The Laughing Horse Press
view enlarged panelA New Mexico literary legend, Walter Willard Johnson, better known as “Spud,” made his home in Taos and Santa Fe from the early 1920s until his death in 1968. A poet, writer, publisher, and humorist, Johnson started out at the University of California at Berkeley where he and two friends introduced Laughing Horse, a campus journal featuring literary giants of the 1920s and 30s. In 1923, after the magazine was suppressed for printing a D.H. Lawrence review with what the University claimed was “obscene” language, Johnson took over sole editorship, moved it to Taos, and continued publishing for more than a decade.
When he acquired his own treadle-operated press in 1927, he printed Laughing Horse, as well as a series of pamphlets, and a small newspaper called The Horse Fly. A major literary force, Spud Johnson worked for The New Yorker, published a volume of his own poetry with the cooperative Writers’ Editions, wrote for the Santa Fe New Mexican, spearheaded local writing groups, edited the Taos Valley News and later contributed a Sunday column to that paper.
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