I have often spouted about getting our message on the streets, and the need for greater leaflets, pamphlets, poster to proliferate on the streets and workplaces. They are our broadcasting system, our quiet teacher spreading our ideas and hopes. The anarchist movement owes a lot to those back allay, back shop, underground and open printing places. those dedicated individuals who spent hours printing and distributing our message, our hopes, our ideas. The printed word is as valuable as the meetings, street demonstrations and protests etc.. The printed word can quietly find its way into homes, workplaces and communities. It is difficult to imagine where we would be without those little presses churning out leaflets, periodicals, posters and pamphlets.
So I am delighted that someone has brought together a history of those printing presses and the important part they played in getting those anarchists, ideas, hopes and visions to an ever increasing public. I for one will be ordering the book when it comes out.
So I am delighted that someone has brought together a history of those printing presses and the important part they played in getting those anarchists, ideas, hopes and visions to an ever increasing public. I for one will be ordering the book when it comes out.
London's anarchist HQ, 127 Ossulston Street, 1894-1927
Article taken from Anarchist News.
From University of Hawai'i News
Anarchist letterpress printers and presses from the late 1800s through the 1940s is the focus of a new book by a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty member.
Professor Kathy Ferguson’s work Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, details the importance of printed materials that galvanized anarchist movements across the U.S. and Great Britain. The book will be released on February 24, and is published by Duke University Press.
Anarchism is a political movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and holds all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary. Ferguson shows how printers arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers and blank space within the design of a page. Their extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and publishing their radical ideas brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. By diving deeper into the practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.
Professor Kathy Ferguson.
“The anarchists organized a remarkable political movement largely through their print culture: writing, printing, distributing, reading, and archiving their publications brought them together. Their success suggests that the act of making things together generates political energy,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson is the author of several books, including Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets, which is about a central figure in the anarchist movement. She is working on another book on women in the anarchist movement whose contributions have been underrated or lost. Ferguson’s goal when writing these two books is to bring women more fully into anarchism, and at the same time to bring anarchism more fully into feminism. She hopes to bring these radical histories to light to make our understanding of them more robust so that we can use them better today.
The Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are housed in the Mānoa College of Social Sciences.
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