Another Roadside Attraction was published by Doubleday in 1971. It sold modestly at first, then became a word-of-mouth sensation among the counterculture — the kind of book passed hand to hand in dormitories, communes, and Volkswagen vans — eventually selling over two million copies and establishing Robbins as the literary voice of West Coast psychedelic anarchism.
John Paul Ziller (a musician, sculptor, and wild man) and his wife Amanda (a mystic, naturalist, and practitioner of ecstatic religion) open a hot dog stand and zoo called “Captain Kendrick’s Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve” in the Skagit Valley of Washington State. Into their orbit comes Plucky Purcell, a former football player turned mercenary turned LSD enthusiast, who has infiltrated a secret Catholic order and stolen the body of Jesus Christ — discovered during excavations beneath the Vatican, perfectly preserved, and proving (or disproving, depending on your theology) the Resurrection.
The question — what do you do with the body of God? — provides the novel’s philosophical engine, but the real subject is Robbins’s prose style: a baroque, digressive, metaphor-drunk voice that treats every sentence as an opportunity for verbal invention. “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion.” Every page contains sentences like this — sentences that exist for the pleasure of their own construction as much as for any narrative purpose.
Robbins’s method — combining genuine philosophical inquiry (about religion, nature, consciousness, freedom) with slapstick, sexual comedy, and prose pyrotechnics — influenced a generation of writers (Christopher Moore, Douglas Coupland, Dave Eggers) and defined a genre: the comic philosophical novel as countercultural statement.
Collecting Another Roadside Attraction
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1971): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $400–$1,000
- Without jacket: $30–$60
- First paperback (Ballantine, 1972): $5–$15
Robbins’s debut and the scarcest of his first editions (small initial printing of a first novel by an unknown author). The counterculture readership that discovered it in paperback rarely owned hardcovers, making jacketed firsts genuinely uncommon.