Chuck's thoughts on The Anarchist Cookbook

I'm tired of folks asking anarchists and anti-authoritarians about how to get a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, so I've decided to create these pages on it. At the same time other anarchists are also working to dispel the misperceptions that this book has attached to contemporary anarchism. The AC has been responsible for propagating misperceptions and lies about anarchists and anarchism for some time. It's time we spoke up in our defense.

I will attempt to analyze the book and the the phenomena of its popularity.

First of all, if you think this page will tell you how to find the Cookbook on the Internet, you are out of luck. I'm not aware of an electronic version of the book, although there may be some poor misguided souls who are currently scanning it in. There are currently hundreds of sites which purport to carry the book, yet I have yet to see the full text of the original online. In fact, it has gotten to the point on the Internet where the "Anarchist Cookbook: has come to mean any how-to collection of bomb-making, weapons, drugs, hacking, or mischief techniques. These collections may be titled "The Anarchist Cookbook," but they are not. Nor do any of them have anything to do with modern anarchism.

Many people are under the mistaken impression that the Cookbook is "underground," or out of print, or illegal, or some combination of these. In fact I recently overheard an employee of a B. Dalton tell a customer that it was "unavailable." After I questioned him, he said that the company has a policy of checking IDs of those who buy the book! I haven't checked with local bookstore managment to verify this policy. The truth is that it is widely available at a scummy corporate chain bookstore near you (Borders, B Dalton, Crown, etc.) If it's not on the shelves, which is commonly the case because the bookstore sold out as soon as the weekly shipment comes in, the bookstore will GLADLY order it for you, because they make more profit on it than most other titles. The cookbook can usually be found on the shelves of your local Towers, because that chain profits from cultivating a "radical" image.

How successful has the Cookbook been?

A news item in a Spring 1994 issue of Publisher's Weekly reported that the book, which was first published 25 years ago, had just reached the 25 million dollar mark in sales.

The Cookbook currently retails for a price of 25 to 30 dollars and the wholesale cost is around 14 dollars. This difference is greater than is the case for most books. Selling the Cookbook is a profitable action for most bookstores, especially small ones.

Given the fact that the book is widely available and that it has been immensely profitable to its publisher, why contribute more money to the Barricade coffers? If you absolutely HAVE TO HAVE THE BOOK, try shoplifting the thing.

Why does the left press allow advertisements for it in their magazines?

As long as I can remember, I've been seeing ads for the Cookbook in left publications. A recent examination (August 1995) of left publications show that many of them carry an ad, usually in their classifieds, for the Cookbook. These include In These Times, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, and more. Indeed, the ad has been a staple in some of these mags for years.

The Barricade ad appears most frequently (almost every week) in the classified section of The Nation. The ad copy states that the Cookbook available from Barricade is "complete, uncensored" and "available again." This is misleading, because the book has been widely available in recent years and it gives the impression that the government banned the book, which is untrue. If the book was unavailable for any period of time, it was because there wasn't a publisher aorund to profit from it. I'd like to know when the book was unavailable, but I have the feeling that it's always been availaible.

This bullshit about it being "uncensored" and "available again" is most likely marketing PR designed to continue the mystique of Cookbook: it's been repressed, censored, and the authorities find it dangerous. A friend of mine searched several legal databases and I've searched the web for incidents where it was shown positively that someone used the Cookbook to build a bomb that was used against property or people. There have been a few incidents this year, but not many before that. If the book has sold millions of copies, what are people using it for other than to impress their friends?

Why is it so popular?

What accounts for the popularity of The Cookbook? I think that half of it is because young college students and other young folks like a "radical" coffee table book for their apartments, dorm rooms, and fraternities. It's also possible, like Bob Black points out in his essay The Best Book Catalog in the World, that those looking for The Cookbook are like those who buy books from Loompanics. He writes that Loompanics customers are:

"... probably not the well-armed, high-tech, drug-taking, survivalist, martial-arts, black-marketeering, tax-dodging, life-extensionist, freethinking, paper-tripping Discordian master criminals that a composite of catalog cullings would suggest. I think they are mostly spiritually restless materialists: macho contemplatives locked into day jobs. They dream of escape -- of "vonu" (invulnerability to coercion by withdrawal from society); of the High Frontier (space colonization); of life extension to tide them over till a better day. They long for the big score. They take hope from books which parade their contempt for normal life as they portray fantastic possibilities always presented according to a patented formula of tough-minded realism. The typical Loompanics reader is, I conjecture, a surrealist trapped in the body of an engineer."

Some of the recent popularity of the book can be attributed to prominent distribution by national chains such as Tower and the constant hoopla in the media about bomb-making materials on the Net.

Legal threats from cookbook publisher

In the Spring of 1996, lawyers for Barricade Books threatened me with legal action if I continued with my plans to publish a cookbook of food recipes that had the working title at that time of "The Anarchist Cookbook, Again: recipes from anarchists and their friends." This should demonstrate that the publishers aren't anarchists--real anarchists don't go around suing each other.

Our version of The Anarchist Cookbook

In May of 1997, the anarchist movement decided to take cooperative responsibility for the publication of our "cookbook." We've now changed the working title to "The Anarchist Cookbook" in order to assert our free speech. The book will be available from several distributors and the production and editorial responsibilities have been taken over by a group called The Anarchist Cookbook Collective. It is possible that the book may be sold at a modest price above costs, with the extra money being donated to movement groups.

We have stopped taking food recipes for the Cookbook, since it's now in production phase. We will probably publish a second edition, so save those recipes! The Anarchist Cookbook will be published at some point in early 1998.

Go to Spunk Press for real books about anarchy
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Created: August 31st, 1995
Updated: December 3, 1997
Anti-copyright 1996, 1997