Dana Atchley's "Notebook 1," an Assembling, was published in March 1970 about the same time as Assembling No.1. Ed Ruscha contributed a piece entitled, "Chocolate" that consists of the word "Chocolate" printed on one page and a hand applied chocolate smear on the following sheet. This is the first periodical to utilize the term, "Assembling." Contemporary Assembling magazines arouse from the topology of correspondence art. As common reference points for its geographically dispersed participants, they functioned as alternative spaces for exhibiting work, places where invitations for projects could be broadcast and coupled with the growing practice of listing contributor's addresses, initiators of community building. Equally important, they provided correspondence art with an image of itself, a momentary snapshot that illuminated the scope and breadth of its activities. Self-published in small print runs, utilizing available print technologies, these periodicals were distributed primarily through informal exchange and circulated almost exclusively within the participating community. Generally, most of the issues were discarded or destroyed by the artist/poet contributors when they finished reading them so such publications printed in small runs from the 1960s through 1980s have become exceedingly rare. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.