RE/Search goes to the source’s mouth to document fringe culture

In a button-down shirt and sweater vest, V. Vale seems a little too clean-cut to have published books on masochists, scarification, punk rock and paganism. Mild-mannered and tattoo-free, he is the antithesis of what one would expect from the revered independent publisher of such countercultural classics as “Modern Primitives.”

Yet for 25 years, the fiftysomething founder of RE/Search Publications has been carving out a niche at culture’s cutting edge, independently publishing magazines and books on subjects that were once deemed unworthy for print and, as an unintended byproduct, gently nudging them into the public consciousness.

“I didn’t even know I was going to be a publisher,” said Vale, dressed head to toe in black for a recent interview outside the Andy Warhol exhibit downtown. “[Then] I found myself at the very, very beginning of the San Francisco punk rock scene.”

All it took was reading a number of derogatory articles that “reduced punk to spitting and safety pins ... [and] I knew I had to publish something that was the so-called truth,” said Vale, whose publishing house was once dubbed “the Underground’s answer to Studs Terkel” by the Washington Post.

Though small, San Francisco-based RE/Search is credited with beginning a fringe publishing phenom, one that includes Los Angeles publishers Feral House and Amok Dispatch, and Juno Books in New York, which was founded by former RE/Search co-editor Andrea Juno in 1996.

Vale’s tactic for getting to that truth? Interviews, and lots of them. All 11 issues of Search and Destroy, the punk rock magazine he published from 1977 to 1979, and most of the 23 books he’s helped compile for RE/Search Publications, are in a Q&A; format--a format he said was inspired by Warhol’s then-nascent Interview magazine.

“All he printed were interviews,” said Vale, who was so impressed with the publication that he copied the magazine’s design for his first Search & Destroy. “I really believe in the interview as a format to communicate [ideas] without pretentiousness.

“I wanted primary-source documentation because I knew that would be quoted for years to come,” he added. “It wasn’t a writer’s theorizing. It was artists talking about what they do.”

Vale’s interest in sword swallowers, drag queens and other fringe characters is influenced by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who believed that research should be thorough and structural. Vale’s goal in publishing is to document countercultural lifestyles intelligently, accurately and from as many different viewpoints as possible.

“Every interview book has been a group project, and actually you have collectively a much greater intelligence than any one person,” said Vale, who co-edited RE/Search with his former girlfriend Juno from 1984 to 1995.

“My job is really to be the scribe in the Egyptian sense. The Egyptian scribe was supposed to transmit every bit of arcana and detail of Egyptian culture, mythology, whatever, as accurately as possible. That’s what I strive for.”

Today, RE/Search Publications, and its academic presentations of edgy material, continue to be some of the best reference books on subjects that were once considered too “out there” for New York publishing houses. And their early books’ impact continues to show in pop culture.

“Modern Primitives,” the 1989 book that explored body modification techniques, is credited with mainstreaming tattoos and body piercing. When it came out, body modification was primarily practiced by societal outcasts. These days, everyone from the kid bagging your groceries to Shaquille O’Neal is sporting navel rings and tats.

“Incredibly Strange Music,” the 1993 guide to novelty albums, is believed to have sparked a lounge-music revival. And “Incredibly Strange Films,” from 1986, prompted many otherwise obscure gore and sexploitation films to be re-released on video.

Those subjects, Vale says, were almost entirely inspired by living at poverty level. He and his friends couldn’t afford to see first-run movies or to buy new records--thus the inspiration for Incredibly Strange Music” and “Incredibly Strange Films.” “Modern Primitives” was inspired by a friend who collected old copies of National Geographic.

“It was all done from lack of money. Everything came from a thrift store for a quarter,” said Vale, who owns 15,000 books and 11,000 records.

“We were always trying to give people the notion that someone they had never heard of might actually bring a lot of value to their lives,” said Vale, who publishes out of his home in San Francisco.

Vale never expected to have such wide-ranging impact. The UC Berkeley graduate had no career aspiration other than working as a clerk at City Lights Books when he started Search & Destroy. Vale put together the magazine with an IBM Selectric II correcting typewriter he used after hours at the bookstore. Using money he solicited from legendary beatnik Allen Ginsberg and City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Vale was able to print his first issue but had to rely on the money he made through benefit concerts to keep the venture going.

He never made back any of the money he poured into the project and stopped producing the magazine in 1979.

In 1980, Vale was approached by Rough Trade Records to launch a similar magazine. A friend suggested he call it RE/Search. The magazine lasted for three issues before the English record label pulled the plug. It was losing too much money.

Two books, including an early work by avant-garde feminist novelist Kathy Acker, were published under the RE/Search moniker, but it’s the 1982 book about William S. Burroughs that is generally recognized as the first RE/Search publication. It featured excerpts from Burroughs’ novels, original photos and an in-depth interview that begins with the question, “You see Outer Space as the solution to this cop-ridden planet?”

Like he did with Search & Destroy, in a Situationist act of appropriation, Vale stole the design from a Rodchenko book, using everything from the type font and size to the column width, even the use of black bars throughout the text.

The latest Vale book, “Modern Pagans,” is an exploration of paganism as “the postmodern religious alternative.” The subject was inspired by longtime Bay Area pagan John Sulak, who also conducted numerous interviews for the book. As with all RE/Search subjects, the book’s purpose is Hegelian.

“If you’re not helping in your publishing to somehow illuminate or map out more freedoms either psychologically, behaviorally or more in your life,” Vale asks, “then what’s the point?”