RE/Search Publications was founded by V. Vale in 1980 in San Francisco. It was the successor to Vale's earlier punk rock fanzine 'Search & Destroy', which was started with small donations, provided to Vale by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and featured a veritable who’s who of punk from the Avengers and Dead Kennedys to Siouxsie Sioux and Joe Strummer as well as interviews with John Waters and Russ Meyer.
Multi- talented V. “Valhalla” Vale is the primary contributor to the books and magazines published by RE/Search Publications, he also hosts a television talk show 'Counter-culture hour' on Public-access television cable TV channel 29 in San Francisco. In 1980, he began publication of RE/Search, a tabloid format zine focusing on various counterculture and underground topics, with financial help from Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records and actress/film director Betty Thomas. He also started his own typesetting business so that his day job could fund his publishing and at the same time guaranteeing high quality typography and design for his magazines and books.
It started as a slim journal that drew Julio Cortázar together with Non, Cabaret Voltaire, Sun Ra, and The Slits. Relatively quickly RE/SEARCH gained a loyal following across the globe by introducing the world to artists such as William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Genesis P-Orridge, SPK, Monte Cazazza, and many others.
All of the RE/Search books, from Industrial Culture Handbook and Pranks! to Modern Primitives and Incredibly Strange Music, are essential pieces of alternative thought, art, music, literature, and ways to circumvent "control" in all its many forms.
They have covered everything under the counterculture rainbow, from body mods to sword swallowing, angry women to bodily fluids, almost all of the time way before anyone else.
RE/SEARCH has remained at the same address in San Francisco since 1979. Aside from being a book/magazine publisher, it is also a mail-order company. Their online shop carries all of their still in-print titles, there is also a podcast and newsletter, plenty to get your teeth into.
Vale still embodies everything that he stood for when they first began his mission, he's still a writer, publisher, researcher, documenter, musician, and constant curator and contributor to the counterculture continuum. Some describe him as the last 70s punk publisher.
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