Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781478016595)

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.

Author: Kathy E. Ferguson
ISBN-10: 1478016590
ISBN-13: 9781478016595
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/24/2023
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.20w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2023