John Wilcock, a British journalist and travel writer who played a major role in the emergence of the alternative press at The Village Voice, The East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate passed away at the age of 91.
Wilcock was both the author of many “$5 a day” travel books and a driving force behind underground publications that, spurning traditional journalism, attacked political, social and cultural norms with bawdy language and comic-book imagery, all of it financed by sexually explicit advertising.

In a 1973 profile, The New York Times called Wilcock “an influential man nobody knows,” an “oracle of the nitty-gritty of inexpensive, traditional tourism” and “an apostle and chronicler of the radical underground” — although, the article noted, he looked “a bit too scruffy for a best-selling travel writer and far too straight for an underground celebrity.”

Wilcock had worked for news organizations in Britain, Canada and the United States, including The Times, and was the first news editor of The Village Voice before he helped found The East Village Other in 1965. The Other, known as EVO to its devotees, was one of the nation’s first underground newspapers. Published biweekly in New York until it folded in 1972, it had a circulation of 60,000 at its peak.

In 1966, as underground newspapers spread to urban areas throughout the country, Wilcock helped found the Underground Press Syndicate, which shared news and features. Based in New York, it was initially a network of five publications: The East Village Other; The Los Angeles Free Press; The Berkeley Barb; The Paper of East Lansing, Mich.; and The Fifth Estate of Detroit.

As more underground papers joined the syndicate and start-ups proliferated — Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book” listed 271 affiliates in North America and Europe in 1971 — free counterculture news, criticism and cartoons became widely available.

John Wilcock was born in Sheffield, England, on Aug. 4, 1927. He became a cub reporter at 16 for The Sheffield Telegraph and worked for the mass-market London tabloids The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror. In the early 1950s he was an editor for British United Press before moving first to Toronto, where he worked at Saturday Night magazine, and then to New York, where he settled in Greenwich Village. In 1955, Mr. Wilcock was present at the creation of The Village Voice, a weekly tabloid covering politics and the arts that was America’s first alternative newspaper — although whether he should be considered a founder is a matter of some dispute .The Voice discontinued its print edition last year and ceased publication entirely just weeks ago.

He wrote guidebooks on how to live on $5 a day in Mexico, Greece, Japan, India and elsewhere. He later edited books on the occult and published Other Scenes, an underground magazine offering travel tips, poetry and social commentary.
A revised edition of the Warhol book was published in 2010, the same year Wilcock published his own autobiography, “Manhattan Memories.”

In the 1980s and ’90s Wilcock published several small newspapers, including one called John Wilcock’s Secret Diary. He also wrote historical tidbits and practical advice on travel for Insight Guides, a London publisher. Wilcock settled in Ojai in 2001 and there began publishing an online monthly magazine, The Ojai Orange. The magazine included a column, which he continued to write until recently. He called it “The Column of Lasting Insignificance.”