Brillig Bookworks
Clancy Sheehy owned the Brillig Bookworks on the Hill. The Hill was the site of the infamous riot and open drug dealing. But being just across Broadway from the campus, it was also the center of a lot of student activity. Clancy’s bookstore was focal point for a lot of the intellectual discussion and a favorite hangout of poets, intellectuals and writers.
When a riot took place on the Hill, Clancy’s bookstore was spared the broken windows and looting that nearby shops suffered. It is indicative of how well-respected and liked Mr. Sheehy was that his property was spared during that riot.
Clancy Sheehy
Did you own Brillig Bookstore on the Hill?
Well, it became the Brillig Works. It was originally, in 1960, it was called Upstairs Bookstore, started by Jerry Smuckler, and then in April of ’61, I became manager. I worked with Jerry Smuckler. I was a graduate student at the University of Colorado. I worked part-time for five years. I came to Boulder in 1955 from Denver. I was born and raised in Denver and came to life in Boulder.
I got to know a lot of people around the University. When I first came, it was just the tail-end of the Beatnik period when they wore black, turtle-neck sweaters and read T.S. Eliot and existentialism by Sartre by candlelight. I was part of the transition from Beatnik to hippieism, hippieness, or whatever they call it. The bookshop became a very active center for that.
First, we were considered the left wing bookshop, the far-left, and I stocked it mostly with paperbacks and a few used books. A lot of professors would use me for supplementary reading and we got to be a real hangout place.
We had people up there discussing all kinds of philosophy. My sign on the door said: “Open whenever the light is on.” So we’d go into the wee-hours of the morning. We’d have poetry readings, music, and political discussions. At first, we were considered the liberal-left.
We were part of . . . when Castro took over Cuba, we were against Batista. So there was a lot of political excitement. The Conservatives in town considered us a political threat. There were some phone calls. There were a group of Birchers who, at one time . . . two different times we got bricks through our window.
In the early and middle ‘60s, the conservative groups were very uptight about us. First we were considered the communist political den-of-iniquity. Then the hippie transition began to happen, and I never had a sign that said I would refuse service to anyone.
Boulder was a crossroads from the East Coast to the West Coast for the young people with their packs on their backs who’d left the sterility of middle-class America and were out on the road. Of course, Kerouac was one of the influential writers of that time.
My bookshop, as I said, was pretty liberal, and I had a lot of Beatnik and hippie writing. New Directions was one of them. We had Ferlinghetti, the poet. West Coast poets and Ginsberg. Ginsberg would come to town (back) then into our little bookshop and autograph.
And the next thing I knew, the hair got longer and the clothes got shabbier. I always said that I could never become a hippie because I came from a low-class neighborhood – Champa Street in Denver. Those kids, most of them, were from middle and upper-middle class families – so I would never qualify as an official hippie.
I read Visions of Cody, in which Kerouac wrote about his experiences in Denver.
Well, right, he had been in Denver. They were a lot of the same places that he hung out that I hung out, in a little bit different time-frame. There was a little ball park down on Welton Street, and I wasn’t far from there. And he hung out in the pool halls, His father was a Bougain. Mine was an Irish drinker, er, barber, and we lived on Champa Street, right off of Skid Row there.
Did you ever meet Kerouac?
No. I’d heard about him, talked with people who had. I talked to Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg. Back in ’65 or ’66, when the hippie scene was really reaching its peak, Ginsberg came to town and he would tell stories . . . and he knew Kerouac. And I’d say, “Oh yeah, I’ve been to the same places.” And young people, very definitely, they wanted to be on the road.
They didn’t realize, of course, the background of Kerouac who had been a thorough scholar, and of course, Ferlinghettie, Burroughs, and Kesey. See, the hippies, that was the irony, they wanted to talk and to meet each other, but they didn’t want to read books. They wanted to experience – that was the big thing.
There was a poet who wrote Turtle Island, I can’t think of his name. He was very popular back then, and he still writes. Then Timothy Leary came on the scene. He came to town, gave a lecture at the university, and came to my bookshop with all of his apostles following him, and we nearly had a riot. At that time, I just had that one little room up front. It wasn’t much bigger than from my kitchen to over there. (Clancy’s apartment is about four hundred square feet.)
What year was that?
He came in about ’65 or ’66. That was when he said: “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.” I had a little talk with him. He came into our bookstore, so I stood up and started singing “There’s no business like show business.” And his apostles were just aghast, because I wasn’t showing any reverence to their great god, Leary.
And I reminded him, because later on he did revise some of that philosophy, that these kids thought that they could drop acid and become another Timothy Leary – not realizing his background, Harvard, and all the research he did. I said: “They think they can drop a pill and become you, and they haven’t even gained a sense of identity.” And I could see that becoming a problem, because they were dropping acid and other drugs and some of them didn’t know what identity to come back to.
And acid was a startling experience? It did open some veils and gave another way of looking at things. But I had an identity that I could come back to. I been around long enough. But some of those kids didn’t. So, anyway, I gave Timothy Leary a little lecture about that. I know a few years later he did revise it. And Alpert, of course, the Guru . . . he and Timothy Leary split up. They had both been involved in psychedelics.
Alpert?
He became Ram Das later, but he originally worked with Leary and LSD experiments, especially with schizophrenics. And they both turned-on with acid. They both had one big book out called The Psychedelic Experience that was big in the ‘60s. Alpert went off to the East, to India, looking for his guru, and found one. He came back years later as Ram Das, and he’s still around.
It was an exciting time. I mean, here was a kid from Denver who was suddenly . . . Suddenly I realized that one part of me was left over from the ‘40s, when I was a teenager. There had been Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, and there I was with the sounds of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. It was an exciting time for me.
Do you think, in any sense, that Walt Disney was a prelude to that? I’ve heard that he was a morphine addict, although I don’t know if it is true. You can sort of see it in his movies, like Fantasia.
When Fantasia first came out, it was a box office flop. But once the kids on acid started seeing their fantasies, their visions, there were huge lines out in front of the theaters when I got to San Francisco in ’68, when they started showing Fantasia, and I did go see it. I had seen it a couple of times before. I think there was some psychedelic imagery happening there.
Do you think that influenced Baby Boomers . . . the kids who grew up after the World War II on Snow White and Fantasia? Do you remember the dancing mushrooms in Fantasia? It was almost a drug-induced trip.
That’s a good question. I didn’t know that about Disney until you just told me that. That perhaps he’d been on drugs himself. I distinctly remember coming out on The Hill one night – they had a pub on The Hill called The Buff Room – and Odetta was there then. My bookshop was just a few doors away. We were on acid one night, and I remember going up there one night and all these snowflakes were falling down, and this friend of mine said: “There really is a Disneyland. There really is a Walt Disney.” That’s what he said. We were all rolling in the snow and looking up at the lights and these great snowflakes coming at us. And I remember visions of those snowflakes that came through and that I had seen that in a Disney film. Most likely there was some kind of connection. Yeah!
Eventually, in ’68, I went on the road. I was so curious because there was all this talk about San Francisco. Clancy’s Bookstore was called “An official hippie hangout” and we had the first be-in. They called me into Denver and Gary Snyder was there. Behind all this, there was a production going on. There was a sense of how to organize and put on a production. These were show biz, corporate minds, even though they were in their hippie garb, promoting the hippie, psychedelic experience. They were really organizers.
Were these the Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey fame?
No. The group I was with, there were a couple of them, the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey. When I went on the road, I was known as “America’s oldest and shortest hippie.” I’d hear these stories a lot, and I almost went to Ken Kesey’s place, but I felt I didn’t want to be another one of the invaders. They were all moving in on him.
In Denver . . . Ginsberg was there. There was a whole group. I remember sitting around at this meeting and people getting stoned, but at the same time making sure this thing was organized and that there were enough outside toilets for everybody to use.
What did Leary do at your bookstore?
He actually came up to autograph. He had heard about my shop. Actually, I didn’t know how much the word had spread around about my bookshop until I got out on the road. I guess Clancy’s Bookshop was one of the spots that they stopped at. He came up to sign books that day and to talk. He was giving a lecture on campus. He filled Macky Auditorium.
I recognized him right off as a showman – he was in showbiz. But these young people were taking him so seriously as some kind of god – a psychedelic god or something. If he could (only) have been a little bit more honest about what he was. That’s what show-people do sometimes – pretend to be more that they are. That was their spark, and Ginsberg would be the first to admit it. I did talk to Ginsberg several times, and he’s a showman.
I remember him walking into my bookshop and there was this big picture of Ginsberg with his Uncle Sam hat on. He exclaimed: “Where did you get that?” I said that these people across the hall were selling these posters. “I’m not making any profit off that.” he said. “I want to know where they’re ordering it!” So there was also the business behind him.
The young people just see this glamorous surface. And as I said, they were stopping in from all over, and my telephone was being tapped and we were accused of being a dope-den and that I was pushing dope and that I had an artificial leg. The story got around that I was carrying heroin or something in my leg – outlandish stories! I never sold dope. But my phone might have been used. Who ever knows what happens on the telephone?
Stan Brakhage even went down to the police station and raised hell with them for tapping my telephone. They had agents across the street with cameras on the roof. Telescopic cameras (were) photographing people coming into the bookstore. That whole scene was happening, but we weren’t selling any books. We were all having this great time, so then we had these fund-raisings, be-ins to save Clancy’s Bookshop, and testimonials. Then I got arrested. The conservative element . . . I had these buttons (that said) “Shower with a friend!” “Jesus was a dropout,” etc. There was a group on campus called Bartle Matrix. John Chick was the head of Bartle Matrix.
How do you spell that? B-A-R-T-O M-A-T-R-I-X?
I think so. It’s part of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s another thing that came in. The Eastern religions, philosophies and books. I was the first to sell the I Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Barto Matrix, and all of those Eastern books, and this psychedelic group used that name. John Chick was head of it, and he went off to the East. And he’s back in town. Somebody told me he’s working at King Soopers. Dino Jergon was another one. In the ‘60s there was a lot of excitement. This was the promised land, and (there was) the feeling that something better was going to happen, and I could feel it then too. But the drugs, I think, did delude people a lot. The organizing and getting things done didn’t hold up.
Then I got to Berkeley and was in the middle of the People’s Park riot. I went out to find out what it was all about, and I found out! I finally ended up in the middle of a riot one night with a bunch of Quakers burning a candle.
How do you think drugs deluded people?
You really see how things fit together. You see a connection and a wholeness of everything . . . and (how) mankind can . . . . All these extra, superficial things get in the way. And I think people did experience love, unity and the whole cosmos and that we were just one part of it. So they could experience that and know that that was possible, and live in it. And living in that realm, it was an exciting and beautiful realm. Those be-ins were just wonderful, beautiful, people just hugging and dancing and (experiencing) just the joy of being alive and sharing.
The negative part in most of that – I know some people were putting on negative trips, depending on who was guiding. You could have gone in a negative way. They just wanted to stay in that turned-on realm. But you have to deal with a lot of other details in life to get things done – to get things to happen. Getting them to happen was part of it.
And the communes – they had their ideals, but they made a lot of mistakes. They didn’t know much about farming and sanitation. I went up to Buffalo and they all came down with hepatitis because their toilet was sitting right on the creek – and they were floating in a blissful fog. Getting it to work was another thing.
A woman I interviewed said that there were two classes of hippies. There were people who were in it for the spiritual enlightenment. They were the more intellectual, scholarly types. And then there were the street people who were more hedonistic – people who wanted to get drunk and high and take drugs. Did you see an evolution like that?
Yeah, yeah! I think she’s right. There were really those people who used it for a spiritual connection or revelation. And the others just went along for the kicks. And I could see that in Berkeley where I ended up when the riots were happening.
People’s Park?
Yeah. People’s Park! I ended up in a parade and people were carrying me on their shoulders. The girls made these wreaths and I would put them on policemen’s heads. But the street people – and I’d later see some of these same people in Boulder – their eyes. I could see in their eyes during the day, in his haze. And when these riots came, they were alive. They needed these riots to . . . . That was their purpose. The cause wasn’t there. Just to be exploding.
Believe me! I was in the middle of it. I was trying to hide! I was at a hotel, the Berkeley Inn, and of course, I was letting people in the door because the tear gas was going on. You’re right. I agree with her.
And then there were a lot of other ones that wanted to use the drugs to get to the spiritual core. Somebody said that drugs were, if you want to get into a higher realm and enlightenment, part of it is that trip up the mountain that you have to take yourself, and drugs were like stepping into a Ferrari or sports car and zipping to the top of the mountain and not experiencing all the unique experiences on the way – which was kind of an interesting simili. But I think she was right. A lot of them were along for the kicks.
I remember that in 1967 or ’68 there on the cover of a lot of magazines there were these pictures of a murder in Greenwich Village of a young hippie girl. It shocked the nation. It was like suddenly there were these rednecks with long hair who had the appearance of hippies, who had the love beads and peace symbols, but who were not real hippies. They were into violence and ruined a lot of communes and, eventually, the entire hippie scene.
Yeah, that was part of it. Stan Brakhage told me once that all these flower children, a lot of them, had just covered their anger over with the flowers and the joy. There was still a lot of anger in them too, that came out in different ways, and I saw that happen. And there were people in there to stir it up at those communes.
Of course, the CIA and FBI stuck their hippies in there, too. When there was a riot, when they wanted to prove that the hippies had caused it, when they had gotten into politics, especially in Chicago, they dressed up as hippies. And the narks, I remember them coming into the bookshop – these three hippie-types. Two guys and a gal came strutting into the shop and said, “Where’s the pot?” And I said, “Do you want something to cook in?” You know, I played their game. And they said, “No, pot. Where’s the pot?” And I said, “No. The john is upstairs, if that’s what you want.” And they were moving around, trying to be really cool. One of them is making this square sign at me. And then I finally yelled at the top of my lungs: “Oh! You mean marijuana. Is that what you want?” All three of them were narks. They were really ugly. They sort of overdid it, trying to play this hippie role. That was the irony.
I came back in ’71, after I had been in Berkeley and all those riots, and by that time The Hill was really a street scene. They put a police substation up on The Hill. Before, as I said, in late ’66 or ’67, twice I got bricks (thrown through) my window, which I’m sure were from the John Birch group. When I came back, most of the windows on The Hill were broken, except Clancy’s Bookshop. The Colorado Bookstore, which is now bricked up, (had its windows smashed). So that transition had happened, and the street people were there by then.
I got busted for this button that said: “F*ck Censorship.” The plainclothes man said I was under arrest for obscenity – for corrupting the minds of youth, and all hell broke loose. These newspaper reporters came up to me and took pictures next to a picture of Socrates drinking hemlock, because I was accused of corrupting the minds of youth. They had a big trial and two civil liberties lawyers came to my defense. It was a question of whether this was obscene or not. The literature laws had been pretty well established by Henry Miller and James Joyce. But the question was whether these buttons were literature.
The prosecution did have a point that a book is something that you just share with yourself, (whereas) this button is projecting an image. One day a guy came into my bookstore with a swastika on the back of his jacket, and I caught my reaction to that! They did have a point, but they had to drop the case because the Boulder law against obscenity was unconstitutional. The campus newspaper had a headline that said: “F-ck” the Constitution – Clancy’s being screwed by the Establishment!” There was a whole group of people on the street selling facsimile buttons to raise money for my defense.
How did you feel about that? Did you relish the role of being controversial?
Well, there was part of me that was show-biz. I got off on some of it, but then it really did get out of hand. And it was ridiculous! And then I saw it for what it was. It was just so absurd, and they wanted me to go on and sell a button again to prove something else, and I said “no.” It was about that time that I decided to fold up my tent and let somebody else take over.
Also, the bookshop was always on the verge of bankruptcy. I had started the bookshop two thousand dollars in debt. Somebody told me, years later, that you never start a business without ten thousand dollars in capital. That was back in the early ‘60s. I was a nice guy, but a lousy businessman.
My main concern was having the right books for the right people. The whole hippie scene was interesting. There was a lot happening and I learned a lot. I’ve often thought of writing about that period. I was controversial. I was accepted. I was part of the community, and I was part of an important time that was happening, the transition.
Copyright 2026 S. Byron Gassaway
Postscript:
“Brillig Bookworks” appears to be a misremembered name — the Boulder bookstore tied to Clancy Sheehy was actually Clancy’s Bookstore (also called Clancy’s), a small independent shop on University Hill in Boulder.
Key facts:
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Owner: Clancy Sheehy, a short (about 4’1″–4’3″), witty, loquacious proprietor whom local kids nicknamed the “Boulder Leprechaun.”
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Era: A 1960s Beat-style bookstore that modeled itself after San Francisco’s City Lights.
For further insight, see this:
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