Concerned Citizen: The FBI’s Anarchist Cookbook Dossier
- AU$30.00
- 182 pages
- 21.5 x 28 cm
- Softcover
- ISBN: 978-1-925-78801-3
- Design: Duncan Blachford
When William Powell’s infamous publication The Anarchist Cookbook (1971) drew the attention of the FBI, agents were assigned to track which stores sold the book and to find out if William Powell was a pseudonym.
In 2010, the FBI released the bulk of its investigative file on The Anarchist Cookbook – it is these files that are reproduced within Concerned Citizen. They are published here in part as historical curiosity, and in part for their readymade graphic design/art-book qualities; the two traits are arguably inseparable.
“Powell’s infamous publication has a more legitimately anarchist precedent in The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (c.1883) by the anarchist bookbinder, Johann ‘Hans’ Most.”
“Within days, The Anarchist Cookbook had become what Most called a ‘literary Satan’.”
“Evincing a mainstream dissatisfaction with capitalist hegemony, both titles became instant bestsellers.”
“The difficulty was not with the information itself since that was already available … The difficulty was with the aura of deviance that surrounded the book.”
Ann Larabee, The Wrong Hands
“One of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted.”
Federal Bureau of Investigation
