Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo documents one of the largest private archives of countercultural material ever assembled: the collection built over decades by Julio Mario Santo Domingo Jr.

Santo Domingo, heir to a Colombian brewing fortune, spent much of his life gathering rare books, manuscripts, artworks, and ephemera tracing the history of drugs, psychedelia, rock music, and countercultural movements from the nineteenth century to the present. This 479-page volume, photographed by Jason Brownrigg with text by Peter Watts and designed by Yolanda Cuomo, moves through the collection's rooms and holdings, treating the library itself (its shelving, objects, and juxtapositions) as much as the individual items in it. It was published in a single-volume trade edition by Anthology Editions in 2017, following Santo Domingo's death in 2009 and the collection's eventual dispersal.

The book's front board carries only a bookplate reading "Ex Libris / Julio Santo Domingo", the collector's own library mark, rather than the published title, which appears on the dust jacket; catalogue records that cite the cover text alone have listed the book as "Ex Libris" for that reason. Altered States stands as the primary published record of a collection otherwise known mainly through scholarly and curatorial circles.