Bill Butler, an ex-pat American beat poet, publisher and occultist.
In 1965 he was running the paperback department of Better Books, London's avant garde bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, where he employed the noted performance and sound poet Bob Cobbing. Bill eventually left and was replaced by the biographer of the Sixties and later owner of the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, Barry Miles.
Bill went on to open The Unicorn Bookshop at 50 Gloucester Road, Brighton, which specialised in anarchist and sexually subversive publications. It was open until 1970 and was described in the sixties by the local Conservative Party as "a place where hippies and perverts gather".
Bill Butler and The Unicorn Bookshop were tried on obscene publications charges in Brighton in August 1968; Professor Eric Mottram and the poet George MacBeth spoke for the defence, but the Magistrates convicted. Mr Michael Worsley QC, prosecuting, described J. G. Ballard's "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan" - later to form part of The Atrocity Exhibition - as "just the meanderings of a diseased and dirty mind.â€
The bookshop in Brighton subsequently closed down and Butler moved to Wales - where he continued publishing from Nant Gwilw, Llanfyndd in Carmarthen. The building is now derilect.
He died in his sleep in 1977 shortly after delivering the manuscript of his last book.
