Month: April 2020

The History of Mutualism was among the series I was most excited about publishing, despite the fact that, in the years I was dragging them around to book fairs, enthusiasm for this sort of deep historical material was perhaps not sufficient to justify the weight in my luggage. But Corvus Editions was basically unintelligible as a purely commercial enterprise, particularly in the period when there were still plenty of bookfairs on the west coast. The point was often just to spread the most unlikely things out on the table as if they belonged there—in the hope that, at some point, some of them really would. […]

The Corvus Editions project started with LeftLiberty: A Journal of Mutualist Anarchist Theory and History, a zine produced in the context of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, a “big tent” coalition of “market anarchists.” It lasted for two issues and received almost no attention. As my own trajectory started to diverge from that of the Alliance, the project was reinvented as The Mutualist: A Journal for Free Absolutes, with an explicitly “neo-Proudhonian” emphasis. The one issue published shows all the signs, I think, of a project being pursued to please no one but myself. Subsequent issues suffered from the difficulty that has always haunted my attempts at publication: I was uncovering new material at such a rate that my critical and interpretive writings were often “out of date” long before I could finish writing them. I eventually collected the best of LeftLiberty, together with some posts from my blog, in a special “0” issue of The Mutualist, which, from a historical standpoint, is interesting as an anticipation of the Contr’un zine series and as one of the first Corvus Editions to use what would become the “house style” in layout and typography.  […]