After the Grammy Award-winning success of their exquisite Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition box set Ozma Records, the imprint founded by bOING bOING’s David Pescovitz and his business partner Tim Daly, are back with a gorgeous coffee table art book celebrating the Golden State.

The Family Acid: California takes a trip with Roger Steffens, a name instantly recognizable to reggae fans, as Steffens is known worldwide as one of the foremost historians of Jamaican music and a biographer of Bob Marley, in addition to being an NPR interviewer and DJ. He’s also a traveller who has had a camera in one hand (a joint in the other) as he’s spent the past five decades seeking out the psychedelic, the eccentric, the outlandish and the transcendent:

Roger Steffens is an intrepid explorer of the fringe but he’s also a family man. He met his wife Mary under a lunar eclipse in a pygmy forest in Mendocino, California while on LSD. Soon after, they conjured up a daughter, Kate, and son, Devon. Family vacations took the foursome up and down the West Coast, from the gritty glam of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to reggae festivals in Humboldt, fiery protests in Berkeley to the ancient redwoods of Big Sur and the wilds of Death Valley. Along the way, they’d rendezvous with like-minded freaks, artists, musicians, and writers, from Bob Marley and Timothy Leary to actor John Ritter and war photographer Tim Page, the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now.

They’d take in the wonders of nature—hallucinatory sunsets, expansive mountain vistas, the dreamlike haze engulfing foggy mountain roads. And, of course, the adults would occasionally lose their minds in psychoactive celebrations of creativity, freedom, and hope. Set and setting were everything.

This book is a collection of snapshots taken between 1968 and 2015 during Roger, Mary, Kate, and Devon’s freewheeling adventures across the visionary state they call home. Think of it as a family album belonging to a very unconventional family.

Some of the photographs have appeared on The Family Acid Instagram feed, but the lavishly-published The Family Acid: California contains hundreds of full-color images, most never seen before, with detailed captions and an original essay by Roger Steffens. Pre-orders of the 192-page book come with a limited-edition photo print on perforated LSD blotter paper (undipped, sorry!), 6.25” x 10”, and signed on the verso by Roger Steffens. The blotter print is available with the book at a special package price or separately.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The blotter paper print.