HUGES, Bart. The Book with the Hole: Autobiography.

(Amsterdam): F.I.T., 1972.  First edition.  Softcover.  18.2cm by 12cm.  320 pages.  Translation and elaboration by Joey Mellen and Amanda Feilding. Issued by the Foundation for Independent Thinking, though never offered for commercial sale, this provocative memoir by Dutch countercultural icon Bart Huges sets out his radical theories of altered consciousness and documents his obsessive pursuit of self-trepanation—the act of drilling a hole into one’s own skull to expand consciousness and improve cerebral blood flow. Huges first outlined his ideas in the 1964 scroll Homo Sapiens Correctus: The Mechanism of Brainbloodvolume and famously performed the trepanation procedure on himself on 6 January 1965 using a foot-operated dental drill, without anaesthetic, in front of friends and collaborators. Far from being a stunt, the act was the radical enactment of a theory he had developed while working as a librarian at the University of Amsterdam’s medical faculty in the late 1950s. Drawing on endocrinology and brain physiology, Huges argued that adult humans suffer from chronically reduced brain blood volume due to upright posture and ossified skulls, and that trepanation could restore a more “child-like” cranial state of enhanced blood flow and passive, permanent euphoria—a kind of biological enlightenment.  The volume outlines the evolution of his philosophy of Homo Sapiens Correctus (“the corrected human”), his belief in modifying cerebral spinal fluid dynamics, and his influence on a small but intense community of self-trepanation practitioners across Europe’s LSD-era counterculture. His ideas were dismissed by the medical establishment as dangerous pseudoscience, but they also prefigured later (mainstream) discussions of neuroplasticity, cerebral blood flow, and the biology of altered states. The book was translated and expanded by two close collaborators: Joe Mellen, who himself underwent self-trepanation in 1970 (after two unsuccessful attempts), and later described the experience in vivid detail in his 1975 memoir Bore Hole; and Amanda Feilding, who also trepanned herself in 1970 and went on to found the Beckley Foundation, a leading organization in psychedelic research and policy reform. The volume is in very good condition, and is notable for being issued with a circular hole drilled through the front and back covers and the entire text block—a literal and symbolic echo of Huges’s own trepanation. A fascinating and rare foundational document of radical medical self-experimentation, outsider science, and psychonaut literature, seldom offered for sale.