Thoughts on anarchist libraries

As mentioned in the last bulletin one of our readers said ‘The article & information about Georges Pilotelle & Columbia University must have been of particular interest to you. It prompted me to reread the article in the Dec. ’24 bulletin – ‘Freedom Press Library 1979’. […] 

‘Beyond keeping a historical record, I am sure you have a view about the questions posed in the article and the wider purposes of an anarchistic library’.

The Kate Sharpley Library aims to preserve what anarchists have written (published or not) as an essential way to understand the ideas and history of the movement. To the best of our ability we try to make those things available, which leads into publishing. Which may be less librarianly, but has always has always been a concern of the KSL: see Albert’s ‘Anarchist Literature: “It Must Begin Again”’ in 1991.[1]

Anarchists of the past were always creating libraries: ‘libraries were “one of the fundamental pillars in the anarchist infrastructural apparatus” where one could read but also join in a common space.’[2] But inevitably there are more mentions of anarchist libraries than accounts of exactly what they were doing and why. I assume there’s a shared understanding of how they work. Which is not to say that they didn’t come in all shapes and sizes. In 1956 Robert Lynn reported on a workers’ library inside the North British Locomotive Co., Queens Park Works, Polmadic, Glasgow.[3] In San Francisco ‘The Russian anarchists’ reading room at 2787 Folsom Street became the International Group’s “Club Rooms,” open to the public six evenings a week and hosting monthly “comraderies” featuring spaghetti, concerts, and dancing.’[4]

Let’s end with Marianne Enckell of CIRA who has written about the how and the why: ‘It isn’t a matter of us archiving the memory of the movement in order to fix it in place; it is a matter of keeping our history alive and subversive, of affirming the existence of Anarchists (“There are not even a hundred of them…”) and their diversity against the suffocation by those in power.’[5]

Notes

1, In KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No.1 [1991] https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/vdndmd  

2, Dr. Kirwin R. Shaffer ‘Anarchist Cultural Politics in Latin America: An Introduction’ in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, Vol. 2023 No. 2 (2023) https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/21699  

3, See Freedom, 1956/06/02

4, Kenyon Zimmer Immigrants against the State, p.183. There are photos of the room at https://nowtopians.com/history/silicon-valley-a-living-history  

5, ‘The School and the Barricade’ (updated version, 2009) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/marianne-enckell-the-school-and-the-barricade [original note: ‘“Y en a pas un sur cent…” An allusion to the poem “Les Anarchistes” by Leo Ferre.’]