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About Us

Barry Reid reveals how EDEN PRESS got started

Eden Press began as a reaction to the mindless idiocy of the Vietnam War. By the late Sixties thousands of soldiers were returning home addicted, disabled, and dead. Most had been drafted and suffered the resulting “fortunes of war.”

A small but growing number of potential draftees, however, were finding safety by leaving the US and moving to Canada. The methods they used spread throughout the antiwar movement, and real-life stories appeared in hundreds of underground newspapers. Friends at the Los Angeles Free Press urged me to prepare a how-to manual, and The Paper Trip was the result.

Publication of this 28-page booklet in October, 1971, was the beginning of Eden Press. I advertised in dozens of underground newspapers, offering The Paper Trip for $5.00 by mail. Surprisingly, the little book sold hundreds of copies, even though I thought it would lose appeal once the war ended.

Not so.  The Paper Trip actually became an underground “classic,” finding its way into every jail and prison in the country. Why? Just as young men feared for their physical lives in the military, prisoners feared for their social and economic lives because of criminal records. The Paper Trip gave them the possibility of avoiding negative records by using the same methods.