A collection of four Solidarty Bookshop catalogs and price lists
Chicago: Solidarity Bookshop, 1960/1970s. A striking group of catalogs and promotional price lists issued by Chicago’s Solidarity Bookshop, the radical bookstore and mail-order distribution center associated with the Industrial Workers of the World, The Rebel Worker, and the circle that established the Chicago Surrealist Group. Far more than commercial lists, these publications combine anarchist propaganda, labor history, surrealist humor, collage, and exuberant hand-drawn typography, treating bookselling itself as a form of revolutionary agitation.
The group includes a grotesquely comic “Salute to All Politicians,” incorporating a text credited to William S. Burroughs and H. Riley; a catalog featuring Errico Malatesta’s expansive definition of revolution; and two sheets advertising the shop’s silkscreen reproduction of the celebrated bilingual broadside calling workers to the Haymarket meeting of May 4, 1886. The latter recount the Haymarket bombing, trial, and executions while presenting the poster as an object through which the memory of the anarchist martyrs could be circulated anew.
Issued from the shop’s successive premises at 1644 Meyer Court and 1703 Vine Street, the catalogs document Solidarity Bookshop’s role as both a neighborhood gathering place and an international clearinghouse for anarchist, socialist, labor, surrealist, and revolutionary literature. Their fusion of mail-order bookselling with worker education, historical commemoration, and surrealist graphic experiment exemplifies the distinctive politics of the Rebel Worker circle: revolutionary unionism enlarged by poetry, humor, imagination, and the transformation of everyday life. Scarce survivals from the independent communications network out of which organized American surrealism emerged.
Three out of the four consist of a single sheet printed on both sides; "A Salute to All Politicians" is 4 pp. The Malatesta list has a 4 ½” closed tear beginning along the left edge, with smaller closed tears and creases and tape residue to the corners. Item #15190
Price: $175.00