The Brooklyn Rail

What is Its Future?

Do you know the San Francisco Oracle? It’s been around lately, on display all over town as part of several “Summer of Love” anniversary exhibitions. It was a trippy countercultural newspaper published out of Haight-Ashbury from September 1966 to February 1968, bookending the infamous season when thousands of young people arrived on San Francisco’s doorstep. In a dozen issues weaving poetry, spirituality, and politics with revolutionary rainbow inking effects, the Oracle reached well beyond the Bay Area, charging up hippies from coast to coast.