Michael Nolan of The Freeman chatting about Time Bomber the Book

Recorded October 10, 2013

A free-form chat with Michael Nolan about the book and events of the era.  We go everywhere from the intentional detonation of the San Francisco Bank of America bomb on September 7, 1971 to the Diggers and Emmett Grogan's rape of Anita Hoffman (Abbie's wife).  The latter was punishment for a copyright infringement.  He was the editor for my first magazine article about this story.

Cover Update

Okay, here we go again.  Without being so wordy this time, the idea here is as stated by Chip Kidd, book designer extraordinaire of Alfred A. Knopf/Doubleday: "What does the story look like?"

Since I wrote every word in the book I might know a little too much about what the story looks like.   So it took a while to boil it down.

I got my information from dozens of newspaper articles and other sources, and all of the people who wrote about it had one common piece of information to work from: The Note.

When you get to the basics, the story "looks like" that guy on the front cover, who wrote the four page note you see on the back cover.  He copied that note by hand, many times, and sent it to a lot of news people, most with a safety-deposit box key taped to page one.

I imagine that everybody who received those notes remembered them for the rest of his life and saw the notes in his mind when the story came up years later.  Same for anybody who remembers the announcement on television, or read about it in the papers.  Those hand-scribed notes are what the story looks like.

Would Chip Kidd make a cover like that for this book?  I doubt it, since I am no Chip Kidd.

- Steve