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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Hello everyone and welcome to another round up of news on the Sparrows’ Nest.

We will be at the Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair to get the latest books and magazines, hope to see you there!

We are happy to report that we could welcome quite a few visitors over the last few months, in fact more than ever, which is very nice indeed.

However you’ll have noticed that we have otherwise been relatively quiet over the last year. This mainly comes down to the problem of us being only a very few Sparrows and we are also involved in other projects (see e.g. the ongoing research projects by the People’s Histreh group), as well as wage slavery.

So why not help us out by volunteering to do some curating and cataloguing? We would particularly encourage people rooted in Nottingham anarchist or socialist politics to help us organise a self-contained collection of local anarchist, feminist and left publications, donated by a long-standing local activist and extending back to the 1970s. The collection is in good condition and arranged alphabetically in archiving boxes, but beyond that needs to be made more easily accessible.

We have received many more great materials. These include several dozen volumes donated by Colin Parker, a founding member of the Anarchist (Communist) Federation. Colin sadly died recently and is mourned by his comrades. He was the author of the AF’s best seller Basic Bakunin, which just went into its third edition. The Nest is happy to have a copy which he signed for us at its publication for the London Anarchist Bookfair last year.

We have also generously been given an extensive collection of around 2,000 items by a local friend and comrade (mostly journals and newspapers from the 1970s to the 1990s). This new collection not only adds many totally new titles to our existing collections, but also fills in many gaps, for instance in our collection of the classic Anarchy journals, contributing issues such as number 34 (December 1963), debating Science Fiction. Although we have not yet been able to process this new collection to the extent we would have liked to, that should not deter anyone from bringing in another stack of paper or two (see also our Acceptance Policy). We will always look after donations even if we are struggling to catalogue and digitise them as fast as we would like, so yet again our appeal to all of you is:

Please do not throw out heaps of old, potentially awesome papers, but get in touch!

We continue cataloguing, and (re-)organising the digital and physical collections (please see changes and new additions to the Digital Library), digitising ever more materials and hunting for and sharing more or less obscure documents with researchers far and wide.

We are still open every Tuesday 11am-2pm (contact us if you cannot make these days, we can always arrange for a visit on other times/dates). However, it is always a good idea to check your inbox before venturing to the Nest (please contact us if you like to be added to the mailing list), as we have to keep our doors shut around once a month for one reason or another.

Till next time, keep reading, archiving and fighting!

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