The Most Iconic Blotters of All Time

I recently got to catch up with countercultural scholar Erik Davis about his acid book Blotter on MIT Press, which has been getting rave reviews in the underground as one of the most interesting books on LSD ever made. We dove deep into several lysergic myths and mythologies, and I also quizzed him about several of the wildest and most influential LSD blotters in history—including some gold-leaf creations that literally made me gasp when I first saw them. Check out the collection below, along with Erik’s wild tales of how they got made. 

‘Bike Rider,’ by Ed Visser (Amsterdam, 1994)

“This is one of the most famous blotters ever. And it’s really just a piece of clip art that the designer, Ed Visser, got from the internet. It’s based on Albert Hoffman’s famous bicycle ride after he first synthesized LSD. The designer worked at Paradiso club in Amsterdam in the ‘70s, and made a lot of their posters. One of the things you might not notice is that the numbers are silk-screened on top of an offset printed image, which are usually not combined. He did that to make it harder to copy. And he added glitter to some of the numbers too, so people couldn’t just steal the design. 

It’s also just a great image of acid. I just love that sense of movement and dynamism of the bike. It seems very appropriate for LSD’s sense of movement and dynamism, and the modernity of it.”

‘Japanese Crests’ by Bernard Hassall

“This was a mid-1980s reissue of an earlier sheet of acid, known on the street as 'samurais,' and based in Monsho: Family Crests for Symbolic Design by Isao Honda. They were made by Bernard Hassall, who was friends with Terence McKenna and was busted. He was particularly artistic in his approach to making blotter, and the originals were a series of Japanese seals protected by a shiny black cover. These sheets came in a box, and one had a higher dose than the others. The LSD manufacturer Leonard Pickard did a reissue of these in eggshell blue in the late 70s.”

‘Camouflage’ by Sarah Matzar (mid-1980s)

“This one is by Sarah Matzar, a woman who was involved in an LSD family in the Grateful Dead scene that was one of the core upper-crust crews. It was a family that some called the Bolinas girl gang, because they were mostly women. She's very much still around, and went through some legal trials; she definitely paid her dues. This is one of her designs, and she also wove quilts, so one of their code names for acid blotter was “quilts.” I like the fact that it’s abstract, and that’s it’s pink. Not all of these things have to be made by mustachioed freak artists. This one has a nice twist.”

‘Tetragrammaton,’ original image from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1977)

“The image itself is from a 19th-century magic book on the history of modern occultism. The tetragrammaton is the four-lettered name of God in Hebrew letters, Yahweh, and it's also used in a lot of magick because it has a lot of esoteric elements to it. This one has a playful, carnivalesque quality with the eyes and the way the tetragrammaton is laid. On another level, it just reminds us of the esoteric dimension. All psychedelics end up having a spiritual dimension, whether you want them to or not. There’s definitely a part of LSD culture that has to do with ceremonial magic and overlaps with the acid scene, like when Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis gets reborn in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the Bay Area. You know, they're definitely taking acid.

But this piece also reflects on the question of: What is an acid blotter? You could say that it’s a brand, or a cartoon. But this one is like, nah — it’s a sigil. So it refers to printing an image, and it has the psychoactive power to transform your state. And it was printed on the back in reverse, so all the black and white was switched.”

'Crazy World,’ original image by John Flores (San Francisco, 1977)

“I really like this one, and riff on it a fair amount in the book. I think it really is a wonderful reminder of the playful dimension of acid phenomenology. All psychedelics have a cartoony edge. Sometimes you see cartoons, or entities that have a cartoon quality. They even call it like the cartoon continuum, like you're getting close to that zone where Mayan gods and Mickey Mouse all start to seem like they're coming from the same place. So this one’s based on an image by an artist named John Flores, and it’s got all of these archetypes—like what would you encounter if you took a stroll through LSD’s cartoon continuum? It’s also very Bay Area—you've got the Grateful Dead skull and roses, you have Zippy the Pinhead, you have the Residents eyeball, the local underground band. You see the bridge, the pyramid building, all that kind of thing.”

‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (San Francisco, late 1970s)

“This one’s probably the most iconic one, in terms of being this bold act of appropriation that's also a little bit more than what it looks like. One of the interesting things is that it was not, as far as we can tell, directly lifted from any Disney intellectual property, meaning the artists did it fresh. They made their own version. This package reminds us of how far some blotter-makers went to make art. You would only get this from buying a gram, so each sheet had a 10th of a gram. You'd have 10 sheets, and those would be inside the foil, and the foil sticker on it also tells you something about the material, because the sticker says Sandoz [the original pharmaceutical company that made LSD]. So that's a promise that this is the highest material. And each blotter had a little Mickey Mouse in it.

So it's a wonderful image, just in terms of just the artfulness of the construction, and the fact that they would go to this length to make something for no reason. From a financial perspective, it doesn't make any sense. It reminds us that the blotter-makers were also artists, and that the LSD trade was never primarily about making money. I mean, people made money. They were definitely happy to make money, and they're not all Robin Hoods by any means. But [the culture] has this kind of idealism or prankster spirit. It’s not easy, back in pre-computer days, to do a sheet of tiny little Mickey Mouses. And the producers were still like, let's make a package for the upper level buyers and sellers. It reminds us that there are kind of secret realms in the trade.”

‘Astrogirl,’ original image by Claudia Rey and Carlos Soul Singer for Liquid Sky (1992)

“Here’s the alien girl from the rave shop Liquid Sky. I can’t say that we know it was officially approved, but it’s very much a great icon—recognizable, but it has a weird take-off into a different realm. Blotter images are obviously a product, and some of them are images that come directly from logos, but there’s a playfulness and kind of irony too. This one’s done on this lovely rag paper, and we've been able to identify the person who created it, named Kevin Barron. He recently wrote a book called Blotto about his life as a blotter-maker.”

[Michelle’s note: Liquid Sky was a really sick clothing store, record shop, and hang-out zone in New York City that became a ground-zero for 90s rave culture… if you wanna know more, you should def listen to this interview with the founders, in conversation with DJ Ty, on Dublab!]

Reincarnating no. 2, Patrick Turk, 2021

“When people think about acid culture, they think about New York, California, and maybe Michigan. Texas never gets enough press, but it was ahead of the game. This is the work of a contemporary artist named Patrick Turk who lives in Houston. He's from Galveston, and he's a collage artist. He makes a lot of 3D collages and is very psychedelic, but not in a typical way. This is an original piece for blotter. In the last 25 years, there’s been a rise of vanity blotter — blotters sold without any acid, that’s a collector’s item or art medium. So there’s artists now that just do vanity blotters that are not designed to be part of the trade, even though sometimes they do get dipped. This is an example of that.

I really like the way that it takes one of the collective features of psychedelic phenomenology—this stuttering, repeating image—and brings it forward in a way that's both beautiful and kind of horrifying. It's a little insect-like. Yet it's also very beautiful and organic, and kind of mandala-like, but it's not a mandala. Instead, it's got a more looping, multi-headed kind of quality that strikes me as the very resonant, overwhelming, abstract places you find yourself in sometimes, where there's clearly an internal logic, but you can't really track it.”

This article first appeared in Rave New World, a newsletter on parties and drugs with a focus on counter-cultural paradigm shifts. Subscribe here. 

April 3, 2024: This story was updated to reflect edits to “Bike Rider” designer Ed Visser; corrected the title of Japanese Crests, removed the reference to it being touched with gold, and clarified the year Leonard Pickard issued the series. We also revised a reference to the Bolinas family to say that “some” described them as girl gang; corrected the phrase “Residents eyeball”; updated Patrick Turk’s current residence in Houston; and removed a sentence suggesting the reincarnation blotter was created solely for vanity purposes.

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