The USS AK Press Has Docked!
This is probably going to be the least coherent blog post you’ll ever read here. That’s because Kate, Jessica, John, and I have been tabling twelve-hour days since Tuesday. It’s been exhausting (hence our failure to blog yesterday) but it’s also been completely worthwhile and we’re still having a great time selling books, talking to folks who stop by our tables, and hanging out with authors and comrades.
Today Kate and I started our day off with the workshop we had organized, entitled “Community Supported Publishing: Print Media Strategies for Movement Building.” We were joined by Penelope Rosemont from the Charles H. Kerr Co., Max Uhlenbeck from Left Turn, and Daniel Tucker from AREA Chicago—plus an enthusiastic roomful of folks working on a variety of other book and media projects. A good time was had by all!!!
Kate loves workshops so much that she went off and talked on two more panels after ours—the “Movement Centers Assembly” (organized by the Brecht Forum) and “Weaving Urban Fabrics” (organized by Red Emma’s, Baltimore Development Cooperative, and City From Below)! In the meantime some comrades from Red Emma’s in Baltimore, the Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia, and Friendly Fire Collective in San Francisco came and helped me sell books (which totally saved my ass during the afternoon rush). We’ve sold out of a lot of popular titles by this point but still had our busiest tabling day yet, and even signed up five new Friends of AK!
For our daily dose of name-dropping, guess who stopped by our table? Ward Churchill, Lorraine Perlman, Penelope Rosemont, Peter Gelderloos, Selma James, and Grace Boggs! We are starstruck. Are you jealous? And look, here are some luminaries having dinner while we are blogging at the cafe. (At opposite ends of the table: Penelope Rosemont and Lorraine Perlman, and Seth Tobocman and Peter Werbe of Fifth Estate.)
This evening we closed up shop and headed over to the New World From Below Convergence Center for a collaborative book release party, where authors spoke on several recent AK titles (Anarchism and its Aspirations, Uses of a Whirlwind, and A Poetics of Resistance) as several other excellent books were launched by our comrades at PM Press, Haymarket, and Microcosm. Here is a lovely photo of Stevie Peace of Team Colors speaking at the event.
As you can see, behind the book table Kate, Jessica and I were the picture of energy.
That’s all for now. Fun fact about Detroit: the place where you buy beer is called the party store. I want to go there now.
(PS from Kate: The “USS AK Press” is what we have taken to calling the gigantic boat of an SUV that we borrowed to bring all of the stock up here for the Forum. Try parking one of those fuckers when you haven’t driven an SUV in 5 years. Hilarity ensues.)