A key component of AK's work is the sharing of knowledge, history, and information. Through its publishing and distribution efforts, the AK collective see itself as part of a long tradition of getting the word out by any means necessary. In many historical periods, books, pamphlets, and other forms of written communication were clandestine, relying on networks of individuals keeping revolutionary ideas alive with secret printing presses, tattered facsimiles, and underground distribution systems. The mission at AK Press is to keep circulating these important texts, while producing new analyses and documenting the history of struggle as it unfolds.

Construction of this archive began on September 5, 1995, with the aim of eventually providing the collected works of the major anarchists, and an online history of anarchists and anarchist movements worldwide, including a graphics archive.

Autonomedia is an autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media. We publish books on radical media, politics, and the arts that seek to transcend party lines, bottom lines, and straight lines. We also maintain the Interactivist Info Exchange, an online forum for discourse and debate on themes relevant to the books we publish.

As an all-volunteer project, Black Sheep Books is operated by a five-member collective hand in hand with a group of dedicated volunteers. Its principle focus is to provide access to anti-authoritarian Left ideas in a way that promotes intellectual debate and challenges today’s hegemonic culture. Together with horizontalist social movements and political projects, bookstores, infoshops, and publishers, Black Sheep Books works toward an egalitarian, ecological, and nonhierarchical society.

4 Langdon Street
Montpelier, Vermont 05602
(802) 225-8906

Through its programs and events, the Brecht Forum brings people together across social and cultural boundaries and artistic and academic disciplines to promote critical analysis, creative thinking, collaborative projects, and networking in an independent community-level environment.

Throughout the year, the Brecht Forum offers a wide-ranging program of classes, public lectures and seminars, art exhibitions, performances, popular education workshops, and language classes. These activities are developed in collaboration with the many social movements and the diverse communities of this most cosmopolitan of cities, and our programs bring together leading intellectuals, activists and artists from New York, across the United States, and internationally.

451 West Street
New York, NY 10014
(212) 242-4201

Started in 1957, CIRA is a place dedicated to memory, which lives thanks to the generosity of authors and publishers, and thanks to the work of dozens and dozens of people who devote their time and money to this work of preservation. CIRA collects the words and images of the anarchist movement, organizes them and catalogs them, giving everyone the opportunity to read them and see them. The catalog is online, and the CIRA publishes a bulletin every year. It also organizes, both in Lausanne and elsewhere (for example, Venice 1984), conferences on anarchism, and prepares bibliographies and other research tools to make access to anarchist history easier.

The IISH, founded in 1935, holds over 2,700 archival collections, some 1 million printed volumes, and about as many audiovisual items. The available collections are accessible through an online catalog, an online index of archives and inventories, and most of the collections are open to the public. The IISH also carries out and stimulates scholarly research.

Cruquiusweg 31
1019 AT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel + 31 20 6685866

The Kate Sharpley Library is dedicated to researching and restoring the history of the anarchist movement, and regularly publishes information on lost areas of anarchist history. It was named in honor of Kate Sharpley, a First World War anarchist and antiwar activist--one of the countless "unknown" members of the movement so often ignored by "official historians" of anarchism.

The Labadie Collection was established in 1911 when Joseph Labadie, a prominent Detroit anarchist, donated his library to the University of Michigan. Although the collection was originally concerned mainly with anarchist materials (the field in which it remains strongest), its scope was later widened considerably to include a great variety of social protest literature together with political views from both the extreme left and the extreme right. Materials are now collected from all parts of the world. In addition to anarchism, the collection's strengths include: civil liberties (with an emphases on racial minorities), socialism, communism, colonialism and imperialism, American labor history through the 1930s, the IWW, the Spanish Civil War, sexual freedom, women's liberation, gay liberation, the underground press, and student protest.

Special Collections Library
711 Harlan Hatcher Library
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1205
(734) 764-9377

Anarchism has, needless to say, a very bad name. Representatives of the establishment and reporters in the mass media habitually use it as an insult, or as a description of any condition of disorder or widespread violence. This is true even when turmoil or terrorism is the result of individuals or groups who have absolutely no relation to the anarchist movement, or by states that are, in essence, precisely what anarchism seeks to abolish.

To avoid such perpetual brainwashing, it is desirable to see what anarchists themselves have said and how they in fact behave. This multilingual Web page--R.A. Forum--presents some evidence concerning the realities of anarchist thought and action. You'll find information on coming events, contemporary worldviews, visions of anarchism, history, ideas to explore, research, and more.