The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book containing instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for the home manufacture of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976 and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation. However, the copyright belonged to the publisher, who continued circulating the book until the company was bought out in 1991. Its legality has been questioned in several jurisdictions.

History

Creation

The Anarchist Cookbook was written by William Powell as a teenager and first published in 1971 at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell gained inspiration for his text from his experiences with Vietnam veterans while living in New York City, during which time the pacifist movements of the 1960s began to take a more violent turn. Powell began plans to become a writer but decided upon a political course when he was drafted into the Vietnam war, which inspired him to write "recipes" and later compile them into a "cookbook". The initial vision of The Anarchist Cookbook was to post instructional flyers in New York City, including how to properly throw a Molotov cocktail and how to make LSD. These "recipes" were eventually adapted to make up an entire book. From 1968 to 1970, Powell began researching in the "U.S. Combat Bookshelf" at the New York Public Library, including mainstream external texts such as The Boy Scout Handbook, and anarchist texts like Fuck the System by Abbie Hoffman. The initial manuscript was sent to Lyle Stuart in 1970.

Powell had difficulty finding employment throughout his life, having described the book as "a youthful indiscretion or mistake that can haunt someone during their early years or even longer." In 2011, Powell and his wife, Ochan Kusuma-Powell, founded Next Frontier: Inclusion, a non-profit organization for children with developmental disabilities and learning disabilities; he described it as a means to atone for writing the text. William Powell died of cardiac arrest on 11 July 2016.

Publication status

Powell originally sent the manuscript to over 30 publishers until Lyle Stuart bought the book and its copyright. Powell received royalties for the book, approximately $35,000 until he split with the company in 1976. Despite Powell's protest against the continued publication of the text, the copyright of the book never belonged to its author, but to its publisher, Lyle Stuart Inc. Stuart kept publishing the book until the company was bought in 1991 by Steven Schragis, who decided to drop it. Out of the 2,000 books published by the company, it was the only one that Schragis decided to stop publishing. Schragis said publishers have a responsibility to the public, and the book had no positive social purpose that could justify keeping it in print. The copyright was bought in 2002 by Delta Press (a.k.a. Ozark Press), an Arkansas-based publisher that specializes in controversial books, where the title is their "most-asked-for volume". As of 2016, over two million copies of the book have been sold. The book was reviewed by the Department of Justice, the White House, the FBI, and by both John Dean and Mark Felt, Richard Nixon's lawyer, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's associate director respectively. While having concerns about the text, the FBI concluded that it could not be regulated as it was published through mass media.

Media presence

Internet/media

Much of the publication was copied and made available as text documents online through Usenet and FTP sites hosted in academic institutions in the early 1990s, and has been made available via web browsers from their inception in the mid-1990s to the present day. The name varies slightly from Anarchist Cookbook to Anarchy Cookbook and the topics have expanded vastly in the intervening decades. Many of the articles were attributed to an anonymous author called "The Jolly Roger".

Knowledge of the book, or copied online publications of it, increased along with the increase in public access to the Internet throughout the mid-1990s. Newspapers ran stories about how easy the text was to get hold of, and the influence it may have had with terrorists, criminals, and experimenting teenagers.

Repercussions from the book's publication, and the author's subsequent disavowal of its content, were the subject of the 2016 documentary film American Anarchist by Charlie Siskel. In the film, William Powell explains in depth his thoughts on the book and the consequences it had in his life. It further explores the themes of responsibility and repercussions that decision can have on one's life. Powell's death in 2016 received little media coverage until the release of American Anarchist, which was a few months after his death. It was classified RC again on 31 October 2016.

Canada

In 2002, the Canadian government permitted the book to be imported from the United States. Canada Customs and Revenue Agency concluded the book does not violate either hate or obscenity laws, therefore the previous ban on the text was resolved.

United Kingdom

Possession of The Anarchist Cookbook without reasonable excuse has been successfully prosecuted as the offence of possessing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, contrary to Section 58<!--(1)(b)--> of the Terrorism Act 2000.

United States

In 2015, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein unsuccessfully pushed to have the book removed from online databases.

  • 1976: Police linked the bombing of Grand Central Terminal and hijacking of a TWA flight to Croatian radicals who used instructions from The Anarchist Cookbook. This led to a London judge and police campaigning to have the book banned in the UK.
  • 2013: The author advocated for discontinuing the book after it was found in the possession of perpetrators of a school shooting in Arapahoe, Colorado and the 2013 Santa Monica shootings. He was cleared of all charges in October 2008, after arguing that he was a prankster who just wanted to research fireworks and smoke bombs.
  • 2017: Joshua Walker, a 27-year-old arrested on return from fighting for the YPG in Syria, was prosecuted under section 58 solely for the possession of the book. He was found not guilty as he had a reasonable excuse: he had downloaded it for an academic purpose and forgot to destroy it afterwards.
  • 2021: Oliver Bel, a 23-year-old mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge, was convicted in the UK of an offence under section 58 for possessing the book, receiving a sentence of 3 years' imprisonment. The book was found by police in a search of Bel's home following a series of racist and anti-Semitic comments online; Bel had also been in contact with the banned far-right group National Action.

See also

  • The Big Book of Mischief
  • Illegalism
  • La Salute è in voi
  • Keith McHenry, who wrote a parody of this book focusing on food mutual aid in 2015
  • Johann Most, author of The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, an inspiration of this Cookbook according to the forewords
  • Propaganda of the deed
  • Kurt Saxon, who wrote a similar book providing instructions on improvised weapons and munitions
  • TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook

References

Further reading

  • Jeff Breinholt, Books as Contraband: The Strange Case of 'The Anarchist Cookbook at warontherocks.com
  • The Anarchist Cookbook on Banned Books — More information about the banning on Banned-Books.org