Summary: The Anarchist Cookbook is a book published
in 1971, and you won't find the real thing online, although it is easily
purchased from your local bookstore. There are various files available on the
Internet that rip off the name "Anarchist Cookbook" and have somewhat
similar content, but they are not the real Anarchist Cookbook. There are also
other files that do contain parts of the content from The Anarchist Cookbook,
often mixed with other material. The Anarchist Cookbook has a poor reputation
for reliability and safety, and most of the online files are considerably
worse.
NEW! Comments on the Anarchist Cookbook from the original author
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Dear NeXuS, I have recently been made aware
of several websites that focus on The Anarchist Cookbook. As the author of
the original publication some 30 plus years ago, it is appropriate for me to
comment. I would appreciate it if you would post these comments as part of
your website on the Anarchist Cookbook. Please do not include my e-mail
address. However, should you wish to confirm the authenticity of this message,
please do not hesitate to contact me at the above address. The Anarchist Cookbook was
written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school.
At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called
"counter culture movement" were at their height. I was involved in
the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations.
The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at
the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I
did not believe in. I conducted the research for
the manuscript on my own, primarily at the New York City Public Library. Most
of the contents were gleaned from Military and Special Forces Manuals. I was
not member of any radical group of either a left or right wing persuasion. I submitted the manuscript
directly to a number of publishers without the help or advice of an agent.
Ultimately, it was accepted by Lyle Stuart Inc. and was published verbatim -
without editing - in early 1970. Contrary to what is the normal custom, the
copyright for the book was taken out in the name of the publisher rather than
the author. I did not appreciate the significance of this at the time and
would only come to understand it some years later when I requested that the
book be taken out of print. The central idea to the book
was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I
no longer agree with this. Apparently in recent years, The
Anarchist Cookbook has seen a number of ‘copy cat’ type publications, some
with remarkably similar titles (Anarchist Cookbook II, III etc). I am not
familiar with these publications and cannot comment upon them. I can say that
the original Anarchist Cookbook has not been revised or updated in any way by
me since it was first published. During the years that followed
its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher
of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect
on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I
was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name
to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I
wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that
were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken
out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in
his name and therefore such a decision was his to make - not the author’s. In
the early 1980’s, the rights for the book were sold to another publisher. I
have had no contact with that publisher (other than to request that the book
be taken out of print) and I receive no royalties. Unfortunately, the book
continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites
dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in
agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very
pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to
be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken
out of print. William Powell |
The Anarchist Cookbook, by William Powell, is a 160 page book, originally
published in 1971 by Lyle Stuart. It is currently published by Barricade Books
under ISBN 0-9623032-0-8. (Note that the name is not the "Anarchist's
Cookbook"; there is no possessive in the name.)
Some people consider the Anarchist Cookbook to be a classic while many
people consider it total junk. Many anarchists say that the Anarchist Cookbook
has nothing to do with "real anarchy." The Anarchist Cookbook
generally has a bad reputation.
You can easily order it (or any other book in print) from your local
bookstore. Give them the ISBN above and you should get it in a few weeks.
Alternatively, you can send $22 (includes postage) to Barricade Books, PO Box
1401, Secaucus NJ 07096. Other mail order places also sell it, such as Paladin
Press.
It's easy to find files called the "Anarchist Cookbook" online,
but I have never found the original despite extensive searching. If you find
the real thing, feel free to send me a working path. Note that the original
tells you how to make bail in New York City, provides a recipe for cacodyal,
and explains how to demolish suspension bridges. If your file doesn't have
this, sorry, you haven't found the real thing.
You can use AltaVista or your favorite search engine to find these and other
related files.
No. According to people who know explosives, it contains many dangerous
errors and formulas that are likely to hurt you. People strongly advise to stay
away from it if you enjoy having your limbs.
If you want to read it just for entertainment or to impress friends with it,
however, go ahead. I thought it was rather silly and contained a lot of tedious
60's political rhetoric. I'd suggest saving your money, but buy it if you want.
Also note that kids regularly blind, maim, deafen, or kill themselves or
their friends by playing around with pipe bombs and other explosives. Please
avoid this, as it will not only mess up your life and upset your parents, but
also motivates laws against the Internet and professional pyrotechnicians.
A few safety tips to think about: a) Constantly ask yourself: what would
happen to me if this mixture blew up _right_now_, say from static electricity? b)
Look at a .22 and consider that the fraction of a gram of gunpowder in this
could kill you thousands of feet away. Admittedly a gun is a special case, but
the point is that a little bit of explosive can fling deadly bits of metal long
distances at you. c) You don't need high explosives to hurt yourself; people
get themselves killed with match heads, gasoline, or gunpowder.
Check out the Pyrotechnics Guild International
or look at the rec.pyrotechnics FAQ file, which, like most FAQ files, can be
ftp'd from rtfm.mit.edu: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/rec.pyrotechnics. Some of the
books that FAQ recommends are Chemistry
of Pyrotechnics and Explosives by John A. Conkling, Fireworks
: The Art, Science, and Technique by Takeo Shimizu, Fireworks
Principles and Practice by Ronald Lancaster, Pyrotechnics
by George W. Weingart, and Chemistry
of Powder and Explosives by Tenny Davis. Only the last two are books that
you could actually afford.
Note that the Anarchist Cookbook is available from nearly any bookstore in
the U.S. These dangerous institutions will also sell you Nazi and hate
literature, pornography, instructions on growing drugs, and so forth. For some
reason, getting this stuff from a bookstore is not news, but getting it over the
Internet is. Before calling for restrictions on the Internet, think of how you
would like these restrictions to be applied to books, which really provide much
more dangerous information than the Internet does. Some examples of
easily-available books are Poor Man's James Bond, Anarchist Handbook, A
Do-it-yourself Submachine Gun, Home Workshop Explosives, Secrets of
Methamphetamine Manufacture.
As an interesting Department of Justice report
points out, over 50 publications describing the fabrication of explosives and
destructive devices are listed in the Library of Congress and are available to
any member of the public, as well as being easily available commercially.
(Although all of the listed books have (coincidentally?) gone out of print
recently.) The report points out that one Kansas bomber got his bomb plans from
the August 1993 Reader's Digest, of all places.
Yes. Lots of them. A classic error is the recipe for extracting the drug
bananadine from banana peels. The flaw is that bananadine does not exist; it
was mentioned in the March 1967 Berkeley Barb as a joke but the Anarchist
Cookbook took it seriously. [Reference: "Storming Heaven: LSD and the
American Dream, p. 336, thanks to Lamont Granquist.]
There are more inaccuracies in the demolition section. Most of this section
was cribbed from the U.S. Army Field Manual 5-25 "Explosives and
Demolitions". However, the Cookbook discussion is simplified or even made
up in several cases. For instance, while the Field Manual has a long discussion
of the difficulty of demolishing suspension bridges, the Cookbook simply gives
six places to put charges.
On the other hand, despite the errors the author of the original Anarchist
Cookbook did use actual reference materials. This is in contrast to many of the
online files, which get much of their content from pure imagination.
For a review with several specific errors, see the anarchistic publisher
Spunk Press's rather negative page on the Anarchist Cookbook: http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/spunk/cookbook.html
.
Also see a review at http://hyperreal.com/drugs/faqs/FAQ-Clandestine-Chemistry
that describes the Anarchist Cookbook as a flawed classic, full of all sorts of
mistakes.
There's a review by "Esperanza
Godot" that discusses the political and safety errors in the Anarchist
Cookbook.
For a detailed look at some errors, I have analyzed one paragraph from the
Anarchist Cookbook:
"To conclude this chapter, I will present the most
horrendous recipe I could find. Since it is not feasible to make napalm in your
kitchen, you will have to be satisfied with cacodyal. This is made by
chemically extracting all the oxygen from alcohol and then replacing it, under
laboratory conditions, with metal arsenic. The formula for alcohol is C4H5O,
whereas for cacodyal it is C4H5AR. Now, this new substance, cacodyal, possesses
spontaneous inflammability, the moment it is exposed to the air. [Followed by a
description of the deadly arsenic fumes it gives off]"
Now for a closer look at this paragraph: a) There isn't actually a recipe
described above, unless you consider "replace oxygen with arsenic" to
be a recipe. It starts out telling you something to do in your kitchen and ends
up with "in laboratory conditions." b) The formula for alcohol is
C2H6O (C2H5OH), not C4H5O. You can't have C4H5O. c) The valence of oxygen is 2.
The valence of arsenic is 3 or 5. Thus, simply replacing oxygen with arsenic
isn't possible. d) The symbol for arsenic is As, not AR. e) The Merck Index and
the dictionary list cacodyl (notice the Cookbook's misspelling) as As2(CH3)2.
This formula is totally different from C4H5AR.
So, there are four obvious errors and a totally useless recipe in one short
paragraph. I hope this brief review has pointed out the quality of the
information in the Anarchist Cookbook.
(As a random aside, the early studies of cacodyl were done by Dr. Bunsen (of
burner fame), who lost one eye and nearly died of arsenic poisoning in the
process.)
Some people claim that the CIA/FBI/author/whoever sabotaged the Anarchist
Cookbook to blow up would-be anarchists or to make the recipes fail. However,
there is little evidence to support this theory. I find it much more likely
that the errors are just due to incompetence. Note that many of the above
errors (e.g. wrong symbol for arsenic, wrong formula for alcohol) don't
sabotage anything but are just stupid errors. I would expect that if it were
deliberately sabotaged, it wouldn't have errors like these.
I received the following long but interesting message:
I was Bill Powell's roommate and close friend during the
60's when Bill wrote the book. Bill and I were working for Bookmasters, an
independent bookstore chain that is no longer in business. Bill was 19 when he
wrote book.
The idea of the Anarchist
Cookbook was originally conceived as a series of recipes in the form of
broadsides that would be pasted up all over Manhattan. Recipe #1 would be a how
to for a molotov cocktail, #2 - how to make LSD, etc. The idea was never acted
upon. It grew from discussions at the IWW headquarters in NYC (4th Street
between C and D); this apartment also housed Resurgent Youth, and the League
for Sexual Freedom. I lived there for several years before moving out and into
an apartment on 10th Street between First and A with Bill.
He liked the idea and one day
quit his job and started on the book. He got all his information from manuals
at the public library and current magazines. Most of the stories and anecdotes
were made up. Bill was never an Anarchist and had no philosophy. We had a few
large arguments after I read the early drafts of the book.
At any rate he sent this out to
every publisher he could find. The rejection slips were fascinating. Some were
actually apologetic because they couldn't publish the book. Lyle Stuart
published the book for a number of reasons. At the time Librarians across the
US were being intimidated by the FBI and CIA who wanted to get names of people
checking out books they felt were subversive. Lyle Stuart felt that publishing
this book would make those efforts meaningless since people could simply buy
the book without signing for it. Anyway Lyle did publish the book.
In my opinion the event of
publishing the book was important. The contents are garbage. This was a very
dangerous and brave publishing act for the 1960's.
Bill moved to Putney, VT,
married, had a baby, divorced, became a right wing reactionary voice in the
local college. He was in Alaska briefly working as a timekeeper in Valdez on
the pipeline. I later heard that he was teaching English in Saudi Arabia.
The concept was Anarchism but the
book is nihilism. He took the idea and assembled a book from other books. The
rewrite consisted of replacing all photos and drawings from their sources with
drawings and paraphrasing a lot of material. Lyle used it to negate FBI and CIA
efforts to get names of book readers.
"Real anarchists" tell me that the "Anarchist Cookbook"
has nothing to do with anarchism. Anarchism is a movement for a radicaly
democratic and libertarian society. "Defining Anarchism" says:
I must tell you, first of all, what anarchism is not. It
is not bombs, disorder, or chaos. It is not robbery or murder. It is not a war
of each against all. It is not a return to barbarianism or to the wild state of
man. Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.
More information on anarchism is available at http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/defanar.html
and in the Anarchist FAQ at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931
On the other hand, the interesting and somewhat academic book "Inside
Terrorism" (first
chapter here) describes the violent history of anarchism, and makes the
interesting observation:
Much as the `information revolution' of the late
twentieth century is alleged to have made the means and methods of bomb-making
and other types of terrorist activity more readily available via the Internet,
on CD-ROM, and through ordinary libraries and bookstores, one of anarchism's
flourishing `cottage industries' more than a century earlier was the widespread
distribution of similar `how-to' or DIY-type manuals and publications of
violence and mayhem.
The goals of this FAQ are to provide a book review, to cut down on
repetitive questions about the Anarchist Cookbook, to keep people from blowing
themselves up, and to point out to journalists that books contain more
dangerous information than the internet.
The Anarchist Cookbook describes activities which may be
dangerous and illegal. In addition, the Anarchist Cookbook contains many
dangerous errors. I strongly advise against performing any of these activities.
I am serious about this. If you hurt yourself, don't blame me. I have no
connection with the Anarchist Cookbook. I am not engaged in any illegal
activity, so BATF please don't raid me.
I would like to make it totally clear that I am not an anarchist. Also I do
not advocate the overthrow of the U. S. Government by force, sabotage,
violence, or terrorism.