Arthur Glick Kunkin (March 28, 1928 – April 30, 2019) was an American journalist, community organizer, machinist, and New Age esotericist best known as the founding publisher and editor of the Los Angeles Free Press.
In May 1964 he produced the first issue of the Los Angeles Free Press, a one-time edition distributed at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market, a fund-raising event for KPFK.
The paper's core volunteers and supporters included people from KPFK, the bohemian crowd that hung out at the Papa Bach bookstore, and The Fifth Estate, a Sunset Strip coffee house that provided office space for the Freep in its basement.
[9] The atmosphere there was described by a reporter for Esquire: "Kids, dogs, cats, barefoot waifs, teeny-boppers in see-through blouses, assorted losers, strangers, Indian chiefs wander in and out, while somewhere a radio plays endless rock music and people are loudly paged over an intercom system.
By 1969 circulation had exploded to 100,000 copies,[7] but legal problems stemming from the publication of a list of names of undercover drug agents put it in a precarious financial position[6] just as it was expanding its operations to include a printing plant, a typesetting firm, and a small chain of bookstores.
[2] He went on to study meditation with Kahuna priests, Dervish Sufis,[6] and ultimately Andrew Da Passano, a Russian-born Italian who taught techniques based on Tibetan Buddhism shared with Russia by emissaries of the 13th Dalai Lama.
[14] In 1979, Kunkin began a seven-year apprenticeship in alchemy at the Paracelsus Research Society in Salt Lake City,[2] where he edited their journal Essentia.
[17] Kunkin was president of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles 1991-1992,[14] an esoteric mystical group founded by Manly P. Hall, and taught laboratory alchemy onsite.
He later became a lecturer in alchemy and other New Age topics at the Institute for Mentalphysics retreat center near Joshua Tree,[18] and a columnist for the Desert Valley Star.
[citation needed] In 2009, he published a radical reinterpretation of the philosopher's stone formula in Volume 1 of the unfinished five-ebook series Alchemy: The Secrets of Immortality Finally Revealed.