The Anarchist Cookbook

The Anarchist Cookbook

Author	William Powell
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Lyle Stuart
Publication date	1971
Media type	Print
ISBN	0-9623032-0-8
OCLC	120422

The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971,^[1] is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era in order to protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War.^[2]

Author

After writing the book as a teenager, Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976, and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation.^[3][2] He was powerless to stop publication because the copyright had been issued to the original publisher (Lyle Stuart), and subsequent publishers that purchased the rights have kept the title in print. Powell publicly renounced his book in both a 2000 statement for the Amazon bookstore^[4] and a 2013 piece calling for the book to "quickly and quietly go out of print".^[5] William Powell died of a heart attack on 11 July 2016.^[6]

Publication status

The copyright of the book never belonged to its author, but to its publisher Lyle Stuart.^[2] Stuart kept publishing the book until the company was bought in 1991 by Steven Schragis, who decided to drop it. Out of the 2,000 books published by the company, it was the only one that Schragis decided to stop publishing. Schragis said publishers have a responsibility to the public, and the book had no positive social purpose that could justify keeping it in print.^[7] The copyright was bought in 2002 by Delta Press (aka Ozark Press^[8][9]) an Arkansas-based publisher that specializes in controversial books, where the title is their "most-asked-for volume".^[10]

The latest publication date is October 16, 2012 (ISBN 978-1607965237), and the book is available in both paperback and hardback from Snowball Publishing.^[11] Reviewers say the copy has its basis in a 2002 revision and shows heavy editing and many items removed over the original 1971 edition.^[12]

Reception

At the time of its publication, one Federal Bureau of Investigation memo described The Anarchist Cookbook as "one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted".^[13]

In 2010, the FBI released the bulk of its investigative file on The Anarchist Cookbook.^[14][15]

Anarchism

Advocates of anarchism dispute the association of the book with anarchist political philosophy. The anarchist collective CrimethInc., which published the book Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook in response, denounces the earlier book, saying it was "not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power – and was barely a cookbook, as most of the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable".^[16]

Online presence

Much of the publication was copied and made available as text documents online^[17] through Usenet and FTP sites hosted in academic institutions in the early 1990s, and has been made available via web browsers from their inception in the mid-1990s to the present day. The name varies slightly from Anarchist Cookbook to Anarchy Cookbook and the topics have expanded vastly in the intervening decades. Many of the articles were attributed to an anonymous author called The Jolly Roger.

In 2001, British businessman Terrance Brown created the now defunct website anarchist-cookbook.com and sold copies of his derivative work, entitled Anarchist Cookbook 2000.

Knowledge of the book, or copied online publications of it, increased along with the increase in public access to the Internet throughout the mid-1990s. Newspapers ran stories about how easy the text was to get hold of, and the influence it may have had with terrorists, criminals and experimental teenagers.^[17]

Legality

The book was refused classification by the Office of Film and Literature Classification upon release, thus making the book banned in Australia. It was classified RC again on 31 October 2016.^[18][19]

In 2007, a 17-year-old was arrested in the United Kingdom and faced charges under anti-terrorism law in the UK for possession of this book, among other things.^[20] He was cleared of all charges in October 2008, after arguing that he was a prankster who just wanted to research fireworks and smoke bombs.^[21]

In County Durham, UK in 2010, Ian Davison and his son were imprisoned under anti-terrorism laws for the manufacturing of ricin, and their possession of The Anarchist Cookbook, along with its availability, was noted by the authorities.^[22]

In 2013, renewed calls were made in the United States to ban this book, citing links to a school shooting in Colorado by Karl Pierson.^[10]

Legacy

The book was a frequent target for challenges to its content throughout the 1990s.^[23] It served as a central element of the 2002 romantic comedy The Anarchist Cookbook.^[24] Repercussions from the book's publication, and the author's subsequent disavowal of its content, were the subject of the 2016 documentary film American Anarchist. ^[25]

See also

• The Poor Man's James Bond
• Rules for Radicals

References

Further reading

External links

• Thompson, Gabriel (February 27, 2015). "Burn After Reading". Harper's. Browsings (blog). Retrieved March 3, 2015. 
• FBI file on the Anarchist Cookbook, 1971-1999