Pocket Detonations No. 2: Otto Gross and the Thousand-Headed Spirit Fresh off the Press!

Otto Gross and the Thousand-Headed Spirit is off the press machines and looking amazing!

Pocket Detonations are small, collectible books that emerge alongside the larger translation and archival work at Bacchus Editions. Each volume follows a single thread in pursuit of the idea, instinct, image, or recurring question that first made us stop and pay attention to the featured individual.

The second Pocket Detonation could only have belonged to Otto Gross.

Physician and psychiatrist by training, anarchist, wanderer, patient, and exile, Otto Gross spent his life colliding with the people and institutions that sought to classify, discipline, cure, and explain him. A year after his death, the Viennese writer Anton Kuh inadvertently gave that adversary an unforgettable name: the thousand-headed spirit of authority.

This little book follows Otto's lifelong confrontation with that spirit, a force that has shown a remarkable talent for changing its language while preserving its habits. A century later it remains busy diagnosing, classifying, collecting, correcting, and forever attempting to explain away those who insist upon belonging chiefly to themselves.

The pages are populated by Otto Gross's own visual world, drawing upon German Expressionism, Symbolism, and related artistic movements through works by Alfred Kubin, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Walter Gramatté, Auguste Rodin, and others. Rare archival photographs, newspaper bits including new translations, and art, come together as a visual narrative to the story.

This is the second volume in the growing Pocket Detonations series.

PUR-bound, 90 pages, printed on cream French Paper stock, this Limited Edition pressing is in the bookshop now. We are very excited about this addition to the Bacchus catalogue.

Get yours here while you can:

Otto Gross and the Thousand-Headed Spirit, Pocket Detonations No. 2!