u/WildVirtue

If you could magic a library or online archive into existence, where all the work of tracking down texts from various different libraries and hard-to-find corners of the internet was done for you, what would the collection look like? And what would it be called?

I've helped digitize a fair few texts that were hidden away in physical libraries, and turned a lot of badly photo scanned books into nice to read books with hyperlinked chapters and footnotes, etc.

I've also been trying to help find a web developer up for building some cool online archives and a classic forum board for people to talk about them. So, I know this is a long shot, but if you have those skills and would like to be involved let me know e.g. the text linked below lists a bunch of already digitized texts that could be split off to start off some new archives:

• https://thelul.org/library/radical-texts-that-could-be-split-off-to-create-new-archives

Finally, are there any cool existing libraries that come close to your dream library? I'll quote a few that I know of below.

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Joseph A. Labadie Collection

One of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive collections of its kind, with materials on anarchism, anti-colonialist movements, anti-war and pacifist movements, atheism and free thought, civil liberties and civil rights, ecology, labor and workers’ rights, feminism, LGBTQ movements, prisons and prisoners, the New Left, the Spanish Civil War, and youth and student protest.

The collection includes books, pamphlets, periodicals, and more, and is noteworthy for its printed ephemera and holdings of posters, photographs, sheet music, pinback buttons, and scrapbooks. It also includes important archival and manuscript material, as well as recordings of speeches, debates, oral histories, and protest songs. 

New material is added regularly through both purchase and donation, with the goal of filling gaps in the historical record, building on existing areas of strength, and meeting the current and emerging needs of researchers, instructors, activists, and others who use the Labadie Collection in the Special Collections Research Center. 

The Labadie Collection is named for Detroit labor organizer and anarchist Jo Labadie, who donated his personal library of books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and memorabilia to the university in 1911. In 2000, we received a large donation of research materials from the National Transgender Library and Archives, adding to our already strong holdings.

• Labadie Collection in the catalog
• Index of Ephemera Files
• Archives and Manuscripts
• Scrapbooks and Photo Albums
• Single Manuscripts
• Single Letters
• Anarchism Pamphlets
• Labadie Photograph Collection
• Political Posters

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May Day Rooms

Our archive focuses on social struggles, radical art, and acts of resistance from the 1960s to the present: it contains everything from recent feminist poetry to 1990s techno paraphernalia, from situationist magazines to histories of riots and industrial transformations, from 1970s educational experiments to prison writing.

We proceed from the understanding that social change can happen most effectively when marginalised and oppressed groups can get to know – and tell – their own histories “from below.” Our archival collections challenge the widespread assault on collective memory and the tradition of the oppressed. We aim to counter narratives of historical inevitability and political pessimism with living proof that that many struggles continue.

We run a public programme including archival projects, publications, film screenings, “scan-a-thons” for digitising archival material, workshops, talks and discussion, reading groups, and social nights, all of which encourage active and collective engagement with history of social movements.

• Upcoming Events
• Blog

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Feminist Library

The Feminist Library is a large collection of feminist literature based in London. We are a library and community space and support research, activist and community projects.

In 2020 The Feminist Library celebrated 45 years of archiving and activism. Mainly volunteer run, we have created and looked after one of the most important collections of feminist material in the UK, and provided an inspiring learning and social space for thousands of people.

• Events
• Blog

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The Anarchist Library

• E-mail: library@angrylists.com
• Live chat: See /special/webchat
• Wiki: bookshelf.theanarchistlibrary.org

theanarchistlibrary.org is (despite its name) an archive focusing on anarchism and anarchist texts.

Within the scope of our use of the term “anarchism” we have been quite broad, but broad does not mean infinite, and basically shrinks down to a set of ideas against the State and capital. This immediately rules out the so-called “anarcho-capitalism”, “anarcho-nationalism” and similar crap.

What is so special about this site?

The library provides a high quality online web browser version of the text along with various other formats, like PDFs, plain text, HTML, EPUB, and XeLaTeX. We actively encourage the DIY printing and the distribution of the texts, so there is no need to ask us for permission to use the texts.

The site provides a way for distributors and friends to change the layout of the PDFs and to create collections of an arbitrary number of texts (1 or more). See the bookbuilder page.

The site also provides an advanced search engine.

All these features come with some responsibility for the people who want to contribute to the library. We ask that uploaders contribute a logical representation of the text, with headings, emphasis, quotation blocks, etc. marked up appropriately. The site provides some tools (inside the web interface) to make this process easy, but some attention and some care is still required. Please be sure to read the manual if you plan to join the project for the mid- to long-term.

• Librarian Picks
• SHH! THIS IS A LIBRARY! forums
• Wishlist

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Sprout Distro

Sprout Distro is an anarchist zine distro (distributor) and publisher based in the occupied territory currently known as the United States.

We distribute zines (see: "What is a Zine?" if you are new to zines) as a way of contributing to the increased proliferation of anarchist projects and resistance. We primarily distribute zines via this website and in person at zine fests, book fairs, and other such events. We make all the zines we carry available as PDFs for folks to download, print, and distribute themselves.

About Our Distro

Our distro mainly focuses on anarchist tactics and skill-building. This means that we have a lot of zines on direct action, organizing, starting projects (ex: collectives, study groups, prisoner support projects), decision-making, street tactics, security, affinity groups, how we relate to each other, etc.

Get In Touch

We welcome feedback from folks, suggestions of zines to carry, new ways to distribute zines, and other projects we should know about. Contact us here.

• Archive.org Page

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Steal This Wiki

A collaborative update and rewrite of Abbie Hoffman's seminal work, Steal This Book. Plus, a collection of related books and essays e.g. books analysing this project's yippie anarchist roots.

• Table of Contents
• About This Project
• General Guidelines
• How to Improve This Project

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The Library of Unconventional Lives

An archive for collecting together stories of lives lived in unconventional ways. Which could mean something as simple as what it’s like to live on a narrow boat. Or it could mean someone hitchhiking around the world because it was the only way they knew how to process a tough childhood with their sanity intact.

• Table of Contents
• About This Project
• How to find and use this archive
• How to improve this project

Copy pasted from Raddle:

>Anarchy is when your personal AI buddy cop robot can throw hands if someone tries to SA you. > >Submitted by tuesday 4 days ago in ShitRedditSays (edited 28 seconds later) > >>I believe in a possible utopic anarchic future, in which robots and "current AI" is used to produce the utopia. In this utopic future each person would be given their own robotic companion, easily capable of subduing even very large humans with minium injuries. These robotic companions would effectively act as our current police do, but at a inter-connected communal level. Not only would rape and other violent crimes be reduced/eliminated, the personal robots would combine with society wide robotics to eliminate all "work", allowing us to focus on art, science and/or entertainment. >> >>PS: for the "current AI" comment: I believe our current level of LLM technology is sufficient to realize this utopic future, and we should stop our pursuit of AGI, and concentrate on robotics (which needs another decade or two for the utopic future to be possible). > >__0: fucking cooked ... an "anarchist" said this? > >ziq: this is what happens when we don't push back against "anarcho-transhumanism" and related techno-fascist cooptions of the beautiful idea > >totalism: Original post is obviously silly but this is a completely myopic view of your particular ideological enemies. You can find similar shit said by all kinds of anarchist. Most anarcho-transhumanists hold the view that technology makes things complicated and impossible to police and control, and you can find anti-civ who want everything to be Dunbar's number sized places where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. > >ziq: One does real harm to everyone by whitewashing the dystopian machinations of the ruling class, even to the point of eagerly welcoming their prison keepers as liberators. One doesn't. > >totalism: Anarcho-transhumanism is about as far from the levers of power / helpful to them as your preferred techno-antagonistic ideology. And if anything, reactionary techbro transhumanists have basically gone extinct over the last ten years. Almost all of them switched to fearing technology because transgender people, and thus they began endorsing state control of it. You also have the person who coined the term TESCREAL saying that transhumanism is bad because it will potentially dissolve the state in the future... and finally, it's a well-known fact that billionaires are building apocalypse bunkers. Does that mean that anti-civ anarchists preparing for The Collapse are responsible for <list of capitalist or state atrocities>? No. > >ziq: Your reductive high school debate bro shtick was wearing thin the first time I saw you. Now it's become so tedious I can't even begin to process your confused proclamation that Silicon Valley transhumanists stopped being transhumanists because they endorse the state or that one guy's ideology hopping proves anything. > >"Anarcho" transhumanism is no less or more dangerous than "Anarcho" capitalism, which is to say it's only powerless until it's not. > >But however powerless you perceive it to be in the current moment, it doesn't invalidate the point I made - the attempt to wrap high-tech fetishism and bald-faced eugenics up with anarchy only poisons anarchy in a world where we're ruled by tech companies working day and night to make humans obsolete. > >Class traitor. > >totalism: Lol are we saying that transhumanism is eugenics because of xyz historical usage of the term now? Transhumanism is ultimately the ethical claim that the freedom to modify yourself with technology is paramount. Of course the SV techbros abandoning that value claim is them abandoning transhumanism, it can't be anything else. Nice dodging the apocalypse bunker point I made tho.

The 2 volumes by Klaus Theweleit and a bunch of related material has recently been added to a niche anti-fascist archive, with hyperlinked footnotes and hyperlinked table of contents, etc.:

• Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History
• Male Fantasies Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

Seminar:

• The Fragmented Body — Klaus Theweleit

Review article:

• On rereading Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies — Kevin S. Amidon & Dan Krier

Book Reviews:

• Pre-Fascist Masculinity — Jay Sherry
• Documenting Barbarism — Michael Rothberg
• Weimarama — Richard J. Evans
• A Very Important Subject (Preview) — David Profumo

Related:

• Book Review: Landsknechte auf dem Weg ins Dritte Reich? — Bruce Campbell

Quote from one of the book reviews:

>Since its appearance in Germany in 1977, Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytical study of fascist literature has graduated from the status of a cult work to that of a classic. Rereading it in English, a decade after my first, rather sceptical perusal, it is easy to see why. Much of what made Theweleit’s book so startlingly original in the mid-Seventies has since become relatively conventional in literary and historical studies, from the Foucaultian analysis of literary discourse, and the exploration of the political history of the human body, to a feminist perspective on sex and power. Yet in the intervening period, the book has not lost its capacity to shock and disturb. ... Sex and death are never very far apart in the literature that is the subject of Theweleit’s analysis. > >Theweleit is concerned not with the literature of the Nazi movement but with that of its much smaller military precursor, the Freikorps movement of the years between 1918 and 1923. The Freikorps were heavily armed bands of right-wing thugs, including many ex-soldiers, who were used by the Social Democrat-dominated governments of the early Weimar Republic to put down revolutionary uprisings such as those of the Spartacists in January 1919, the Communists in Munich later the same year, or the ‘Red Army’ in the Ruhr in the spring of 1920. Recently the Freikorps have had their defenders: some historians have suggested that they helped stabilise Weimar democracy in its formative phase, or that they were a basically legitimate means by which the German middle classes defended themselves against the Bolshevik threat. No one who reads this book, however, can come away without feeling that these men were pathological murderers who despised the values Weimar represented and hated the ‘bourgeoisie’ as decadent and corrupt.