[The Freedom Press Library in 1979: Plans and problems]

If money – or rather, the lack of it – limits our activities in Angel Alley, a shortage of collaborators runs it a close second.

We have in mind the Freedom Press Library, which as pointed out in these Notes, must remain inoperative so long as we cannot find a comrade, preferably a librarian, sufficiently interested in the potential of an anarchist library to assume the responsibility of organising it on a long term basis. We have had over the past twenty years so many enthusiasts who have been more concerned with going through the library for their own ends, generally leaving it in greater disarray than it was before they started, that we now appear to some friends as dogs in the manger when we do not automatically welcome with open arms every newcomer who wants to get the library operational in double quick time! That we do want to have a working anarchist library no one can surely doubt seeing that we have never stopped adding contemporary material to it. But what form should an anarchist library take? What purpose should it serve? Who are the kind of people we should seek to attract? Indeed what kind of material should it house? And how should the material be classified?

These and many more questions come to mind if one sees an anarchist library not as a happy hunting ground for the ever-growing number of sociology graduates in search of subjects for their theses but as a centre generating anarchist ideas and research.

As we see it, the librarian(s) for such a library should be less concerned with librarianship (though it is an essential ingredient) and more with using the library themselves as a means of stimulating their own political imagination and in turn communicating their thoughts to editors and other propagandists, through meetings, discussions, duplicated bulletins at regular intervals, and of course articles for publication. Students in search of a thesis – that is who have time but few ideas – would then be most welcome, our librarian taking the place of their professors too busy entertaining on TV quiz programmes, or churning out more pot-boilers for the commercial market, to have the time to think and to stimulate their students.

An anarchist library in our opinion should not even attempt to emulate the established socio-political libraries. Assuming, materially, that it could, we doubt whether the results would justify the effort and money involved. For those of us who have followed the growth and development of the universally acclaimed Institute of Social History in Amsterdam from its very beginnings it, alas, now points to everything that an anarchist library should avoid if we keep ends always to the forefront. On the other hand the C.I.R.A.(International Centre for Anarchist Research) in Geneva with which our anarchist library would wish to establish close links, lacks funds and staff, and apart from producing its bulletin, the last issue of which is reduced to listing what the professionals call ‘accessions’, nothing emerges to stimulate anarchist propaganda.

Should our anarchist library relegate the autobiographies and biographies to the basement and fill its shelves with books dealing with self-management, land use and ownership, economics, production and distribution, education, housing, etc. …?

To all those of you who favour the idea of an anarchist library we pose the kind of questions we have been posing ourselves in the hope that you will send us your views.

If the response is encouraging we will certainly arrange a meeting later in the year. All letters will be answered.

‘News From Angel Alley’ Freedom (16 June 1979) [See also ‘Rebel Voices Archive; Anarchist Library Project’ https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/612m8b for Anarchist/ radical libraries in seventies London]