[In the following essay, Goodrich recounts the circumstances surrounding the publication of Kesey's The Further Inquiry and Paul Perry and Ken Babbs's On the Bus, which both commemorate the Merry Pranksters's transcontinental bus trip in 1964.]

The entire country was in for a long, strange trip in 1964 when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters left for New York City from La Honda, Calif., aboard a psychedelically painted school bus driven by “Cowboy Neal” Cassady and bearing a destination sign reading “Further.” Capturing the legendary event on paper has proved to be an equally odd trip; although Tom Wolfe's best-selling The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (FSG, Bantam; 30-odd printings) described the expedition in some detail, the major participants themselves have had trouble convincing publishers to do a book on the Pranksters. Until now, that is; with the bus trip having clocked up its 25th anniversary and the 1960s evoking more nostalgia these days than regret, both Thunder's Mouth and Viking have committed to heavily illustrated, high-profile books on the subject. Viking will publish Ken Kesey's The Further Inquiry (150-plus color photos, 50,000 first printing) in October, a book that represents just one of three Kesey titles from the publisher in 1990; Thunder's Mouth will publish Paul Perry and Ken Babbs's On the Bus (paperback, 120 photos, 10,000 first printing) in November.

The two projects kicked around the publishing world for some time before finding their respective homes, partly because of doubts about the market and partly because the bus trip—which was undertaken with a film in mind—seemed so difficult to render in book form.

On the Bus originated in the mid-1980s, when Perry, a magazine editor who had previously worked with Kesey, suggested the head Prankster let him put together a book proposal based on the Prankster archives—hours and hours of film and audiotape, plus hundreds of photographs—sitting in an outbuilding on Kesey's farm. Babbs (dubbed on the bus trip “The Intrepid Traveller”) was a natural collaborator, since he too was a writer and a Kesey neighbor. He was also someone who had already tried to marshal support for a similar project, and in fact had been giving an “On the Road” audiovisual performance since 1981. But the proposal was ill-fated; agent Nat Sobel sent it out to some 20 publishers without generating much interest. “It was one of those books where art and commerce clash,” says Perry, for while many editors loved the idea behind the book, it always encountered skepticism from production or sales departments.

Sobel eventually stopped sending the proposal out, but when he mentioned it to Neil Ortenberg, publisher of Thunder's Mouth, Ortenberg reacted with enthusiasm. “I knew it was going to be a terrific book,” he says now, citing the involvement of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Robert Stone, Jerry Garcia and Hunter Thompson. Perry says “the cooperation was extraordinary—practically everyone said, ‘God, this is a great idea, all the participants are dying off.’”

For his part, Babbs transcribed the audiotapes from the bus trip, including some of the raps that made Neal Cassady famous.

“It was a real '60s project,” says Perry. “You pick up participants along the way, and you don't know where you're going.” On the Bus's gradual expansion is reflected in its subtitle—The Compleat Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture.

The history of Kesey's own book is even more checkered. Written as a screenplay in the late 1970s, The Further Inquiry—a spaced-out courtroom satire in which Neal Cassady's spirit is put on trial for unspecified crimes—never sold to Hollywood and ended up buried in Sterling Lord's files. Submitted as a book, it was turned down at least once by Viking—so the story goes—until it was rediscovered in 1988 and offered to editor David Stanford, himself a Bay Area native, bus-trip aficionado, and sometime farm-hand. (Charles Verrill, Kesey's editor for Demon Box, his last book, had left Viking to become an agent.)

Stanford visited Kesey in Oregon, saw the rotting hulk of the bus in the author's field, and the experience reconfirmed his enthusiasm for the book—as did Viking's recent sales conference. “The reps loved the book,” he says. “We put on the Grateful Dead and ran some bus footage—it was wild.”

Like Ortenberg, Stanford knew a book on the bus trip would succeed only to the extent that its design conjured up the spirit of the '60s. Viking designer Michael Kaye did the job, says Stanford, giving the book “a whole new level of graphic complexity”—which included a corner-of-the-page photographic “flip book” of Cassady, “fastest man alive.” Graphic treatment aside, the impact of both books derives largely from the archival photographs themselves, most previously published; the majority were taken by “official” Prankster photographer Ron “Hassler” Bevirt, but a good many are by Allen Ginsberg.

Ortenberg and Stanford met to make sure the photographs in the two books didn't overlap, and that cooperation reflects the publishers' sense that the titles complement one another. As former Viking publicity director Victoria Meyer said in a very '60s frame of mind, “Anyone interested in the subject will want to have both books.”

The Further Inquiry stands somewhere in the middle of what has been a flurry of Kesey-inspired activity at Viking. In January it published Caverns, a mystery created in collaboration with some of Kesey's University of Oregon writing students under the pseudonym O. U. Levon; in October, Viking Puffin will publish Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, an Ozark tale that originally appeared in Demon Box; sometime in 1991 Puffin will also publish Shoola and the Sea Lion, an adaptation of an Indian tale. The commotion will culminate in fall 1991 with Sailor Song, an environmentally conscious novel involving a film company's arrival in Alaska to film a children's book—Shoola and the Sea Lion, of course.

Kesey was quite willing to talk to PW about his works in progress, but as it turned out, couldn't be reached for comment. His phone has often gone unanswered in recent days, explains Stanford, because Kesey, other Pranksters and newer friends have been outside repainting “Furthur” for its trip to the ABA.