Hello everyone! We hope this finds you all well. Please feel free to read this as a pdf document.

Sparrow Artwork by Craig Humpston

Archiving is Activism!

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the November newsletter.

We’ve been busy Sparrows. As well as continuing our reorganisation (see the October newsletter)…

On November 8th we attended the annual Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair, at the People’s History Museum. As usual we sold off duplicate items to raise money for our running costs, but more importantly made and remade friends involved in other anarchistic archiving, publishing and book selling projects. These include Northern Herald Books, Sheffield’s Radical Poster Collective, Swansea’s Seditionist, and the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford, which celebrates its 40th birthday in January. We no longer have a book buying budget, but lots of people donated stuff including our good friends Active Distribution. We gave out loads of info packs about the Nest, with reactions to Craig Humpston’s Sparrow artwork ranging all the way from ‘Divine’ to ‘Adorable’. And we went to two workshops, one by the brilliant Opuntia Anarcha-Fem collective, and one promoting the new Eclipse initiative, which aims to counter the rise of the Far Right in mainstream politics.

More networking

This was our second trip to the People’s History Museum in the last few weeks, after we attended an SSLH meeting in early October.

SSLH brings together a group of people representing archives of all sizes, exchanging ideas and experiences how we all tackle similar challenges in very different institutional settings.

Nov 25 Document of the Month

As the size of our own collection attests, Anarchism is a hugely literate tradition. But in case you are wondering what an Anarchist Bookfair in Britain might actually be like, our November documents first take us back to where it all began, in London. There were a handful of iterations before the 1983 fair (we don’t have a document relating to that, but please tell us if you do!), but here is the advert for the 1984 event and the associate #01 of the New Anarchist Review. The London Anarchist Bookfair has run most years since, and in the brochure from 10 years ago, you can see how serious and representative the event had become. Anarchist and Radical bookfairs are now a staple of the activist calendar nationally, and there are even whispers of a return of a Nottingham event in 2026!

Also looking forward…

We are currently helping the Notts Queer History Archive with their collection, and are pleased to say that we will be hosting a fair bit of it, in situ and digitally. This also includes artifacts, including a scale model of the Outhouse Project.
And finally, if you like us, note that we are completely self-funded, so please donate if you can.

Bank name: Unity Trust Bank
Recipient: The Sparrows Nest Library and Archive
Sort code: 60-83-01
Account: 20379287