We will also debut a new sticker and a brand new experimental publication, Vortext, a journal of philosophy, nihilist performance art, and MAXIMUM ULTRAISM. Vortext will be available for online orders afterwards if we have any left, and the stickers will be available here in bulk next week. We’ll have our new, free postcard, as well.

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Tuesday, August 16, 7 pm
Reading Frenzy, 921 SW Oak Street, Portland, OR
info@readingfrenzy.com (503)274.1449 / more details

Wednesday, August 17, 7 pm
Autonomia, 600 24th Avenue South, Seattle, WA / more details

Saturday and Sunday, August 20-21
Tabling at the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair

Thursday, August 25, 5:30 pm
Random Row Books, 315 West Main Street, Charlottesville, VA

Friday, August 26, 7:00 pm
Dream City Collective, Dream City Thrift, 5525 Illinois Avenue NW, Washington, DC / more details

Saturday, August 27
Frederick DIY Fest at United Church of Christ, 15 West Church St., Frederick, MD

Sunday, August 28, 1 pm – 5 pm
Baltimore Free School, 1323 North Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD
This will be a full four-hour seminar exploring the subjects brought up in Work in greater depth. Posters for the event are available here.

Monday, August 29, 7 pm
Flying Brick Library, 506 South Pine Street, Richmond, VA 23220 / more details

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Work is now being reprinted, and we expect to have copies to mail out mid-June. For the hundreds of you who have back-ordered the book—anticipating, as did we, that they would be available by now—we offer our most sincere apologies. Never did we imagine this fiasco would be extended for so long. You have three options: 1) Do nothing and your book will be among the first ones sent out a month from now, 2) Cancel your order by emailing us, or 3) E-mail us to remove Work from your order, and we’ll ship out the rest immediately (send emails to house@crimethinc.com). Details of the exchange/credit program for people who received defective copies will be announced once we have the new copies in hand. Thanks everyone for your patience during what has been a genuine nightmare for us!

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What We Know So Far About the Problem

For books that contain the defect, it manifests itself thusly: Initially the book seems fine and by all tests and measures appears to be in good health; the cover is solidly attached, and nothing indicates trouble. However after spending some time actually reading the book and putting stress on the cover, it will simply pop off. The adhesive meant to attach it will be exposed and there will be no tears in the paper or any trauma—it is simply detached as seen in the above photo. At the moment, we still don’t know exactly what happened for this to occur on some books and not all of them, and are waiting to hear back from the printers as to what precisely can cause this to occur. The trickiest part of this defect is that it can’t be detected until the book has been handled for several hours, making book-by-book quality control impossible. Fortunately, because we have a fancy Otabind binding on this book, a cover failure isn’t catastrophic, and the actual book binding remains 100% intact.

Not all copies are affected, in fact, we believe that most are not—we’ve found more books that are rock-solid than those that aren’t, so if you’ve spent some time reading yours and it still is in great shape, then you have nothing to worry about.

What Happens If You Already Bought the Book

We’re particularly sad that this problem will affect our most enthusiastic supporters and early adopters of the new text—it seems incredibly unfair to all involved. You can be assured that if you are affected by this problem, at the very least you will receive a free replacement copy as soon as they are available, at no cost at all to you. We will post an update as soon as we have a system set up to deal with exchanges and credits. Thanks so much for understanding, for your patience, and for supporting us at the first opportunity.

In the meantime, there appears to be a simple solution that at least temporarily solves the problem: simply close the book and align the cover properly with the edges of the book, place it on a hard, flat surface and press down firmly on the spine-edge of the cover, running your fingers from the top of the book to the bottom; somehow this appears to bind the cover to the book more solidly than they initially came, and should last through an entire reading of the book, and beyond, judging by our experiences here.

Moving Forward

We are still accepting orders for the book, but they now become backorders. If your order contains a Work book, the entire order will be held until the corrected printing of the book is available, which we expect to be approximately 3 weeks from now. Your card will not be charged until the order is shipped. All paper mail orders we receive for the Work book, starting today, will be held also, even if the order was mailed prior to this announcement.

UPDATE: New info here.

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Letterpress geeky note: Because we were printing on non-white paper, we chose to create our baby blue ink by mixing the blue ink not with the usual translucent white ink, but instead with an opaque white ink, not intended for mixing. This helped keep the ink from being darkened by the paper, and resulted in a delightful visual pop. Using that success as a guide, we mixed the orange with a smidge of metallic silver ink to help give it some brilliance as well. You can judge the results when you get one of these in hand.

Five years have passed since our last report. Since then, we’ve distributed another 50,000 books, published seven more issues of Rolling Thunder, and done our part to support uprisings from Pittsburgh and Toronto to Athens and Moscow.

All this is well and good, but we live in a constantly changing world, and what worked well yesterday is bound to deliver diminishing returns tomorrow.

On one hand, our insistence on selling almost everything at cost means that—like our foes—we’re always on the verge of complete economic collapse. At the same time, and more importantly, the channels through which information circulates have shifted a lot over the past decade—and it’s important for us to keep up with these changes. For a long time, we’ve resisted the pressure to shift to digital formats, convinced that offline media have more power to move people than online ephemera. But as revolutionary anarchists, our task is not to fight a rearguard battle against technological progress; it is to engage capitalism and the state in a struggle to the death, utilizing every opportunity to spread subversion.

The initial funds for our projects came from us pooling the money we’d made working minimum-wage jobs in the service industry. Back in the 1990s, it was also possible to obtain resources by hook or by crook, as they say; however, after one attracts a certain amount of the wrong kind of attention, this becomes a bad idea. As a result, for the past decade, CrimethInc. Far East has operated according to a very simple program. We sell some of our books at a slight profit, counting on the high volume of sales to generate enough money to pay all our overhead costs and fund our other projects. Some of the other projects are priced to break even, such as the posters and stickers, while others are priced below cost, such as Fighting for Our Lives and Rolling Thunder.

It’s actually a miracle that we have been able to make this work. Unlike most other major anarchist publishing projects, we’ve almost never had to beg for money. We find it distasteful to seek resources from those who don’t share our political commitments, and we don’t trust those who depend on such funding; at the same time, we don’t want to drain the resources of the anarchist community, which should go to projects like prisoner support that cannot pay for themselves. Because we’ve been willing to work full time for free and plenty of people want our books, it’s been possible for us to accomplish things few organizations could.

Over the past few years, however, the proportions of what we sell have shifted significantly. We sold more posters and stickers in 2010 than ever before, and traffic to crimethinc.com continues to increase dramatically; yet book sales have declined from their previous levels. This isn’t surprising: book publishers and periodicals are going out of business by the dozen as the shift to free digital media takes its toll on both the publishing world and the attention spans of readers. We’ve also noticed that ever more people are downloading sub-par versions of the books on torrent websites—the same number by which book sales would probably have increased, in a world without internet or recession.

Consequently, the costs of keeping everything in print, maintaining the website, and distributing free material have begun to exceed the funds brought in by book sales. This means that, at the very moment we should be taking advantage of new attention and new opportunities to up the ante, we’re hamstrung by a lack of resources.

We could probably plateau at this point and coast forward a few more years, but that’s not what we’re here to do. We need to work out a new model that will enable us to be even more effective in the coming decade than we were in the last one. This will involve changes and new risks, and we’re hoping you’ll support us through these.

The internet has fostered a culture in which people take free access to information for granted, while the economic recession has made it difficult for poor people to buy any more than they absolutely need. At the same time, the global spread of the World Wide Web offers new opportunities to cross-pollinate with resistance movements in parts of the world where no one can afford to order books internationally. While we’ve long resisted the pressure to digitize our books, hoping instead to emphasize the value of real printed matter, we are now considering ways to go about this tastefully and effectively. Nonetheless, we remain convinced that one physical copy of a book has more power to change the world than a hundred digital downloads, and we will to continue to give real-world projects priority over virtual ones.

In the future, we expect to derive less revenue from projects that have downloadable equivalents; therefore we’ll have to raise money from materials that can’t be downloaded. We’re still brainstorming what that might look like. For now, we’re simply raising the prices of our posters and stickers slightly (guides will remain as currently priced); we’re also about to introduce larger posters as a fundraiser to pay for our other projects. Soon we’ll be announcing new book printings and minor price increases for those as well. If this is successful, we hope to initiate a new round of free projects; but first we have to stabilize ourselves financially.

Our core values remain the same; we’re still committed to the same types of outreach we have always been. We just reprinted Fighting for Our Lives for the fifth time and will continue to distribute them for free, all 50,000 of them. Ideally, we will come out of this able to make all of our materials more widely and freely available, while increasing our capacity to take on new projects. If you aren’t on the verge of bankruptcy and you want to help us with this, feel free to order one of the benefit posters that will appear on this site next week.

Thank you all for everything you’ve done to enable us to do what we do. May it someday be enough.

For the abolition of business and business plans, by any means necessary—
A few overworked underlings at CrimethInc. Far East

From the Depths will be bringing Plague Mass on tour in the US next February.

Just in time for the tour, we’ll be co-releasing a 12″ split between From the Depths and Next Victim, from Poland. We’ve been following Next Victim’s eerie music with great excitement since some of the members were in Mind Pollution, another amazing band. It’s an honor to get to collaborate with two bands that have been so inspiring for us!

Plague Mass “Last Home” [7.9 MB MP3]
Next Victim “Własna Nisza” [10.6 MB MP3]

These are the planned tour dates for Plague Mass and From the Depths. If you can help with booking, please email booking@fromthedepths.info.

Friday February 11 San Luis Obispo, CA
Sat 12 San Diego, CA
Sun 13 Tijuana, Mexico
Mon 14 Mexicali, Mexico
Tues 15 Tucson, AZ
Wed 16 Phoenix/Flagstaff, AZ
Thurs 17 Riverside/LA, CA
Fri 18 Santa Barbara, CA
Sat 19 Oakland, CA
Sun 20 off – San Francisco, CA
Mon 21 Santa Cruz, CA
Tues 22 Reno, NV
Wed 23 Redding, CA
Thurs 24 Portland, OR
Fri 25 Olympia, WA (w/ Marrow)
Sat 26 Seattle, WA (w/ Marrow)
Sun 27 Vancouver, BC
Tuesday March 1 Bellingham, WA
Wed 2 Tacoma, WA
Thurs 3 Eugene, OR
Fri 4 Arcata, CA
Sat 5 San Francisco, CA

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Earlier this summer,

In addition, now that the band has finally made enough money to cover the recording costs of the album, they are offering it for free downloading. Donations are still welcome to cover the costs of making this available.

“Germinate” is still available on CD via CrimethInc. Far East. From the Depths is scheduled to record another record this fall.

Reshape magazine ready! After one year we’ve finally published a free magazine including several translations (to German) from the CrimethInc ex-Workers Collective. It contents several ”old” translations we found in the elder magazine “Interface”—but we also did some translation-work of our own and therefore have many new texts. We hope to provoke some discussions in the German leftwing, autonomus, antifa, and anarchist scenes with this publication. You can read more about our motivations in the foreword. We’ll distribute the 20,000 copies through several activist mailordesr, infoshops and in the streets. If you want to help—get in touch! Further, we have a blog that contains more translations than were included in the magazine, with more to come.

As promised, subscription copies will be the first mailed out, so if you haven’t yet subscribed, now is the time to do it—if you miss the first bulk subscription mailing, the next one won’t be until a few weeks later. NOTE: Current subscribers should email rtsubs@crimethinc.com if they have changed their address.

If you were planning to order and want to save a few dollars, the deadline for ordering with the old rates is Noon, Pacific Time, on Saturday, January 2nd. After noon, all orders will be shipped at the new rates.

Current Availability (click on number to see list of all libraries with book):
Days of War — 192 Libraries
Recipes for Disaster — 57 Libraries (22 here, 20 here & 15 here)
Expect Resistance — 28 Libraries
Evasion — 112 Libraries (74 here & 38 here)
Off the Map — 62 Libraries

These numbers are great, and you can be sure almost every single one of these books was the result of someone requesting the library to acquire it. Of course, there is much room for improvement, so keep up the good work folks, and don’t forget: each request makes the next request more likely to be filled, so keep at it!

PS: For those with the old version, you aren’t missing anything—there is no new content on the discs themselves.

And, lastly, a hearty congratulations to Ms. Stephanie of Los Angeles, who won our random subscriber drawing for a Ne Plus Ultra copy of Days of War.

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Update: Shocking news—printer has missed yet another deadline of their own. We now expect to have them for mailing on Tuesday, the 15th. Grrrrr.