Letterpress revolution : the politics of anarchist print culture

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance. "Anarchist collectives and associations have a long and robust history of independent publications and journals. Letterpress Revolution explores the radical print history of anarchism in the US and England from the late-19th century to the present to show how anarchist print culture has thrived through a combination of media technology, epistolary relations, and radical scholarship. Kathy Ferguson tells the story of anarchist presses, often located centrally in the homes, offices, and community centers of anarchist movement and run by everyone from professional union printers laboring in their off hours to lay artists and craftspeople learning new skills. These presses created what Ferguson calls a "fugitive public" that produced anarchist knowledge outside of formal educational institutions. Although anarchists are politically committed to dispersed and independent collectives, Ferguson argues that anarchist print culture has created an assemblage of dynamic and entangled networks that brings the movement together. Finally, Ferguson considers contemporary letterpress printers and other anarchist formations around material and intersectional politics that continue today-including Food Not Bombs, Protect Maunakea ʻOhana, and the feminist bookstore movement-which, she argues, strengthens anarchist theory by incorporating thing power and a critical analysis of anti-Blackness into anarchist politics"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 Preface 9 Acknowledgments 13 Introduction: Anarchist Letters 17 1 PRINTERS AND PRESSES 37 2 EPISTOLARITY 99 3 RADICAL STUDY 145 4 INTERSECTIONALITY AND THING POWER 201 Appendix A Compositors, Pressmen, and Bookbinders 231 Appendix B Brief Biographies 241 Appendix C Printers Interviewed 247 Notes 249 Letters Referenced 297 Bibliography 303 Index 333 Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of anarchist letterpress printers and presses, whose printed materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to 1940s.