Welcome to the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive

Based in Nottingham (UK), we look after tens of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, zines, leaflets, posters and other items documenting the anarchist movement in the UK and beyond, as well as local radical history. Browse our catalogue, access digitised records in our free Digital Library and get in touch to arrange a visit.
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Happy new year everyone and welcome to our fourth monthly(ish) round-up, giving you an idea of what we have been getting up to.

In November we hosted the first organising meeting for AFem 2014. This is an Anarcha-Feminist Conference to be held in London on Sunday 19th October 2014. That’s the day after the London Bookfair. The meeting was attended by anarcha-feminists from six cities, including Paris! For more information about the conference, please see the Afed website or e-mail afem [at] afed.org.uk

We also had visits from members of the Nottingham Women's Centre and the London Feminist Library, which we hope will go toward establishing closer links. 

Amongst the highlights in our new acquisitions are:

Malcolm Archibald, The Story of Maria Nikiforova: The Anarchist Joan of Arc (Black Cat Press, 2007). Marusya Nikiforova is an overlooked figure from the Russian ‘revolutionary’ era, sentenced to death four times.

Maurizio Antonioli (ed.), The International Anarchist Congress, Amsterdam 1907 (Black Cat Press, 2008). An important conference for the development of anarchist workers’ strategy, and which anarchists in several countries have been revisiting.

Liz Willis, What is Libertarian History? (Liz Willis, 2011). A re-print of her Black Flag article, for anarchist historians and historians of anarchism by the author of the excellent Women in the Spanish Revolution.

Claude McKay, A Fragment of Aframerican Life (Charles H. Kerr, 1990). A historical work on Harlem in the 1940s by the Jamaican-born poet and IWW activist, who was influential on the Négritude movement. McKay died in Chicago 1948, and this is the first ever publication of this book.

The University for Strategic Optimism, Undressing the Academy. Or, the Student Handjob (Minor Compositions, date?). A manifesto for student rebellion.

Els van Daele and Herman Schuurman, ‘De Moker’ Group. Rebellious Youth in the Dutch Libertarian Movement of the Roaring Twenties (Roofdruk Edities). This contains Schuurman’s ‘Work is a Crime’.

Ian McKay, Mutual Aid: an Introduction (AK Press, 2011). McKay’s quick guide to Kropotkin’s seminal work.

David Goodway (ed.), For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice (History Workshop publication) (Routledge, 1989). Brings together some important works by and about anarchism).

Noam Chomsky, Occupy (Penguin, 2012). Yet another analysis of contemporary events by the man with his own shelf at the Nest.

Janet Byrne, The Occupy Handbook (Back Bay Books, 2012). A more varied work, with David Graeber on the anarchist origins of Occupy Wall Street.

Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger, Haymarket Scrapbook (Charles H. Kerr, 1986). A great browse.

and

Three issues of Radical, a Japanese journal distributed by Freedom Press, perhaps in the 1980s, about which we must find out more.

And of course we celebrated our 5th anniversary! We held a party at the Nest on 21st  December – it was good to get together and think about all the achievements since the opening and think forward to the next 5 years!

Regarding our anniversary please see also this interview by a Sparrow, printed in the latest bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library and there is also an article in the December issue of Freedom newspaper.

Regarding the library collections we have continued to work on the reorganisation of the ‘Local Studies’ section, also resorting a number of folders featuring local materials from struggles in the 2010s, and identifying a lot of local papers that we will strive to digitise in the next few months, including numerous issues of the Nottingham Agitator, an anarchist-socialist paper from the 1980s.

Please keep an eye on the Digital Library in the next few weeks, as more materials will be added, including further issues of Solidarity magazine (if you had no chance yet, see the ‘Public Archive’ section for recent additions).

In the next few weeks we will be buying more acid free archival boxes to house documents that we are currently curating. As always, purchasing stuff that will actually protect documents on a long term basis is very expensive, so if you are able to donate some money, that would be hugely appreciated!

We also continued with maintenance and improvements to the Nest, notably the very overdue painting of the main meeting room. Many thanks to all donors who made this possible.

 

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