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Chuck0's thoughts on The Anarchist Cookbook

I'm tired of people, usually homophobic teenagers, asking anarchists and anti-authoritarians about how to get a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, so I've decided to use these pages to tell the truth about it. At the same time, other anarchists are 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. There is something which purports to be the "Anarchist Cookbook," but it has obviously been authored recently, given that it includes hacking tips, which weren't even known at the time (1972) that the original Anarchist Cookbook was written. It has gotten to the point on the Internet where "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, Barnes and Noble, Tower, 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.

The Anarchist Cookbook is also popular at the online bookstores. As of May 26, 1999, the AC was listed at Amazon.com as being their 1,944th most popular title. Barnes and Noble also sells it on their online website.

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 in 1972, 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.

Don't bother looking for the book at anarchist bookstores. Most of them refuse to carry it. Some will carry it on free speech grounds, but many feel that anarchists shouldn't be selling a book that gives us a black eye.

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 shows that many of them carry an Anarchist Cookbook ad, usually in their classifieds. These publications 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 Books, 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 simply marketing PR designed to promote the mystique of the Cookbook: it's been repressed, censored, and the authorities find it dangerous.

Have People Used the Cookbook to Make Bombs to Hurt People?

A friend of mine searched (around 1995) several legal databases, including Lexis/Nexis, for trials and incidents where the Anarchist Cookbook was said to have aided a criminal act. He found NO incidents that mentioned that the book version of the AC had been used to commit a crime. 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. The number of incidents has grown very slowly, with more mentions this year, but we must discount some these attributions to the AC with confusion generated by copy-cat mayhem manuals on the Web. Remember, the original Anarchist Cookbook is hard to find on the Web, probably because the publisher is zealous about protecting its "intellectual property."

If the book has sold millions of copies, what are people using it for other than to impress their friends? The Anarchist Cookbook doesn't cause a person to automatically go out and start blowing up people, contrary to what the media says post-Littleton. The fact remains that millions of people own this book and it merely sits on their bookshelves.

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. Most of the email that we get at this site in regards to the Anarchist Cookbook are from adolescents who are obviously looking for the trappings of rebellion. They want a book that they can leave in their room for the parents to find and get freaked out. This is not a trend that started in the 90s; kids have been freaking out their parents with their reading choices for a long time.

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. I suspect that sales of the Cookbook skyrocket after every media scare about bomb-making information on the Internet. The fallout from the recent Littleton incident is very similar, albeit much larger, to scares in recent years about bomb-making information on the Internet.

How has the Anarchist Cookbook hurt the anarchist movement and demonized anarchists?

There are many factors in society that cause people to have mistaken notions about anarchists: the media, schools, government, and so on. The corporate media has been in the forefront of demonizing and lying about anarchists for over a century. Schools, through pro-government "civics" classes, teaches children that government is necessary to the healthy functioning of society. They preach that anarchy, in their minds the absence of government, means chaos and a situation where it is every person for themself.

The Anarchist Cookbook contributes to these mistaken notions in the following ways:

1. Too many people judge a book by its cover. They assume that the AC must be a handbook written by anarchists. Heck, it even has talks about anarchist history in the preface.
2. As the most popular of the mayhem manuals, many people own or have seen a copy, and many more have heard about it. The way it is packaged, with a black crude cover and 1970s layout, connotes that the book is somehow "underground." People think that anarchists exist in the undergound. It's easy to see why folks with littlel knowledge of anarchism or anarchists, lump the Anarchist Cookbook with their stereotypes of what anarchists must be like.
3. The preface talks about anarchist history and what anarchists do. It was poorly written in 1972 and hasn't been updated since then. This gives people the impression that anarchism is a historical movement, with no currency.
4. The nature of the book, with bomb-making and drug recipes, conveeys the impression that anarchists are really, really interested in illegal and terroristic activities. It also conveys the idea that anarchists find this information so useful, that they compiled a cookbook of this valuable information.
5. The fact that the Anarchist Cookbook has given people false ideas about anarchists can be demonstrated by examining the recent hysteria that broke out after the Columbine shootings. Rabbi Cooper of the SImon Wiesenthal Center has been public figure most frequently quoted lumping anarchist sites in with terrorist and hate websites. He incorrectly uses "anarchy" to label "mayhem" websites.

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 rights. 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. The book will 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 1999.

Go to Spunk Press for real books about anarchy
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Created: August 31st, 1995
Updated: May 26, 1999