and next year as well; some videos and compact discs; each title confirms our mission: experimental texts and invstigative cultural studies charting the popular history of new zealand and particular moments when definitions changed.'

well, we never did find a screenprinter so we print and matt-laminate most of our covers. one or two editions have sold out, one or two have become university texts, and the rest are improving with age. anyway, i am gordon spittle and beside me is alan brunton, put down your smoking glue gun and step up to say a few words, alan."

"thanks, gordon. i never thought we'd get to be this active when we started! you remember we wanted to go with the idea then that books could be happenings, performances, fireworks going off in the belly of the literary whale. that wasn't a learning curve, it was going around Daytona on the end of a stapler! We came through that still dedicated to giving space to the memories and experiences of those real people that the mainstream major publishers put down. if the voice is authentic, we want to print it. i can't remember when we last looked at our business plan! did we ever have a business plan?

it was more about having fun, wasn't it. putting something human back into the mechanics of making copies, connecting with people doing something so off the main highway only bumper could find them. we don't just order up a bunch of books to sell, we make real voices available to real people. each title comes to us like a kitset, and we measure, fold, clamp and hold in our hands every book that leaves here.

so, you have found us here. that shows imagination. that's what we are all about. bumper books is the most interesting conversation in town. take a look around and then hit that order button, that's all it takes to join in. you'll meet some lively and generous people along the way."

Chemical Evolution: Drugs and Art Production 1970-1980
by Martin Edmond
Published by Bumper Books. 1997
The following is an excerpt from this book.

"Richard Turner offered Spleen the right to reproduce in print one of the sound tapes he had made in preparation for filming the aborted Black Power documentary. It is a conversation between himself and two young members of the gang who had appointed themselves his unofficial bodyguards. The tape was transcribed and duly published in issue #6 of the magazine. Meanwhile things had come full circle, the main interviewee had been charged, with others, in the murder of a young Australian tourist in Te Aro. Acting on information that the defence in the trial of the Blacks had successfully opposed a prosecution move to quote from Spleen in the evidence, journalist Warwick Rodger lifted large chunks of the interview and, without seeking permission, republished them under his own by-line in The Dominion as a five-day feature story Anatomy of a Murderer . Furious protests from Spleen --- including bearding the editor of The Dominion in his den -- forced the newspaper to print an acknowledgment of its major source for the articles, but failed to prevent further publication. A complaint to the Press Council was upheld; to no other effect.

As Turner's experience with the Black Power shows, drugs could be both a source of money and a kind of currency in themselves. The number of Phillip Clairmont paintings of dubious provenance which were to surface after the artist's death attest to the use of art as another medium of exchange. His sometime Wellington cocaine supplier, for example, has a number of rare workers on paper from the artist's own portfolio. All Clairmont's major drug dealers were given art, bequeathing a shadowy provenance to some of his best work, secreted, as it still is, in clandestine collections. In 1977 both Clairmont and Alan Maddox both frequented the Black Power HQ in Mount Victoria where a mutual friend rented part of the house. Maddox left a painting on the bare scrim on one of the walls, the fate of which is unknown; a non-partisan, he remains in close contact with the local chapter of the Mongrel Mob in his home town.

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