any given time. But the underground press phenomenon proved short-lived. An Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) roster published in November 1966 listed 14 underground papers, 11 of them in the United States, two in England, and one in Canada. Within a few years the number had mushroomed. A 1971 roster, published in Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book, listed 271 UPS-affiliated papers; 11 were in Canada, 23 in Europe, and the remainder in the United States. The underground press' combined readership eventually reached into the millions. The early papers varied greatly in visual style, content, and even in basic concept — and emerged from very different kinds of communities. Many were decidedly rough-hewn, learning journalistic and production skills on the run. Some were militantly political while others featured highly spiritual content and were graphically sophisticated and adventuresome. By 1969, virtually every sizable city or college town in North America boasted at least one underground newspaper. Among the most prominent of the underground papers were the San Francisco Oracle, San Francisco Express Times, the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe; Open City (Los Angeles), Fifth Estate (Detroit), Other Scenes (dispatched from various locations around the world by John Wilcock); The Helix (Seattle); Avatar (Boston); The Chicago Seed; The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta); The Rag (Austin, Texas); Rat (New York City); Space City! (Houston) and in Canada, The Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC). The Rag, founded in Austin, Texas, in 1966 by Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman, was especially influential. Historian Laurence Leamer called it "one of the few legendary undergrounds," and, according to John McMillian, it served as a model for many papers that followed. The Rag was the sixth member of UPS and the first underground paper in the South and, according to historian Abe Peck, it was the "first undergrounder to represent the participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the mid-sixties was trying to develop." Leamer, in his 1972 book The Paper Revolutionaries, called The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds". Gilbert Shelton's legendary Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip began in The Rag, and thanks in part to UPS, was republished all over the world. Probably the most graphically innovative of the underground papers was the San Francisco Oracle. John Wilcock, a founder of the Underground Press Syndicate, wrote about the Oracle: "Its creators are using color the way Lautrec must once