Big Table. [Vol. I], No. 1–Vol. II, No. 5 (all published).

Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll, and other Chicago Review staff members founded Big Table following the suppression of their Winter 1958-1959 issue by the University of Chicago administration following a Chicago Daily News article titled 'Filthy Writing on the Midway.' Big Table publishes some of this suppressed material. The first issue, which included 'Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch', was also banned, although it was later acquitted. This attention prompted Maurice Girodias to send Sinclair Beiles to the Beat Hotel in Paris to meet Burroughs and arrange for Olympia Press to publish the first edition of Naked Lunch later that year.

Contributors include John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Edward Dahlberg, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kline, Norman Mailer, Michael McClure, Aaron Siskind, and John Updike.

Periodical, 5 issues (201 x 134 mm, 8 x 5¼ in); toning to pages of issue 2; sewn adhesive-bound illustrated wrappers, rubbing to covers, light toning to issue 1, wear to spines of issues 1 and 2, subscription cards in two issues, a very good set; various paginations.

Anderson & Kinzie pp682-683; Clay & Phillips p265