According to Paul Kantner, guitarist and founder of the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, "if anyone remembers anything about the sixties, they didn't live through them." Fortunately, Kantner was wrong, and from the haze of the marijuana, LSD, and countless concerts that shaped that mythical decade, many of the protagonists have managed to recall and transmit essential fragments of their experiences, composing a partial history of the Beat Era, to which this volume aspires to make a decisive contribution.

Taking as its starting point the astonishing collection of records, posters, and publications from the era assembled by Zdenek Primus, the purpose of this book is twofold: on the one hand, to review the contribution of the psychedelia And the hippie movement enters our visual universe primarily through the analysis of album covers and concert posters of beat music groups, whose exuberant designs were sometimes created by artists such as Wes Wilson, Víctor Moscoso, or even Andy Warhol. On the other hand, it offers a visceral and passionate approach to the youth movements that gave rise to this counterculture, in two places as different as flower power California: Francoist Spain—with texts by Mariano Antolín Rato, Patricia Godes, and Juan Pablo Silvestre—and Czechoslovakia on the other side of the Iron Curtain, with the captivating accounts of two young Czech beatniks during the Prague Spring (and its subsequent crushing by the Soviet army).