Man in the biscuit tin…

From 1933 to 1940 Marcus Graham edited Man! A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement for the International Group of San Francisco. Historian Kenyon Zimmer described it as ‘the finest and most popular English-language anarchist publication of the era.’[1] A run of the journal has recently been digitised by the University of Illinois Chicago.[2]

This is not the first ‘reappearance’ of Man! In 1974 Cienfuegos Press published an anthology (600+ pages) of articles and illustrations from it, edited by Marcus Graham. The KSL has recently posted the contents list of ‘Man!’ : an anthology of anarchist ideas, essays, poetry and commentaries for anyone who wants to chase down what was in it.[3] We found a review by Peter Miller: ‘It is true that some will no doubt find the polemical material rather tedious, but polemic is much to my taste and I enjoyed them greatly.’[4]

Very occasionally you find something that not only illuminates connections you’d otherwise know nothing of, but also gives you a sense of what those connections meant. Australian journalist Hugh Lunn tells how his grandfather (Frederick Hugh Lunn, an Australian militant of the Industrial Workers of the World) passed a copy of Man! to his son, Fred:

‘Actually, Grandpa Hugh thought he was going to die a decade earlier because Fred had a paper called Man! A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement from New York which he kept hidden, folded up in a biscuit tin. It contained an article on the Spanish Civil War on which was written in pencil: “Hughie Lunn’s Last Will and Testament sent just B4 he died 4.7.38 to his son Fred. To be read Sunday mornings. Retained by you till you are fifty and reread every 10 years and then to live this life.”’[5]

How many testaments like that are there, lost forever or still waiting to be found?

Notes

1, p.187 of Immigrants against the State : Yiddish and Italian Anarchism In America (2015).
2, https://archive.org/details/pub_man see also https://libcom.org/article/man-journal-anarchist-ideal-and-movement 
3, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/866vw7 
4, Libertarian education 18 [1975?] See https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-12062/ 
5, p.53 of Over the top with Jim : Hugh Lunn’s tap-dancing, bugle-blowing memoir of a well-spent boyhood. See https://archive.org/details/overtopwithjimhu0000lunn/