[1] It was published by Carp Press, the name of the self-publishing project of Brautigan and his wife, Virginia Dionne Alder.

The man is holding onto a tree, which Davis says was pointedly phallic because "Richard was always looking for something to kind of gently throw in the public's face.

"[2] The woman in the drawing is intended to be Emily Dickinson—it was from one of her poems, and included by Brautigan as an epigraph, that the book's title was taken:[2] The grave my little cottage is,Where, keeping house for thee,I make my parlor orderly,And lay the marble tea"The book is 16 pages long, with 24 poems.

Nine of the poems were reprinted in the 1968 collection The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, one of Brautigan's best known works.

According to John F. Barber, unlike his later work, Lay the Marble Tea uses several different narrators rather than a single first-person perspective.