In the mid-1960s, there was a boom in underground and self-published works. Hectography, mimeography, and offset printing not only made it possible to produce small editions cheaply but also fostered a specific aesthetic: in wild cut-and-paste layouts, 'messianic amateurs' combined typewritten aesthetics, handwriting, doodles, collected and collaged imagery, pornographic photos, snapshots, and comics. Typography consciously liberated itself, paralleling a deregulation of linguistic and visual forms of expression in the name of a new 'sensitivity.' The volume, which is published alongside an exhibition at the Weserburg in Bremen, presents for the first time such a wide array of underground and self-published works from the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as the international context in which they emerged: not as a history of anecdotes, but as an attempt to capture the aesthetic cosmos of a do-it-yourself culture.