The need for alternative news sources brought divergent countercultural scenes together in the late '60s and early '70s, connecting psychedelia with the nascent gay pride movement, the Black Panthers with Andy Warhol, and the environmentalists with the feminists. With Free Press, Jean-François Bizot, who founded Paris' underground publication Actuel in 1970, narrates the evolution of the free press movement through hundreds of magazine covers, posters, and excerpted pages. Divided into topical chapters such as "Freak Out!" and "Black Power!," the detailed reproductions speak for themselves, with annotations relegated to the back of the book. It's as close to the '60s protest movements as some of us will ever get.

The Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) started in the offices of the East Village Other in 1966, and supplied free news reports by writers such as Hunter S. Thompson and Ken Kesey, with illustrations by R. Crumb, Ron Cobb, and Spain Rodriguez. Via the UPS, mid-1960s American protest rags such as the L.A. Free Press and the Berkeley Barb inspired fledgling zines, including London’s it and Oz . No matter what the cause, radical aesthetics went hand in hand with radical politics. A crude, three-color image from the East Village Other depicts a woman in lingerie, holding a handgun and resting her leg provocatively on the body of a dead policeman. The caption reads: "Celebrating the Decline of Traditional Values."

High energy and immediacy characterize the era's graphic design: text was often handwritten and laid out sideways, and trippy cartoons in saturated colors, such as Crumb's bug-eyed man on the cover of Oz, captured a drug-addled generation. And although Angela Davis, John and Yoko, and other historical figures dot the pages of the anthology, Free Press also returns forgotten moments to the limelight. Most strikingly, its covers fold out into campaign posters for the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's 1968 run for President.

-H.G. Masters