Most of the 35 adults earn all or part of their living selling the Avatar, keeping about half of the 35 cents they get on each sale. Some, including Jim Kweskin, leader of the "jug band" which bears his name, have other sources of income. Nine or ten work full-time putting out the paper, Hansen said.

"It varies," said Hansen. "Sometimes people are full-time. Sometimes they're not. But all of our livelihoods are resting on this paper."

He said that he did not think of the one-and-a-half-year-old group as hippies, though "we're more like that than anything else. We just want to show people another way to live together."

Avatar staffers claim that the paper, which is published every two weeks, has a circulation of 22,000.

A number of vendors have apparently been attracted by the notoriety that the paper has received from the arrests, which began three months ago. Only four of those arrested yesterday gave Roxbury addresses.

"They must go out and recruit people for a day," sighed one police official. "Every time we clear out one group, we go right back and find some more selling it."

"I don't understand why they do it," he added, pointing to an article in the current issue, Avatar's 18th, containing a series of graphic epithets. "There's no point in writing like that. You wouldn't want your kid sister reading that."

So far, according to attorneys for the 49 who have been arrested, four have been acquitted on the grounds that they did not actually sell the paper. None of the others have been tried. The first 14 who were arrested have been indicted by a grand jury and will be tried in Middlesex County Superior Court, but no date has yet been set