Posted on 03/25/2005 2:40:15 PM PST by calcowgirl
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- When the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair started in 1995, it was a rather small collection of like-minded radicals getting together to talk politics, not certain if they were just preaching to the choir.
Ten years later, thanks to shared enemies like the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act, the fair has become a popular rallying point for the far left and the focus of an entire weekend of dissident cultural events, from punk rock concerts to soccer games.
"The Bush era," says Joey Cain, 50, a longtime organizer, "has been good for anarchist consumerism."
All 75 merchants' tables were sold out in advance of Saturday's fair in Golden Gate Park, which along with Montreal's "Festival of Anarchy" each May is one of the largest such events in North America. Vendors fly in from as far away as Europe to sell rare anarchist and political books.
Enthusiasts see it as part of a venerable tradition of dissident literature in the San Francisco Bay area, where Jack London, a professed socialist for much of his life, learned to write and City Lights Books owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl."
"There is a literary underground in the city that keeps renewing itself," said Adam Cornford, who heads the poetics program at the New College of California, a progressive liberal arts school in San Francisco. "There have been waves of counterculture in the city all the way back to Jack London and the Beats. Serious committed anarchists have been driving force in the literary scene since the 1940s."
And nothing sells books like controversy.
One of the biggest displays at the fair each year is by Oakland-based anarchist publisher AK Press, which has seen a 10 to 20 percent growth in its business annually, including spikes in sales during such polarizing events as the World Trade Organization protests, the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the leadup to the Iraq war.
"We haven't hit a wall yet," crowed Ramsey Kanaan, who works for the publisher and volunteers at the fair. "It seems like the number of people interested in this literature has grown everyday."
The label recently cracked Amazon's top 100 list with firebrand activist Ward Churchill's book "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which includes his essay about the terror attacks, and Churchill is among the many authors in town for the fair.
While many of the works being sold are little more than self-published pamphlets, these authors can only benefit as the nation turns harder to the right, organizers say. In fact, many classics of underground literature were just pamphlets until they became controversial, said Cornford, citing San Francisco author Robert Duncan's 1944 statement of gay liberation "The Homosexual In Society" as an example.
"People will suddenly become famous because they get banned or clamped down on," he said. "I have no doubt that some of these books will be highly regarded just like 'Howl' is."
For Chris Carlsson, a self-employed, self-publishing San Francisco book designer, the fair is a chance to get together with other anarchists, where "people with contending and antithetical views can talk, share literature and denounce each other."
That's just the spirit organizers were hoping to cultivate ten years ago, when the first fair was held by the Bound Together Anarchist Collective, a fixture in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where the small storefront is tucked in amid smoke shops and tourist boutiques.
"We were looking to reach out to a larger community rather than people who just walked in off of Haight Street," said Cain, 50, one of about 25 unpaid volunteers who have managed to organize themselves into two shifts a day at the collective, which is packed with racks of zines, anarchist flags and Malcolm X T-shirts.
Another activist who has helped organized the fair since its inception is Tom Alder, a fervent anti-war protester in Michigan during Vietnam who came West and found his following. "People have always called me an anarchist - even at a point where I didn't understand the word," he jokes.
On Saturday, Alder will be drawn to the same mixture of art, politics and commerce that brings black-clad anarchists, aging radicals and younger intellectuals with children in tow to browse the bookshelves.
After all, when civilization as they see it is falling apart, it's time for anarchists to get together.
"They are inclined to rebel anyway," Cornford said. "They look around and see the world is going to hell."
On the Net:
Bookfair: www.bayareaanarchistbookfair.org
ANARCHIST OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
Celebrating a decade of irrelevance is more like it.
*******
Hey......... Steal This Book
;-)
We should consider ourselves blessed to have such stupid enemies.
..you've got nothing to lose but your brains!(humor)
Great minds think alike. See my tag line.
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