Letterpress Revolution
The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture
Published on 24. February 2023
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-4780-1659-5 (ISBN)
Description
While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers-whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers-arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism's remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.
Reviews / Votes
"By focusing on letterpress Ferguson presents a novel way of looking at the history of Anarchism. Letterpress as a way of working generates an active hands-on ambition to build and embody new and creative ideas. . . . Ferguson's history promotes the message that meaningful radical development builds from face-to-face, hand-to-hand, cooperative endeavour." - Peter Good (Kate Sharpley Library) "Ferguson's half-century of involvement in radical politics and her painstaking research in anarchist collections (many of them ill organized) qualifies her to write this dense but compelling history. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - T. S. Martin (Choice) "In fluid prose, Ferguson offers a fresh historical look at the anarchist movement through a focus on lesser-known figures and their lesser-known labours, including printing and letter-writing." - Layla Saleh (LSE Review of Books) "Letterpress Revolution is essential reading. It is a result of exhaustive and detailed research that clarifies instead of obscures. ... It enriches anarchist history allowing us to appreciate the nuances and bravery of people as well as their complexities."- Barry Pateman (KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library) "Kathy Ferguson has written a wonderful book, an essential contribution to the history of classical anarchism-with her eyes firmly on the present-and a must-read for anyone interested in the movement's political, social, cultural and material history, and in the women and men who made it, quite literally." - Constance Bantman (Anarchist Studies) "In Kathy Ferguson's rigorous, compelling and exquisitely poised analysis of anarchist print culture, we find journals and readers, presses and printers, letters and archivists stepping forth from the margins of anarchist history to take center stage as the generative, consolidating sustenance of the anarchist movement in its classical prime." - Rebecca van der Post (Theory & Event)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
16 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 238 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
639 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-1659-5 (9781478016595)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kathy E. Ferguson is Professor of Political Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and the author of several books, including Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets.
Content
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Anarchist Letters 1
1. Printers and Presses 21
2. Epistolarity 83
3. Radical Study 129
4. Intersectionality and Thing Power 185
Appendix A. Compositors, Pressmen, and Bookbinders 215
Appendix B. Brief Biographies 225
Appendix C. Printers Interviewed 231
Notes 233
Letters Referenced 281
Bibliography 287
Index 317
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Anarchist Letters 1
1. Printers and Presses 21
2. Epistolarity 83
3. Radical Study 129
4. Intersectionality and Thing Power 185
Appendix A. Compositors, Pressmen, and Bookbinders 215
Appendix B. Brief Biographies 225
Appendix C. Printers Interviewed 231
Notes 233
Letters Referenced 281
Bibliography 287
Index 317