Ceased publication 1970 | Founded 1968 | |
Type Underground press monthly | ||
Fountain of Light was a hippie underground newspaper of the 1960s published monthly in tabloid format in Taos, New Mexico, from 1968 to 1970. At least 14 issues were published before the paper went under in mid-1970.
Contents
History
Members of The Family and Lorien communes outside Taos launched the paper in the Lorien Building, a converted warehouse north of town on the Santa Fe Trail. Timothy Miller, in The Sixties Communes: Hippies and Beyond gives the following brief account of the origins:
In addition to the services Miller mentions there were also a bookstore, a mobile security patrol, a small research library, and a shortwave radio network connecting some of the outlying communes without phone service. Along with most of the rest of these facilities Fountain of Light perished when the money ran out in 1970, all of the above-mentioned services having collectively run through a quarter of a million dollars in 2 years.
A small part of the paper's spirit might be gathered from a 1969 editorial entitled "Why Taos":
Concluding,
Contributors
In the paper's final months of existence local writer Jim Levy took over as editor and tried to convert it from a hippie commune paper to a local alternative newspaper covering actual news for the broader Taos community, abandoning psychedelic design motifs in favor of a more traditional newspaper look. Contributors included local poet Harvey Mudd; Roger Thomas was the paper's graphic designer.