GINSBERG, Allen (and others).
Big Table 3. Volume 1, Number 3.
FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY ALLEN GINSBERG. Chicago: Big Table, Inc., 1959. Edited by Paul Carroll.
Octavo. 120 pp. Sewn signatures in stiff cream pictorial wrappers, the cover photograph by Aaron Siskind. Signed by Allen Ginsberg in ink on page 7, at the opening of his contribution. General soiling to the wrappers, else a near fine copy.
The third issue of Big Table — the Chicago little magazine founded in 1959 by Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll after the University of Chicago suppressed the Winter 1959 Chicago Review over its planned Beat content. Big Table 3 carries an early periodical printing of Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," the long elegy for his mother Naomi, which appeared complete only in 1961 as Kaddish and Other Poems from City Lights. The issue is a roll-call of the period: alongside Ginsberg are John Rechy's "The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny," Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Edward Dahlberg, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Norman Mailer, Paul Blackburn, Edward Dorn, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Her," and an excerpt from Jean Genet.
Signed by Ginsberg on the page where his own work begins, the copy joins the documentary record of one of the most consequential little magazines in postwar American letters — a publication born of a censorship fight and central to the public emergence of the Beat writers.
SKU TO-2026-042
