Anarchist Bookfaiirs, Where?

     Anarchist Bookfairs, great events for meeting like minded people, new people, swapping ideas, getting your nose into other people's literature and pushing your own. However, surely the whole idea is to bring new people to anarchism, not to fly around in the same circle. So where should they be held. In some back street squat, a small autonomous centre, a hired room in a local pub? I have always felt that we should be more ambitious and go as much in the mainstream as possible and meet the unconverted, the apolitical, the apathetic, the one searching for something different. We live in a capitalist society, so cost of course plays a part in where they can be held, perhaps we could all take a leaf out of the recent Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair. 

     

One person's opinion from Anarchist News:

 

       The 9th Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair was dedicated to Donald Rooum (1928-2019), illustrator and long term anarcho. His image of anarchism's three personas (the punk, the bomber and the academic) was used on the bookfair's flier, and a very nice flier it was too. While it’s true that Rooum's work is often associated with the red and black Freedom, it's less well-known that Rooum himself identified as ‘a Stirnerite anarchist, provided "Stirnerite" means one who agrees with Stirner's general drift, not one who agrees with Stirner's every word.’ I’ll come back to that later.
      After following my friend’s directions from the tram stop, I was surprised to find the venue this year was not the backroom of a pub or the basement of a ‘social centre’, but was a museum in the centre of town. Maybe this says something about anarchists' desire to move from the fringes; maybe it's about the public opinion of anarchists in 2019. Either way, the People’s History Museum couldn’t be further from the underground Euro squat aesthetic of last year’s venue. I'd heard rumours that it was going to be hosted at the university this year, so it sounds to me like the organisers were trying their best to move from the Partisan into a more accessible, more mainstream location, and were somehow able to come up with the large deposit needed to book a space like the PHM. As I met my friend in the museum's hall, they admitted they missed the dinge of previous venues, but I for one was glad to be able to see the books and faces in the sunlight, and to be able to breathe as I moved from stall to stall.
      There were around thirty stalls in total, including Freedom up from London, Active Distro from Bristol, AK Press from Edinburgh, and PM Press from the North East. The other stallholders ranged from definitely anarchist (Elephant Editions), through questionable (Anarchist-Communist Group), to definitely not anarchist (New Internationalist). Also present were MARC and Footprint, two local printers who have long provided anarchists with affordable zine and booklet printing; Advisory Service for Squatters keeping it real in the back corner; Hunt Sabs with their latest Saboteur magazine plus fox teddies(!), and many more. Looking at the lineup, one can't help but wonder whether it is really a ‘book’ fair or is, in fact, an ‘organisation’ fair under a different name. One curious friend who came along for the morning noted that ‘lots of people here are determined to make more anarchists’ - I told them to be glad they’ve never been to the London ‘book’ fair, where the organisations wanting to sign you up outnumber the book publishers/distributors two to one. Next year I’d like to see fewer membership forms and more zines, magazines, booklets and books.
      Alongside the stalls were a series of talks and workshops that I didn’t attend. The ‘Education Space’ included book launches by PM Press (‘Journey Through Utopia’) and Ruth Kinna (‘Government of No One’ on Pelican), and a Q&A from The Anarchist Party (sadly not a rave but an actual political party). I heard The Anarchist Party were given hell by the audience for ‘working with the enemy’, which seems kind of hypocritical considering how many of the organisations present directly engage with the state and capital as their modus operandi. Speaking of which, a talk by the IWW’s local branch was apparently planned but didn’t go ahead. The final talk of the day, and the busiest, was by D. Hunter about Lumpen Magazine. I regret missing this one - Hunter's work articulates the horror of the daily grind like no other I’ve read this year.
       Bookfairs in the UK are mostly the same rotation of stallholders travelling from city to city with mostly the same stock and having mostly the same conversations. I’m always on the lookout for people who are doing something different. If, like the late great Donald Rooum, they are more into Stirner than they are into Bakunin and Bookchin, all the better. This year I found three: Elephant Editions, Gay Plants, and Forged Books. Elephant Editions you know. The other two I’ll let you discover yourself. Enjoy, you rebels, and let’s hope the organisers can tempt out Return Fire next year.
        As the day came to an end, I sat in the PHM’s cafe and wondered why so few bookfairs have a space like this, where you can retreat from the fray and read your new books. Am I meant to wait until I’m home? I spent the last hour sat sulking over a coffee, a slice of toast and At Daggers Drawn. There was no official afterparty, but Radical Routes had an evening film showing nearby, someone called ‘MCR Punks 4 West Papua’ had a gig in town, and Partisan had a queer karaoke a bus ride away. Tempting as all three were, come closing time I said my goodbyes and, with a pile of books under my arm, disappeared into the frozen northern night.

Till next year.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Donald Rooum.

         Some of you may already know this, others may not, so for that reason I believe it is worth posting, in tribute to one of us. A life dedicated to justice and peace. 

This from Anarchist News: 

 

      I HAVE just learned with sadness that Donald Rooum, above, whose work appeared periodically in print editions of the Freethinker over many decades, died in London on August 31.
       I was alerted to the fact that Rooum had died by another longtime Freethinker contributor, Professor John Radford, author of  Don’t You Believe It!: Sixty things everybody knows that actually AIN’T SO!, a book that Rooum illustrated.
Rooum’s career and colourful life was affectionately documented in a blog called Spitalsfield Life in 2012. The author wrote:

      In spite of the fearsome reputation acquired by Anarchists, Donald possesses a quiet nature, almost unassuming, and he has not been on a demonstration since 1963 when he was framed by the police for having a brick in his pocket. A brick which the police inadvertently – and famously – forgot to plant. It amounted to a national scandal at the time. Since then, Donald prefers to stay at home and seek his political influence indirectly by working on his long-running cartoon series, leaving it to younger Anarchists to take to the street.

      Rooum, who in 1963 was working as a cartoonist for Peace News, was arrested by a violent and racist London policeman, detective sergeant Harold Challoner. On July 11 of that year, Rooum was demonstrating outside Claridge’s Hotel against a visit to the UK of Queen Frederika of Greece. Challoner told Rooum:

You’re fucking nicked, my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you?.

       After hitting Rooum on the head, the copper went through Rooum’s possessions, claimed to find a half-brick and said:

   There you are, me old darling. Carrying an offensive weapon. You can get two years for that.

       Rooum, a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties who had read about forensic science, handed his clothes to his solicitor for testing. No brick dust or appropriate wear and tear were found and Rooum was acquitted, although other people Challenor arrested at the demonstration were still convicted on his evidence.
        By the time Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead and was sent to Netherne mental hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Three other detectives involved in the arrest of protesters – David Oakley, Frank Battes and Keith Goldsmith – were sentenced to three years in prison.
Rooum told Spitalsfield Life:

        When I was sixteen, I thought a free society would be easy to get. Now I don’t think things are going to be easy, but the civil rights movement has been good. There have been improvements. There’s no longer any law against homosexuality and no longer any corporal punishment in schools. There was an awful attitude that people who weren’t white were inferior. When I first came to London in 1944, I phoned up a boarding house and they asked me to come round in person, because there was a no coloureds policy.

       To me, Anarchism is an ethical stance, a point of view which regards coercion of any kind as wrong.

      Rooum edited the London-based anarchist paper, Freedom, for many years. He became lecturer in typography at the London College of Printing, took an Open University Degree in Life Sciences and was elected a member of the Institute of Biology at eighty.
Spitalsfield Life said:

      His endeavours have spanned the political, the literary, the artistic and the scientific, yet it is in the levity of cartoons that he has found his ideal medium.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk