Books & Poetry

The event known to regular punters as just ‘the bookfair’ has grown from a few groups plying their wares in a Camden community hall in the dark Thatcherite days of 1981 to the UK’s biggest anarchist gathering, hosting 80 bookstalls and forced to turn away more. The anarchist scene is now taken seriously enough for the annual Anarchist Book Fair to attract big names like John Pilger and ultra-mainstream psychologist Dorothy Rowe, author of many self-help bestsellers and a regular speaker at the event, who this year will give a timely talk on ‘how powerful people manipulate our fear’. Feature continues

Anarchism, and especially the history of anarchism, is enjoying an upsurge in academic and intellectual respectability. This year’s bookfair has a session whose subject is ‘consolidating the position of anarchist academics within their workplaces’. Economist Michael Albert – author of ‘Parecon: Life After Capitalism’ and co-editor of the influential US publication Z Magazine – will be there, on tour to promote his vision of ‘participatory economics’.

For a less mainstream take on recent history, there’s a double autobiography launch for two veterans of ‘street level’ anarchism. Ian Bone – dubbed ‘the most evil man in Britain’ by the tabloid press in the 1980s – launches ‘Confessions of an Anarchist’, an inside story of the Class War organisation. (Bone was ‘spokesperson’ for Class War, the most active and confrontational anarchist group in the 1980s, whose paper deliberately imitated the style of the Sun, and was aimed at its readership. Regular features included ‘hospitalised copper of the month’.) And Martin Wright launches ‘Anti-Fascist: A Foot Soldier’s Story’, an account of his street fighting years. Wright was the guide on the Mayday 2001 bank holiday weekend history walk of the radical East End – the only history walk ever to have its own police helicopter escort hovering overhead.

Alternative presses often time their launches to coincide with the bookfair, and this year’s offering from Freedom Press is the light-hearted ‘Anarchist Quiz Book’. There’s also the usual deluge of fanzines and self-published pamphlets.

‘Mainstream bookshops have central buying and a very limited range of material. Bookshops are closing down,’ says Cordelia Molloy, part of the fair’s organising collective. ‘With increasingly repressive censorship-type laws, it’s really crucial to keep all ideas going,’ adds another member of the collective, Tony Wood. While documentary DVDs accounted for a lot of sales last year, Wood believes that the printed word is still irreplaceable. ‘When you look at endless bulletin boards and email discussions – you can see the need for more of the printed written word. With books, and the costs they involve, that means quality, and there’s a need to think first about what you’re going to write.’