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We’re back from our annual bookfair trip, rested and ready for Spring, and we thought we’d start with some photos from the bookfair this year. For the first time in nine years, we noticed that less people came this year than the previous year—we’re not sure what to blame, but we’d place our bet on the combo of crappy weather and Obama. At any rate, y’all can expect more frequent blog updates from us in the coming months and more content to be added to the site.
Just a reminder that USPS Priority and International shipping rates are increasing somewhat dramatically in 7 days. Any orders placed after the 16th of January will have the higher shipping rates, so if you are planning on an order, it’d be best to order by the 16th.
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We are pleased to now be shipping out fresh copies of Off the Map from the new sixth printing. As with previous printings, this edition has a new color ink on the inside covers, a delightful Eggplant Purple, aka Pantone 512. Otherwise, the book is identical to the last printing—in other words, a tiny, boisterous bit of narrative resplendence.
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Our beautiful town of Salem may be covered in ice, and our toes might be colder than a banker’s smile, but on Monday we strapped chains to our tires and have managed to make it to the post office each day this week, and plan on continuing to do so. We know there are a bunch of you out there who might need to get some stuff for winter gifts, and if you have to bite that bullet, might as well spread some anarchist joy while doing it. All orders shipped via Priority Mail should get to their destination by the 25th as long as the orders are submitted to us by 3PM Pacific time on Saturday the 20th. Of course, the USPS doesn’t guarantee that, so the earlier you submit your order, the better. We will make sure that every Priority Mail order received before 5PM will go out on the same day—after 5PM and it will go out the next day. A couple suggestions: we find that Off the Map makes a perfect gift for just about anybody, and you can get 6 copies via Priority for $14, or for more experienced activists, it’s hard to beat a copy of Expect Resistance, of which you can get 10 copies shipped Priority for $60. Or you could just take a stand and not buy anything out of stupid, ritualistic obligation—that’s more than OK with us.
Following the trend of the last few years, the USPS is raising shipping prices yet again on January 18, 2009—just six short weeks away. US Priority Mail prices are going up 55¢ for anything but the smallest packages, an increase of 6%. But the huge increase is for international orders: a dramatic increase of 7%-10% to the already exorbitant shipping costs, adding several extra dollars to most shipments. So, if you were planning to make an order internationaly or in the US via Priority Mail, be sure to place it sooner than later. FYI, Media Mail prices in the US will remain unchanged until May 2009. USPS rate change info here.
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Just a note to anyone who was hoping to one day get their hands on a copy of Rolling Thunder #3 and/or #4, we are down to about our last 50 copies of each, and there is no way they will last through the end of the year—so, if you want one, order it now, before they are gone forever. Currently they are part of the Rolling Thunder Bundle that include issues #3-#6 for $10, a bargain that will disappear once these two issues sell out.
We recently received, and have begun mailing out, fresh copies from the second printing of Expect Resistance. In our endless quest for perfection, we’ve made several minor changes to this printing, resulting in a hard-fought, solid advance towards the definitive edition: 1) shifted the margins around just a smidge to allow more space on the inside margin, and more centering of text that appears on image backgrounds, 2) Switched the color of the red ink on the inside to a slightly darker tone to facilitate easier reading (from Pantone 193 to 187), 3) adjusted some images to print better, partricularly images that were printing too dark, 4) a couple design adjustments that no one will even notice, and 5) fixed a typo. All that said, there is no new content, so if you bought the first printing, don’t feel slighted—and if you’ve been waiting to check the book out, now is a great time to get a crisp copy hot off the press.
The short of it is this: We’ve lowered the minimum order to qualify for UPS Ground shipping to a measly $10, down from $40, to encourage people to use it. We are also officially recommending it over all other shipping methods for U.S. orders.
Here is the long of it: Of the many things we’ve learned doing mailorder these past eight years, two principles are continually made evident: 1) The United States Postal Service is cheap, and 2) The United States Postal Service is kind of crappy. Those two go hand-in-hand and that’s why we’ll keep offering their service—if the most important thing is low cost, then the USPS is for you.
However, at this point, we’ve officially got to make a few disclosures about the USPS Media Mail service: 1) They will try their hardest to mutilate your package; it will be dropped, crushed, impaled, kicked, and left out in the rain, 2) Sometimes they will put extra effort into it and will basically destroy everything inside it, but still deliver the useless contents, 3) For extra fun, sometimes they just destroy the entire package and then deliver (and, this isn’t a joke) only the shipping label, not attached to anything, and 4) On special occasions they will just send your package into a black hole. But mistakes happen, right? Yes, but with the USPS there is no recourse: for all of the above problems there is nothing we or you can do about it. No refunds, no real tracking, nothing—you are just shit out of luck, but hey, at least you saved a few dollars on shipping, right?
It took 8 months, but we now have some actual print reviews of Expect Resistance to put up—over on the Expect Resistance reviews page, we have fresh reviews from Fifth Estate, The Indypendent and Last Hours from the UK. There are a slew of choice quotations, but I’m particularly fond of two: “Longer, deeper, higher and heavier.” and “The overall quality of the book, from layout to binding to inks to image registration, could only be compared to that of heavy art tomes, and clearly reflects a love for the craft that measures on the Richter scale.” Just to be thorough, there is also an entertaining review on a blog here.
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After many years and hundreds of thousands of stickers, we’ve changed the colors on the back of our This Phone Is Tapped stickers from orange & black to Spring Bud Green & Civil Twilight Blue—we fully expect these new colors to be twice as effective. [I know, I know, it's not that big a deal—unless you spend 300 days a year stuffing them into packages.]
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The 9th printing of the Gender Poster was completed yesterday morning—which happens to be almost exactly the 5th anniversary of the first printing of the Gender poster. That’s about 175,000 copies in 5 years, which we consider a pretty decent start, and worthy of celebrating with an over-the-top video.
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We received the fifth printing of our anarchist cookbook Recipes for Disaster yesterday, and after unloading and moving 9,000 pounds of them in 90º heat, we can now say that these books are imbued with our sweat in more than just a figurative sense. Only very minor changes were made in this printing: the currency rates in the conversion table were updated and the comic book font used on two pages was changed for a third time (we think we got it right this time, really).
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We just printed a new version of the birds of confusion postcard on a nice Spring Green paper with Robin’s Egg Blue and Metallic Silver inks. Naming colors is fun. We did 1600 copies on our letterpress—6400 impressions over a few days—and they are now going out free in every paid order, and should last at least 6 weeks. Thanks again to Richard Olmsted for the artwork!
We sent out the last Rolling Thunder #2 today, and as such, the complete PDF is now available for download.
Download Rolling Thunder #2 [14MB]
#2 contains articles about the protests against the G8 meeting in Scotland, a retrospective on squatting and resistance culture in northern Europe, an in-depth discussion of subcultural marginality and refusal, an inside report on the workings of current labor unions, a memoir of gender mutiny, and an account of how to establish a squatted community center; other highlights include an intimate reflection on the patterns by which abusive relationships perpetuate themselves and a primer on communications technology for direct action, and much more.
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Our overworked promotions department has finally heated up the boilerplate to complete this handy reviewer’s guide to Expect Resistance. This belated tutorial offers points of departure for readers and would-be reviewers alike, and presents a contest for the particularly assiduous.
In case any intrepid reviewers require additional assistance, we’ve added a new feature to our reading library: “The Fine Art of Criticism: A How-To Guide for Aspiring Journalists.” This controversial screed originally appeared in the third issue of Rolling Thunder, and remains as relevant today as it was then—however relevant that is.
Tune in next time for the follow-up, “A User’s Guide to Expect Resistance,” a preview of which is pictured above.
