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 printed 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 to construct the architecture of the page. Their extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movement 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.
“This labor of love brings back to us an almost-lost world in vivid and exemplary ways, with theoretical sophistication, historical depth, analytical rigor, and literary flair. Letterpress Revolution is a beautiful book—and a hopeful gift to future generations.” — Marcus Rediker, coauthor of The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
https://dukeupress.edu/letterpress-revolution
February 2023 | 352 pages, 16 illustrations
978-1-4780-1923-7 | $28.95 paperback $20.27 with discount
Special offer: Use coupon code E23FRGSN to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu.