Bicycle Day and other Psychedelic Essays by Alan Piper: early histories of psychoactive drugs shaping psychedelia, incl. foreword by Mike Jay

Psychedelic Essays by Alan Piper focuses on the early roots of psychedelic culture, arguing that psychedelics became seen as transgressive through histories that are often forgotten. The book traces influences across a broad timeline, moving from eighteenth-century drug cultures through the Club des Hashischins and into the psychedelic 1960s, with special attention to the less explored interwar period. Piper links drug-induced mind states to modernism and highlights specific threads such as Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, occultic circles around Hofmann, Harvard peyote experiments, literary and social contexts involving writers like Hope Mirrlees, David Lindsay, and Ernst Junger, and the role of Sandoz pharmaceuticals during Nazi Germany. The edition includes a foreword by Mike Jay and is sold as a limited hardback run.