Commercial exploiters quickly packaged the Beat as a commodity

Evidence

Manville, a former adman, may have been nobody’s idea of a beatnik but—entranced by the March basement—he was in sync with a cultural moment. Time’s disapproval notwithstanding, the Beat continued that spring with several explanatory paperbacks, Fred McDarrah’s photo collection The Beat Scene and Seymour Krim’s mass-market anthology The Beats, as well as two LPs purportedly recorded “live” in beatnik coffeehouses: the Gaslight’s Beat Generation Jazz Poetry and Café Bizarre’s Assorted Madness, Beat Generation Poetry, Beat Erotica by the Beat and the Unbeat. By way of an uptown promotion, the Record Hunter sponsored a “beatnik invasion of the midtown bourgeoisie” in which an assortment of Beat poets and painters occupied the emporium’s display window across Fifth Avenue from the Forty-Second Street Library. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: scene-turned-market. This is the marketing/commodification phase that preceded counterculture.