San Francisco Oracle

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Cover of the sixth issue, February 1967

The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, [1] was an underground newspaper published from September 20, 1966 to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city. Allen Cohen (1940-2004) was the editor and Michael Bowen the art director, the two of them having founded the publication. The Oracle was among the founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate.

The Oracle combined poetry, spirituality, and multi-cultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury. It was arguably the outstanding example of psychedelia within countercultural "underground" press, noted for experimental multicolored design. Oracle contributors included many significant San Francisco-area artists of the time, including Bruce Conner and Rick Griffin. It featured such beat writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure.

At its peak, the publication's print run was about 125,000, but its editors estimated that ample pass-around readership brought their circulation above half a million.^[1]

A spin-off in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Oracle, existed for a short time.