In a little less than a month, I’ll voluntarily end my employment at the big box bookstore where I’ve been working for the better part of a year, and strike off again into the realm of self-employment. The change has everything to do with the sorts of discussions we have been having about the merits and ultimate sustainability of the big-box model, and there will undoubtedly be occasions to talk here about the ways in which that model is already failing to provide either a pleasant shopping experience or a tolerable work environment. But that’s for another day.
What the change means for me, my readers and my political allies is, in the short term, a whole lot more archiving, transcription, translation, publishing and writing from yours truly, and a number of opportunities for those readers and allies to help sustain the process. I’ll be offering subscriptions to LeftLiberty (+ related pamphlets), to Liberty (Release 2.0) (a reformatted, annotated reissue of Tucker’s periodical), and to M. Corbeau’s Monthly Blackbird (a radical miscellany and book catalog), as well as a new, rapidly-expanding catalog of rock-bottom priced anarchist pamphlets, free for download, damn-cheap to distribute and still inexpensive in print form direct from me. And if the whole thing doesn’t come crashing down immediately, I’ll have mutualschool.org up and running sometime this summer, and then the next phase, good lord willin and the crick don’t rise…
This is the project that I left the midwest to start, and that I was basically still too beat up to start right away. And it’s really either a new beginning or a last stand for me, so we’ll see what happens.
sounds exciting! are you printing all this out on a laserprinter or?
Hey Shawn, the space is opening up here in Toledo and if you’re going to be publishing a number of pamphlets, we’d sure be interested. Don’t worry, we don’t mind paying! What sorts of pamphlets will you be carrying? We’re absolutely absent in terms of market-anarchist publications and don’t really have a nice avenue for such things (I like Invisible Molotov, but we don’t have free/cheap prints).
CTM, it will be the laser printer to start with, and then we’ll see what happens. It will have to be pretty close to a print-on-demand operation at the outset, just to keep cash-flow manageable. But there are some good printers in Portland that I would love to work with. And I’ll also, as promised, be releasing some stuff through Lulu.
EAA, Good to hear things are going forward. I’ll be in touch about distribution as soon as I’m clear on details. The range of things will be pretty broad, including some communist anarchist and syndicalist stuff that I think is important, some non-anarchist historical political stuff that is fun and builds context, and some stuff that’s just fun. Some names already in the projected catalog: Marc Guyau, Benjamin Paul Blood, Paul Brown (New Harmony communist), John Gray, Jean Grave (translated by Voltairine de Cleyre), Thaddeus Hyatt, Joshua King Ingalls, Dyer Lum, Sidney H. Morse, Thomas Mendenhall, William B. Greene, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Henry Edger, Calvin Blanchard, Adolf Hugentobler, etc…