Anarchism and bookshops

The Anarchist Book Fair is the longest-lasting public book event on the left in this country, regularly attracting around 3,000 people from this country and beyond to meet old friends, argue the toss at meetings and to buy and sell books. Other than the smaller regional book fairs - Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield for example - there are few places where anarchist books are seen. Few general bookshops are interested in anarchism (give or take the odd Chomsky) and there are few radical bookshops.

That has not always been the case. At one time there were 130 radical bookshops in the UK with a public magazine,The Radical Bookseller. Some seemed predestined to fail: Beautiful Stranger in Rochdale and Proletaria in Doncaster, where are you now? Others have lived long and happy lives - News from Nowhere in Liverpool celebrated its fortieth birthday a year or two back, while Freedom Bookshop and Housmans, both in London, are even more venerable. All carry anarchist books and own their own premises. That alone probably enabled them to survive when other radical bookshops were swept away.

There's always been a creative conflict between radical bookshops wanting to promote ideas and discussion and the necessity to pay the overheads and suppliers and, for those who go in that direction, paying the wages. The anarchist 56a in South London and the Cowley Club in Brighton are run entirely by volunteers and are happy so doing. There are several such shops, which are also social spaces, in membership of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers (ARB). On the other hand Housmans and Five Leaves, in Nottingham, are the only two new-book booksellers in the country signed up to the Living Wage Foundation. 

In the heyday of the radical trade many, if not most, of the bookshops were anarchist-influenced or libertarian/feminist in their structure whilst selling a wide range of books. Operating as co-ops or collectives, they saw themselves as a prefiguritive business model for how an alternative economy could work, together with collectively-run print shops, wholefood shops, community magazines and the like. Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham (where I worked from 79-95) happily sported linked anarchist, feminist and peace signs on the shop van and was run as a collective. When I left, it was turning over £400,000 and paying better wages than commercial bookshops. Its politics at the time were strong, particularly over anti-fascism and opposition to wars, yet it ran commercially with a thriving school and library side to the business. One of the reasons the bookshop operated in this way was so that we were able to employ people with children and we did not expect workers to live in poverty in order to work there. This was also the view of Silver Moon women's bookshop which operated for some time on Charing Cross Road in London (until rent hikes put them out of business when the government changed the rules to force councils to only charge market rents for premises).

The collective model was surprisingly controversial with, in 1985, Comedia publishing What a Way To Run a Railroad: an analysis of radical failure arguing, with supporting evidence, that collectively-run businesses were a bad thing. For some years the Federation of Alternative Booksellers refused entry to shops other than collectives, thus excluding Housmans and Freedom as well as shops owned by political groups of the left. This changed after some very fraught debates with the organisation becoming the Federation of Radical Booksellers. The current Alliance has no such concerns.

Whatever the structure, radical bookshops have often come in conflict with the law and the far right. Grassroots in Manchester, Silver Moon and Gays the Word were only some of the shops which had LGBT stock seized. Mushroom and others had drug-related books taken. Muslim fundamentalists attacked the trade in general over Satanic Verses and in response Bookmarks produced a widely-circulated poster saying Fight Racism, Not Rushdie. The far right were a constant threat - stickers, letter bombs, threatening phonecalls, physical attacks on staff - these were regular occurrences. These included, for example, firebomb attacks in 1973 and 1977 on two Black bookshops in London, both called Unity Bookshop, and in 1994 an attack by fifty fascists on Mushroom in Nottingham. The more recent attempted arson attack on Freedom Bookshop is likely also to have come from the right. But really, every radical bookshop was a target, Fourth Idea in Bradford, Gays the Word in London... everyone had their story to tell.

But to prove there is nothing new under sun, Christopher Richardson, in his book A City of Light: Socialism, Chartism and Co-operation - Nottingham 1844 describes how in 1826 the local freethought bookshop was besieged by Christians for four weeks before the owner, one Mrs Susannah Wright won the day. During the siege she had to draw a pistol on two of her assailants!

Radical bookshops have a long history, their names often appearing fleetingly in the records. Anarchist bookshops from the past include a succession of shops run by the IWW supporter Charles Lahr and a number of short-lived anarchist bookshops often described as "The Bomb Shop"! Leicester, for a period, had The Black Flag bookshop, Leamington had The Other Branch and the 121 Centre on Railton Road in Brixton had a bookshop for about ten years, though the opening hours were admitted to be erratic. Much better known was Rising Free, latterly of Upper Street in Islington. There is a persistent rumour that they sourced their stock (being polite here) from other bookshops. True or not, they helped me into radical bookselling by supplying books for a college stall on sale or return back in the early 1970s in Aberdeen before Boomtown Books opened. I've probably got some remaining stock from the bookstall if you want it.... A longer lasting libertarian outlet was the commercially-owned Compendium in Camden which linked the hippy era of Better Books and Indica (in London), Unicorn (Brighton) and Ultima Thule (Newcastle) with the more political era in the wake of 1968. It closed in 2000, still profitable, when the lure of renting out the premises was too strong for its owners to resist. Compendium was famed - in those pre-internet days - for its American imports, and by publishers for its slowness in paying bills! 

Though the London Anarchist Bookfair continues, others such as the annual Socialist Bookfair, the Feminist Book Fortnight the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Book ran out of steam. The radical trade was also a significant part of Booksellers Action for Nuclear Disarmament. It was always my dream (not that I did much to bring it about) that there would be a closer alliance of radical bookshops, radical people who worked in mainstream bookselling, radical publishers, radical writers and radical librarians. All the groups mentioned did this for a period, but nothing permanent developed.  Not all former staff of radical bookshops stayed on the outside left - Days of Hope in Newcastle (known locally as Haze of Dope) included Mo Mowlam and Alan Milburn who both went on to be a Labour Cabinet Ministers but most bookshop staff are still around and often still have an involvement in the book trade.

In some ways, despite the number of shops being low nowadays, anarchist books are more available than ever, thanks to the internet but also the major operations (by left wing standards) AK Distribution and Active Distribution, both of whom have huge stalls at the anarchist bookfair but also at festivals and other suitable events. Both have an extensive mail order operation. There are also a number of second-hand book dealers selling anarchist books. The best of them is probably Northern Herald books, owned by the anarchist Bob Jones. Their stall is always the busiest at the anarchist bookfair and you can find them at many conferences of the cooperative and trade union movement. Frustratingly Northern Herald has resisted putting its stock online but they have never failed to have the book I wanted in stock!

 The number of bookshops in the Alliance is steadily growing. Some are glorified bookstalls, some are second-hand, some are social spaces, some - I am thinking of the socialist People's Bookshop in Durham - are central to the local labour movement. The London Radical Bookfair (LRB), an initiative of the ARB, complements the Anarchist Bookfair (and includes some of the same exhibitors) and has found a supportive venue at Goldsmiths in South London. The LRB will have its fifth year next year. The Alliance also has set up the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and the Little Rebels award for children's books. Having been initially funded by Five Leaves, the current sponsor is the General Federation of Trade Unions. There is more confidence in radical bookselling now than for some time and some effort has been put into creating this skeletal structure for the movement. A lot of that is down to Housmans, which has put itself at the centre of the radical bookselling revival.

Not that it is easy to run a radical bookshop... city centre rents are prohibitive. Five Leaves survives in its city centre spot because we are in an alleyway whose only other tenant is a bookies, but this also means we are unlikely to be swept away by rent hikes. Trade discounts are better than they used to be and publishers large and small are keen to support independent bookshops. With the closure of Books Etc and Borders, Britain's publishers are very dependent on the one chain, Waterstones. Even though the number of independent bookshops fell below 1,000 for the first time in 2013 our collective contribution to the booktrade is more than the sum of its parts and it is in every publisher's interest that the indie sector survives. It used to be said that the only way to make a small fortune in bookselling is to start with a large fortune... certainly nobody expects to get rich in this business. Not least because unlike, say, a cafe, bookshops need to carry a lot of stock to be attractive and it probably takes about three years to find your feet economically. 

From almost the start Five Leaves has paid the Living Wage (not the Government's renamed minimum wage, the pretend "national living wage"). That's not been easy and we have to be fairly ruthless at business decisions to manage it. Whilst I have nothing against shops being entirely run by volunteers, I felt that I could not expect people to work for the business for less per hour than the cost of a standard paperback novel. It's also a good selling point as to why people should shop with us - we pay our staff properly. This has a resonance with many customers but particularly trade unionists. Our own annual mini-festival (Bread and Roses) has been trade union sponsored and we regularly work with unions such as UNISON, NUT and the former NUM on meetings and projects. 

Five Leaves also has a big events programme, at least weekly events in the shop, political talks, poetry readings, Irish history, transgender, anarchism, Middle East, Corbynism... you name it, we've had talks on it. Often these are in conjunction with outside groups. The talks - not all book-related - being people in and make the bookshop a significant part of the local political and literary scene. These complement our main job, which is, and always will be, offering books for sale as radical bookshops have been doing in Nottingham since 1826!

Ross Bradshaw

Ross set up Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham in 2013, which grew out of Five Leaves Publications, which has been publishing since 1995.

This article first appeared in Freedom (Winter 2016/17) 

Colin Ward and Five Leaves

I started reading Colin Ward in, I think, 1973, at Aberdeen People's Press. APP was a magazine with its own print-shop, one of many such papers throughout the country such as Leeds Other Paper and Rochdale Alternative Paper. One table at APP was devoted to “swaps”, magazines exchanged with APP, and some national magazines for sale or reference. It was there I came across Peace News, which I hooked up with for many years, and Freedom. The latter listed many local anarchist groups across the country and, tantalisingly, its appeal fund often listed significant donations collected at anarchist picnics in America, sometimes from groups with foreign language names. For a young man living in the north east of Scotland in those pre-internet days this was heady stuff.

Freedom was respected (and criticised) for being the journal of record of the anarchist movement, the paper of “official anarchism”. There were brasher papers, with more exciting layout, but often with only brief lives. With Freedom you got tradition and continuity and you had access to the work of Vernon Richards, the scarily pedantic historian Nicolas Walter and, the subject of this magazine, Colin Ward. I found some copies of Colin Ward's Anarchy which, though it closed in 1970, was still thought relevant, certainly more so than the second series produced by the group that succeeded him as editor. I've spent years trying to complete the set of 116 issues he edited.

Over the years I got to know Colin's work, starting with a wonderful series of books on work, on vandalism and on utopia for Penguin Education and of course his Anarchy in Action. This is still the book I recommend to people wanting to understand what anarchism is all about. Anarchy in Action remains in print from Freedom Press, even if the Freedom empire no longer really reflects Colin's view of anarchism.

I got to know Colin – he spoke at one or two meetings in my later and current hometown in Nottingham - and found him as good company in person as his books were to read. The long defunct Old Hammond Press published pamphlets by him on housing and on William Morris and, in 1995, I became a “proper” publisher when Mushroom Bookshop published his Allotment: its landscape and culture (jointly written with David Crouch), buying paperback rights from Faber. Typically, Colin said he did not want any royalties, simply being glad the book was again available. The Allotment kept Five Leaves Publications afloat for many years after we took over Mushroom's publishing side. We reissued several of his other books including Arcadia for All, a new title Cotters and Squatters and a selection of his essays, Talking Green. Colin preferred to emphasise the positive, with no time for “tittle tattle” about the anarchist movement. The nearest he came to that was the extended interview with David Goodway, Talking Anarchy, which we published and is now with PM Press.

Unfortunately the last few years of Colin's life were not kind to him. He was unable to complete his last commission, to edit a set of essays by other writers whose ideas chimed with his. I last saw Colin at the relaunch of Anarchy in Action at Housmans Bookshop in London. I'd been asked to speak and was proud to do so. My guess is that everyone at the launch already had the book, but everyone wanted to see Colin again and to honour one of British anarchism's most influential figures. It was, I think, his last public appearance.

Our last Colin Ward publication was Colin Ward Remembered, a collection of the speeches given at his memorial meeting – funded by those who generously chipped in to hire Conway Hall for the event. People sent so much money we were able to publish the memorial volume from the surplus.

The meeting was attended by hundreds of people Colin had influenced. In my own case the Five Leaves publishing firm and the more recent Five Leaves Bookshop would not have happened without his early encouragement and his infectious belief in doing positive things, not just damning what is wrong with the world.

This article first appeared in Anarchist Voices Volume 9 number 1

Radical bookselling update and prospects

The big debate in the general booktrade - featured heavily in the Guardian - is about whether the day of the celebrity biography has finally come to an end or is simply slowing down. At the other end of the spectrum even commercial publishers have started noticing that left wing books sell, and sell well, with Allen Lane publishing The Establishment by Owen Jones. This book topped the Christmas best-seller charts at Nottingham's Five Leaves Bookshop and at News from Nowhere in Liverpool, coming second at Housmans in London only to Housmans' own annual Peace Diary, despite it being a £16.99 hardback. Allen Lane, the top end of the Penguin empire, also published Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, the one book that really might have an impact on climate change and a book which places the blame for climate change right where it belongs - with capitalism.

Five Leaves has just completed its first full year trading as an independent and radical bookshop. Looking at our December best-sellers, ten of the top fifteen were political books. The only novel was John Harvey's Darkness, Darkness which was set during the miners' strike of thirty years ago and in modern times. Indeed, three of the fifteen were related to the miners' strike. The strike remains a defining part of our common history. We're pleased with our first year, but just as pleased that News from Nowhere had a record Yuletide and a record year. The publicity around their fortieth birthday helped as did the unfortunate closure of a Waterstones' branch in the same street. Many people, in person and online prefer to "shop with the real Amazons" at this women-run bookshop. The radical book-trade is nothing if not tenacious! News From Nowhere, London's Gay's the Word and Housmans are positively venerable; Wordpower in Edinburgh and the two anarchist distributors Active Distribution and AK Distribution have passed out of their teenage years but there is a range of younger projects that seem to be sustaining themselves. All strive to be part of their local community, working with campaign and other groups. It can only be positive that members of the Alliance of Radical Booksllers are sprinkled around the country - it's not a London-centric membership. 

AK Distribution report that their best selling titles includes books on feminism and economics and in Scotland Wordpower had large sales for books related to the Scottish referendum. Another trend is the renewed interest in "people's history". In Nottingham Chris Richardson's City of Light, a book about radical life in the city in the year of 1844 has sold over 500 copies while Spokesman Books and Merlin Press offer a different history of World War One that that pursued by our Government. For those of us keen on pamphlets it is s good to see Stop the War Coalition's pamphlet on WWI, No Glory. People will read pamphlets if they are stocked by bookshops - something commercial bookshops are loathe to do. Five Leaves is a publisher turned bookseller and having a shop has enabled us to return to being a pamphleteer too. Our first two titles will be available shortly, one being a forgotten essay by Edward Said on Jerusalem, sadly as appropriate now as when first written, the second on the Communist Doctor Who writer, Malcolm Hulke, whose existence we came across in the Morning Star!

Radical bookshops are not the only side of the business with claims to venerability. Merlin Press will shortly be sixty and its publishing arm is run in tandem with Global Book Marketing, representing many publishers from home and abroad while the main distributor of radical publishers and magazines, Central Books, has been in business since 1939. Nobody rests on their laurels though, and the Russell Press (set up in the heady days of 1968) has been at the forefront of digital printing and reports more and more groups using this affordable technology to publish local and people's histories.

Bookshops, publishers, distributors, printers... and prizes and bookfairs. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing is four in 2015 and will be funded by the General Federation of Trade Unions while in Nottingham the mini-festival of the same name was established in November also with trade union support. The number of local anarchist bookfairs continues to grow while the London Radical Bookfair is now the major date for the whole radical booktrade to come together. This year the Bookfair will again be at the Bishopsgate Institute, on 9th May.

So what are the big radical titles going to be for 2015? We too are finding a lot of interest in feminism, especially from young women, but the publishers are a bit slow to catch up. An exception is the short book We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Green MP Caroline Lucas should get a lot of attention in March with her Honorouble Friends? discussing her work inside and outside of Parliament while Paul Mason's Post Capitalism will be a summer best seller. Looking at the lists of dedicated left wing publishers, Pluto is bringing out David Rosenberg's Rebel Footprints, a walking guide to the capital for lefties, due in March (the author first got to know he byways of London as Central Books' van driver) while the Verso paperback of A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros might enable us to think about walking without, you know, actually doing it.

And Five Leaves? Well, there is the small matter of an election coming. One of our big books in 2014 was Harry Paterson writing on Nottinghamshire during the miners' strike where, among other things he discussed the UDM. In 2015 we are letting him loose on the the political equivalent of a scab union, UKIP, with We Need to Talk About Nigel. We could hardly not.

A shorter version of this article will appear in the Morning Star

I never got round to posting on that Sunday, but here's an event on Wednesday instead

Five Leaves presents:
‘Liberation in the 1960s?’
with Phil Cohen
Wednesday 4th December, 7pm, Housmans Bookshop, Kings Cross
Entry £3, redeemable against any purchase

Phil Cohen, author of ‘Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile’ (Five Leaves 2013) will talk about his involvement with various movements of the 1960s, including the mass squat of the Queen Mother's house at 144 Piccadilly with the London Street Commune, taking LSD with RD Laing, the early days of the Situationists, setting up Street Aid... and assorted run-ins with the police and gangsters.

In his memoir ‘Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile’, Phil Cohen, alias Dr John of the London Street Commune, and erstwhile Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, re-traces his chequered career from blitz kid to public school dropout, from hippy squatter to cultural theorist, and from urban ethnographer to poet, through his obsession with books.

The first part of the memoir provides a vivid account of wt it was like to grow up in Bloomsbury in the late 1940s and ’50s and how its famous squares, buildings  and local characters  influenced  his imaginative life.  He describes  how he created  an alternative identity centred on his own  personal ‘reading room’ in counterpoint to the official  success story he was supposed to be,  as he rebels against the  ethos  of his  public school, with  its traditional emphasis on Classics and negotiates the  fraught identity politics of being a Jewish  ‘mitschling’.

The memoir goes on to detail the author’s  adventures as he goes up to Cambridge  to read History, runs away to sea  and then  becomes involved in the ‘underground’ counter culture  emerging in the London during the so called ‘swinging sixties’. Books were  at the forefront of his activities, whether ‘liberating’ them from bookshops, gluing them together in a situationist provocation against bourgeois culture,  or setting fire to them in an ‘event structure’  by artist John Latham.

The author relates how the British Museum Reading Room provided a much needed port in the political storm stirred up by his activities as a leader of the ‘hippy squatters’ at 144 Piccadilly in 1969,  helping him resume his  studies whilst continuing to  engage in radical  community politics over  the next decade.  Part One concludes with some observations about the culture of the reading room itself, discusses   ten books that shook the author’ world and  the impact of  new technologies of research linked to  the opening of the British Library at St Pancras.

The second half of the memoir  explores the  author’s life long love affair with books, and situates this consuming passion  in  relation to the issues   raised by  Walter Benjamin in his famous essay ‘On Unpacking a library’.  The author considers what books might have to say about how  they are  treated if they were allowed a voice; he goes on to  discuss  the place of collecting in a ‘throwaway society’ and  details   the strategies, both rational and irrational, that informed his  project of building a personal library. A concluding section  celebrates the pleasures of browsing, and  speculates about   what keeps bibliophiles acquiring books right up to the end.

Phil Cohen is also author of ‘On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics’ (Lawrence and Wishart, 2013)

London Radical Bookfair interim report

In 1991 I wrote an article for Tribune. concerned that the number of radical bookshops in Britain had fallen to close to a hundred. Innocent that I was, not thinking that the next decade would wipe out most of those shops - the economic and political impact of Thatcherism bringing radical bookselling and publishing to a low ebb.
About three years ago a group of us associated with Housmans Bookshop in London noticed that sales had picked up and that there was a new interest in radical books, particularly those trying to explain the economic crisis. There was a spring in the step of radical publishing not seen for a while, and attendances were picking up at events. Out of those discussions came the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, the first organisation for many years, operating on a light touch basis. We discussed, and set up the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. We - the Trustees being Nik Gorecki at Housmans and Mandy Vere at News from Nowhere in Liverpool - wanted to encourage radical publishers, to encourage radical writers and to encourage the commercial sector to value radical writing. Following the prize-giving social at the first year, the idea developed that it would be useful to provide a forum for the shortlisted writers to discuss their work in front of an audience... some events... and why not have a small bookfair around that discussion?
By now other publishers were becoming interested, though nothing yet was firm. Various cheap and unsuitable premises were discussed. We were keen not to be in competition with the longstanding  London Anarchist Bookfair held every autumn. The Anarchist Bookfair had weathered the downturn and - more than that - had flourished to become  major event, but we wanted a bookfair that would appeal to a wider audience - socialists, greens, radicals of all sorts - including anarchists. The London Radical Bookfair idea was developing... Suddenly one of the group discussing the project indicated he knew of a Trust that might help, a bigger venue was found, Conway Hall, and the idea took off.
At this stage difficult family commitments got in my way, Andrew Burgin became overwhelmed by the growth of his and his partner Kate Hudson's Left Unity initiative and Nik Gorecki at Housmans found himself with a looming bookfair on his hands. With Zen-like calm, and the support of Michael Gilligan, also from Housmans, stalls were booked and publicity started. Around this time the Bread and Roses Award changed to include the Little Rebels Award, organised by the Letterbox Library. There would now be a bookfair, events and two awards. But would people turn up, with next to no advertising budget, no dedicated staff, half the expected organisers gone AWOL? On Saturday the answer was a resounding YES.
Here's the evidence:

This is only a partial view of the main hall. Elsewhere there were meetings with the Bread and Roses shortlisted writers, the food area and the bar... and the usual milling about and conversations outside the main area.
There were stalls from the London radical bookshops, Housmans, Newham Bookshop, Bookmarks and others; distributors including Turnaround and Active; publishers including Pluto, Merlin, Verso down to smaller outfits like Five Leaves; trendy young things whose books I could not understand and wizened veterans selling heavy duty texts. Fifty stalls in all - including the one below, offering hundred year old copies of Arbeiter Fraynt, the Yiddish anarchist periodical banned by the British Government during WWI.

What was encouraging was the level of interest and the absence of sectarianism. There was a collection at the end with half the proceeds going towards a radical bookfair next year and half to the anarchist Freedom Bookshop, rebuilding after an arson attack. People warmly welcomed the speaker from Freedom at the plenary closing event as much as they did the children's writers from the Little Rebels prize. I was MCing the plenary and got a big ovation for the main organiser Nik Gorecki, who was of course busy on some practical thing elsewhere in the building so never heard it. But he and his colleagues at Housmans deserve all our thanks. Radical bookselling is on the move again. And I'm pleased to say that Housmans itself is doing well.
I'll shortly post a report on the Bread and Roses/Little Rebel award winners, and put down some thoughts on how the radical bookfair might continue. It is many years since the old socialist bookfairs, and the third world and black bookfairs so we have a fairly clean slate. This is exciting.

Almost Talking Green

The picture features just a part of the crowd at Housmans last night for the joint launch of Five Leaves' Talking Green by the late Colin Ward and Autonomy by Dan Poyner, a book on the graphic design of Colin Ward's old Anarchy magazine. The audience stretched right to the door of the shop and behind the speakers to the back of the shop. Front centre with her arms folded is Harriet Ward. I was touched when some of the young people came up to say they had only just discovered Colin's work as they were squatters and found that everything they read on squatting refers to Colin's books on that subject.
I found it a difficult evening, in part because it was so like the last time Colin had a book launch there - his last public appearance which was the last time I met him, though the mood of course was celebratory. Since Colin's death there has been a special issue of Anarchist Studies, a Colin Ward reader, a short memorial volume Remembering Colin Ward, a conference on his ideas about education (the papers will be published) and now these two books. But the main reason I found it difficult was that I had overdosed on drugs to keep a cold away and was completely exhausted as well as having a head made of cotton-wool. I could not make much sense of my notes and when one person asked for more information on Talking Green I could hardly remember anything about the book. Worse, the basic rule of launching a book is to refer to it from time to time, read teasers from the book... so I chose to read something from a long out of print book published by Penguin and a longer piece from Colin's Anarchy in Action published by Freedom Press. Naturally those were the books that people wanted to buy - one unavailable and one only there in small quantities which sold out immediately! Despite my efforts we did shift a few Talking Green.
More coherent were Ken Worpole, talking about Colin's aesthetics and Dan Poyner and Richard Hollis on the graphic art of Anarchy. It was a shame that Rufus Segar - the main Anarchy designer is now too old to travel in London but Dan and I both remarked on his extraordinary correspondence - letters with 44 penny stamps on the envelope, sometimes just containing a series of visual and written puns. Dan's beautiful book Autonomy sold in good numbers.
I was particularly pleased that the architect and writer Tom Woolley, visiting from Ireland, spoke from the floor. Tom's first published piece had been in Anarchy and his contact with Colin brought him on immensely, with their shared interest in Walter Segal's ideas of self-build housing. Tom is now working on houses built out of hemp (and no, you can't smoke them). Another floor speaker remarked how excited he was each time his sub copy of Anarchy came through as every cover was different and each issue would have a set of serious articles about issues that he had not thought about before. There are few magazines that closed over forty years ago that are still loved and remembered, and reintroduced to new generations of readers.
Colin was one of a generation of productive anarchists from different backgrounds - Vernon Richards and Marie Louise Berneri, both with a family background of Italian anti-fascism, the doctor John Hewitson, the secularist Nicolas Walter, Philip Sampson and others, all now passed away but whose work in making anarchism relevant to everyday life remains important.
I'll end this piece with the last two sentences of Anarchy in Action - which I managed to read twice last night - which, as much as one can in a couple of sentences - sums up Colin's world view: "Anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of social self-determination."

Colin Ward event - February 9

Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing

Five Leaves is pleased to announce the winner of the first Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing - Debt: the first 5000 years  by David Graeber (Melville House). Appropriately, the award was given on Mayday at the trade union owned Bread and Roses pub in Battersea. The author was working abroad at the time, so Bill Godber, from Melville House's UK distributor, accepted the award on David's behalf. It must have felt like a journey into the past for Bill Godber, something of a veteran in radical publishing. The runner up was Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Island: tax havens and the men who stole the world (Bodley Head).
The award was presented by the author Nina Power, one of the judges, who described Graeber's book as "brilliantly researched, motivated by a clear political will and utterly indispensable, not only for understanding the terms of the world we live in, where we came from, but also for what we can do about changing them."
David Graeber wins a trophy and a cheque for £1000.

The Bread and Roses Award was funded and initiated by Five Leaves with the Alliance of Radical Bookseller and the support of Red Pepper, Peace News and the Morning Star.
The trustees of the award are Nik Gorecki (Housmans Bookshop), Mandy Vere (News from Nowhere Bookshop) and Ross Bradshaw (Five Leaves).
Five Leaves provided the prize money to establish the award and will continue to support Bread and Roses for two further years. We would welcome others as sponsors for this year's award, for books published in 2012.
I would like to thank Nik at Housmans for carrying through most of the work on the award when I had to drop out in the last few weeks.
Debt will be published in paperback on 12 June at £14.99 and carries the ISBN 9781612191812.
http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/

Like many old peaceniks, I've got a battered old copy of the Gene Sharp trilogy The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Suddenly the world has discovered Sharp is hot. Here's an article about him on the Beeb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12522848. In short, his From Dictatorship to Democracy is being widely used, samizdat style, to give people ideas on how to overthrow real live dictatorships. His book has been circulated in thirty languages. Who knew? Housmans Bookshop in London has just rush-released the book. It's not even on Amazon yet so you had best get copies from http://www.housmans.com/, or News from Nowhere in Liverpool. The reader may or may not agree with the obvious and topical conclusion in Sharp's prescient section on foreign support to overthrow dictators when he says "some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political or military control over the country. The foreign states may become involved for positive purposes only if and when the internal resistance movement has already begun to shaking the dictatorship..." concluding "...there are grave problems with this reliance on an outside saviour."

Sharp also lists 198 forms of unarmed resistance - ideas lapped up in some Arab states - though how they managed to translate "bumper strike" or "nonviolent air raids" into Arabic is beyond me since it seems hard to translate them into English. There is a minor and invisible Five Leaves' fingerprint on the production, but I'm really pleased to see Housmans returning to publishing with this important book.