In 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art hung a show arguing that the Beats weren’t just a few novelists and a poem about Moloch — they were a whole visual and cultural movement, and this is the catalog. Lisa Phillips curated it, and the book runs about 280 pages with ten essays and 250-some illustrations. The reach is what makes it worth owning. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are in there, sure, but so is Bruce Conner’s assemblage, Jay DeFeo’s giant painting, Wallace Berman, George Herms, Kienholz, Jess, Larry Rivers, Robert Frank’s pictures, Brakhage and Mekas and the underground film scene, bebop, Lenny Bruce, the obscenity trials, North Beach and the Ferus Gallery in LA. It came with a chronology and a bibliography that are still useful. The show got knocked around by critics who thought the museum was making a marketing package out of a bunch of outsiders, which was true, but the book outlasted the argument. It’s out of print and worth finding.