In 1967-1968, a small group of immensely talented people in the San Francisco Bay Area came together to form a short-lived but highly inventive poster and notecard copmany. East Totem West. Its founder, Joseph McHugh, took the poster - heretofore used primarily as a travel enticement or concert announcement - to a new, revolutionary place: the poster as art. He began creating images - through the process of printing -that harkened to acid-trip visions and spiritual mandalas - posters and notecards that sold by the thousands to the growing generation of hippies, freethinkers, bohemians, and individuals who were thriving in San Francisco and had begun to find themselves all over America.

It was as much a function of the place and times as it was the combination of people that made East Totem West happen: the Bay Area was host to several underground newspapers (The Berkely Barb, the Black Panther Party Paper, the Oracle, among others), influential personalities (Alan Watts, Bill Graham, Ken Kesey, to name just a few), a music revolution (including such icons as the Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin), and no fewer than five college campuses. Posters were the medium of choice, and poster stores enjoyed a heyday that has never been approximated. It was the perfect time for East Totem West to create, produce, and distribute its vital artwork.

White Rabbit and Other Delights: East Totem West - A Hippie Company 1967-1969
by Alan Bisbort