This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The Sackners are mentioned in the chapter on Jack Hirschman stating that "his visual work has been extemsively collected by the Marvin and Ruth Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach." Michael Duncan describes Wallace Berman as "a key under-recognized artist of his generation...an enigmatic, underground figure whose colllages and assemblages articulate an important strand of dark spirituality in postwar American culture." Descriptions and illustrated works and a biography of each member of the circle contribute an important body of work to the understanding of this group. the book also includes an in depth analysis of Semina, Wallace's journal that is "a fragmentary guidebook to alternative modes of thinking, living, and art making...based on a romantic embrace of mysticism, individualism, and domesticity." The catalogue also includes an illustrated chronology from 1926 to 1976, reproductions of rare letters written by Berman and a checklist of the exhibition. FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer "The distinguished poet Michael McClure once described Semina, the meticulously handcrafted little magazine that artist Wallace Berman produced for friends in nine issues between 1955 and 1964, as "unwholesome" and "un-American." He meant those neutralizing terms as a compliment. "In the age where the eight-cylinder Buick, the grey flannel suit and the tract home represented wholesomeness," McClure wrote, "Semina was the ultimate unwholesome object, and we gloried in it." The homemade magazines vary in form. Some are simple folders with pockets, others are envelopes filled with clippings and still others are bound in a more conventional manner. All include combinations of poems, photographs, drawings, handwritten notes and collages, some made by Berman and others made by several dozen artist and writer friends. The nine issues usually appeared once a year (none appeared in 1956 and 1962, but two were printed in 1960). The show's impressive, abundantly illustrated catalog includes an annotated accounting of their contents.Semina was never sold. You couldn't subscribe or get it at the newsstand. You couldn't acquire it at a gallery. The catalog astutely traces relationships between Semina and the work of Surrealist poets such as Antonin Artaud and the mystical wing of Judaism represented by the Cabala. Another, more popular source goes unidentified, however, and given Berman's keen interest in the imagery and mechanics of mass media it seems too explicit to ignore. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 when a Bedouin shepherd boy stumbled on seven rolls of ancient parchment hidden in a cave on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, had grown to some 800 ancient manuscripts, texts and fragments when 10 more caves were explored over the next decade. The aged Hebrew and Aramaic communication galvanized the scholarly and the public imagination, culminating in the 1955 book on the ancient papyri by America's preeminent literary critic, Edmund Wilson. Of course, when Berman began his publishing project in 1955, there was barely any art world at all in the United States, never mind in L.A.Today, when new art has merged with global public spectacle, it is easy to forget how minuscule the community of artists, poets and their followers was, until relatively recently. "Semina Culture" chronicles the formation of the first such postwar community in Los Angeles. A counterculture, it flowed easily between Northern and Southern California, and its crystallization was an essential feature of the content of Berman's extraordinary art." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.