I had heard of Lee Lozano but didn’t really know much about her until reading this article in The Brooklyn Rail about the publication of her notebooks. I was inspired to purchase two volumes of the notebooks (Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 are available on Amazon) out of curiosity about their contents, and also because I used almost the same exact notebooks as a kid. The facsimiles are fascinating– they look just like the original pocket size spiral notebooks except that the spirals are bigger and they are thicker, perhaps in part due to added pages pasted in, and partly due to the use of better paper in the facsimiles. Some of the contents are mundane stuff– lists of calls made and received, visits made and received, etc.– but from them you get a snapshot of life in the late ’60s SoHo art scene, and Lozano knew all the players. I think it is fantastic that these are being published in such faithful facsimile editions, and at a reasonable price (list is $25, but as of this writing Amazon has Vol. 3 at $18.31, which is what I paid.)

Here are my copies of the facsimiles:

Volume 2 was a Roaring Spring “The Spring” notebook, #7313.
Here are similar ones from my own collection, not sure why they changed to #7314. Also the price had risen to from 25 to 39 cents by the late ’70s/early ’80s (read more about them here).

Volume 1 and 3 were Vernon McMillan Memo Books, No. S-2508– the logos are a bit hard to see, and they changed the branding over the years from “Vernon Line” to “Vernon McMillan” but the “Memo Book” title retained the same typography, as you can see from this orange one from my own collection (read more about it here):

You can see the product info a little better in Brooklyn Rail’s photo of Vol. 1, which seems to be sold out.

From the Brooklyn Rail article:

Between 1967 and 1970, during a period of extreme intensity, Lozano kept a set of eleven pocket-sized and spiral-bound notebooks (three have been released by Karma so far), each cover numbered sequentially and emblazoned in chunky black marker with the word “PRIVATE.” While cited frequently in scholarly literature and understood as essential to her seismic experimentation with what she would call “Life-Art” (dematerialized art that involved action, information, and behavior as medium), these journals have remained largely out of public view. Now widely available and resting on my nightstand, these dutifully reproduced facsimiles could easily be mistaken as my own.

The handwritten notebooks are filled with a mixture of content banal and enthralling: friends’s phone numbers, political declarations, reading lists on math and science, aphorisms, horoscopes, puns, ideas for paintings, SoHo gossip, drug consumption. … Some texts read as artist’s statement: “Finally I must say something about why I write in such small books. It is to encourage myself to maintain terseness.” …

Details about Lozano’s daily life also flood the pages. Readers learn that she was in near-daily contact with Dan Graham: they watched the moon landing on TV together, attended a Grateful Dead concert, and shared a Thanksgiving dinner with Vito Acconci. She recalls complaining to her neighbors—to Joseph Kosuth about their broken elevator and to Christine Kozlov about the mailbox key. She projects an increasing reticence about meeting up with Yvonne Rainer and registers Eva Hesse’s death, unemotionally, by date and time of day. Her third notebook, which is filled with a pathologically detailed list of calls and visits she made and received between May 15, 1969 and July 21, 1970 likewise names prominent artists, dealers, and curators that made up her now-canonized cohort.

Read more at: Lee Lozano Private Books 1-3 | The Brooklyn Rail