Complete run of 48 issues, in varying formats and sizes, extensively illustrated in color and black and white. Including most of the important original inserts: Oz Sheet No. 1 (#4); Che Guevara poster (#8); Outcry! People’s Park poster and Running Man Book News (#21); Honeybunch Kaminski poster (#24); Print Mint leaflet (#26); Jimi Hendrix/OZ News poster (#30); Janis Joplin/OZ Old Bailey Trial poster (#36); and the Wembley Rock ’n’ Roll subscription form (#43). Also with cover variants of #30, #31 and #35; proof sheets for #9 and #47; and proof cover for #34. The rare Yoko Ono/Saville flyer for #8 is supplied in facsimile. Condition generally very good to near fine, with individual faults as described.

Founded in Australia by Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp, OZ was transplanted to London in 1967 and rapidly became one of the principal voices of the British underground. Its 48 London issues provide an unusually immediate record of the political, sexual and artistic revolutions of the period: Vietnam and the anti-war movement, feminism, gay rights, race, drugs, environmentalism, alternative lifestyles, rock music and the sustained struggle against censorship. The V&A describes OZ as “one of the most important records of 20th century counter-culture and revolution.”

OZ was equally revolutionary as graphic design. Under Martin Sharp, and through artists including Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, Michael English, John Hurford, Robert Crumb and others, conventional magazine layout gave way to psychedelic typography, collage, fluorescent inks, metallic papers, posters and pages conceived as autonomous works of graphic art. Issue #16, the celebrated Magic Theatre number created principally by Sharp and Philippe Mora, pushed this experimentation towards an almost entirely visual, multimedia conception of the magazine. The V&A identifies the issue as a particularly significant part of its Felix Dennis OZ Archive. The remarkable succession of covers and colour variants reproduced in the accompanying documentation demonstrates how thoroughly OZ treated the magazine itself as an artistic medium.

Its cultural importance is inseparable from the history of censorship and freedom of expression in Britain. The notorious “Schoolkids OZ” (#28), guest-edited by a group of teenagers, led to the 1971 prosecution of Neville, Jim Anderson and Dennis for obscenity and conspiracy to corrupt public morals. The six-week proceedings became one of the defining censorship battles of the era; the V&A calls it “arguably the most important censorship trial of the decade.” John Lennon and Yoko Ono publicly supported the defendants, with Lennon contributing the song that became God Save Oz.

The magazine was also an extraordinary meeting place for the period’s radical culture. Contributors represented here include Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Kate Millett, Colin MacInnes, David Widgery, Caroline Coon, Nick Kent and Heathcote Williams, while OZ published or interviewed figures including Andy Warhol, Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa, Anaïs Nin, Timothy Leary and John Peel. Its pages therefore connect the British underground not only with radical politics but with feminism, experimental art, literature and the emergence of the rock culture that transformed the international media landscape.

The provenance of the present set is particularly significant. Felix Dennis (1947–2014) progressed from street-selling OZ to advertising manager, designer and ultimately co-editor, experience that he later credited with teaching him how to become a publisher and entrepreneur. This was one of only two complete runs in his possession; the other entered the Victoria and Albert Museum with the Felix Dennis OZ Archive, acquired by the museum in 2017. The presence here of proof sheets, a proof cover, variant issues and numerous ephemeral inserts gives the set an archival dimension extending well beyond that of an ordinary complete run.

Provenance: Felix Dennis, co-editor of OZ, originally from the OZ editorial office, London, and subsequently preserved at Dennis’s estate at Dorsington, Warwickshire; accompanied by a signed letter from Barry Miles on behalf of the Felix Dennis Estate.

Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–1971 (1988); Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake (1995); Tony Palmer, The Trials of Oz (1971); Victoria and Albert Museum, Felix Dennis OZ Archive, THM/497.