Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

It's a gesture of good faith, and a demonstration of anarchist economic principles, to ojEfer at least some, if not most, of your stuff for free, so do your best to come up with a source of free photocopies or materials: find a pilfering friend at a copy shop or seek employment at one yourself, misreport the number of copies you made or crack their copy-counting technology, order a big stack of free papers from some wild-eyed radical collective (hint, hint). You can also sell things on a sliding scale according to the means of each individual. Put out a donation jar?^you'll be surprised how proactive people will be about donating what they can, once they know you're not out to make a profit. At some events, donations alone can be enough to pay gas money, even if you're traveling a great distance. Anarchist bookmobiles have succeeded in crossing the country, sharing literature everywhere they go, on the strength of mere donations and book sales.

Consider setting up a banner or similar visual by your table to increase your visibility and add atmosphere; you could also develop theater or circus acts to attract attention. Don't be shy about what you're doing, or use euphemisms about it?^that just makes people suspicious. Shouting out "Subversive propaganda! Seditious Hterature! Dangerous stuff here, folks?protect your children from the anarchist menace!" will endear you to fence-sitters, if you do it with the right spirit?they'll appreciate your sense of humor and hyperbole, and wiU want to prove that they're not so old and uptight as to be afraid of a little brush with the extreme. You'll find yourself astounded at the vidde variety of people who will come up to you proclaiming that in fact they are the dangerous anarchists, not you.

Make a display system that offers easy access to a number of browsers at once and also protects fragile materials until they find good homes; you could even set up the

back of a truck as an infoshop on wheels. For long tours, in the course of which cardboard boxes would get dented or soaked (note that, as the boxes empty of material, they become more and more fragile), you can pack everything into those plastic crates with the interlocking plate tops that are easy to find behind drug stores. If possible, carry your own tables, folding chairs, hand truck, tarp in case of rain, and paperweights or rubber bands so you won't find yourself running around picking up rocks in front of police at the next demonstration that falls on a windy day.

Besides photocopied posters and pamphlets, there are a million other things you can offer at tables: screenprinted patches, free food (as an outreach for your local Food Not Bombs group, a strategy to detract from sales at the corporate bagel store next door, a pressure valve for dumpstering surplus, or just for its own sake), healthy substitutes for tampons, video documentaries, normal-looking clothing home-altered to convert to black bloc gear and back again, miscellaneous stolen goods, items (such as graffiti markers) useful for committing community-friendly crime. One anarchist traveling circus made many hundreds of dollars to fund their other projects by stealing massive quantities of vaguely radical books from corporate bookstores and selling them at cheap prices. A table to encourage graffiti could provide young people with stolen paint pens, spray paint, gloves, and bottles of glass etching solution, and homemade stencils and stickers. An anarchist table at a liberal antiwar demonstration could give out posters using humor to push a more radical stance.

When it comes to the question of whether it's worth the trouble, always err on the side of tabling unless you have something better to do. Even if it turns out the event is attended exclusively by Young Republicans, and no one takes anything you've brought, it's still important for us to be visible as anarchists/queers/creative people. That makes it all that harder for our enemies to deny our existence, which is their most powerful weapon against us; also, whether or not we win "converts" for "the cause," a goal of

To make extra gas money while tabling, you can put out a sign that reads "massage?free or for donations," Provided you are something of an extrovert, this can really help break the ice, not to mention pay your travel expenses.

You can save the "postage paid by addressee" envelopes you get in junk mail and send them back stuffed with more junk mail^or, better, with love letters to whomever opens them, begging them to seek a better life.

Distribution, Tabling, and Infoshops

dubious value at best, it's important for people to have a basic idea of what we want and what we're doing. It may take them a number of times seeing you to work up the courage to interact with you, anyway.

And a Pinch of Curiosity!