With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was
meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity.
Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
Abbie Hoffman was the stand-up comedian of the Anti-War Movement, beloved by everyone who appreciated high jinks in their dogma, freedom of thought in their self-evident truths. He had the misfortune of being entirely correct about racism, sexism, homophobia, the war machine, environmental catastrophe and economic injustice. His wit made him prominent, and his prominence made him a target.
(Image via)
He is no longer with us, but part of his legacy is a hilarious blueprint of his ideas titled Steal This Book, published in 1971.
Bill Hartel:
Abbie Hoffman couldn’t get a anyone to publish Steal This Book — thirty publishers turned it down. When the book was released, bookstores wouldn’t carry it. Newspapers, TV and radio all refused to run advertisements. But despite these set backs, Steal This Book found its way on to the Best Seller list in 1971.
The book sold more than quarter of a million copies between April and November 1971. So where are all those copies? The Chicago Public Library doesn’t have one. Although the New York Public Library has 9,993,000 books, it hasn’t had a copy of Steal This Book for twenty years. The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library with 20 million books, doesn’t have one either.
After he published Fuck The System and Woodstock Nation, Abbie was kept informed of every sort of rip off scam. He saw that this collection of ways to beat the system could be made into a catalog for his Yippie movement “Sort of a tongue in cheek parody of the American ‘How To’ manuals that were so popular at the time,” said Abbie. But Steal This Book is much more than just a manual of survival in the counter culture world — a “Hip Boy Scout Handbook” as the New York Times called it. In between the chapters on “Free Food” and “First Aid for Streetfighters,”
Abbie’s thoughts on freedom, liberty, responsibility, self reliance shine through. His idealism echoes the sentiments of Henry Thoreau and Thomas Paine.
Abbie’s former publisher, Random House, rejected the book, as did thirty other established publishers. Not to be so easily thwarted, he collected $15,000 from friends and set up Pirate Editions. Book distributors refused to distribute the work, so Abbie arranged with Grove Press to distribute Steal This Book provided Abbie assume all the liability for the book. Abbie tried unsuccessfully to place advertisements for the book in the media (with the lone exception of the San Francisco Chronicle). Although the book was on the New York Times Best Seller’s list, they wouldn’t carry his ads.
In spite of all that, Hoffman scored a best seller. But unlike a predecessor such as, for instance, Thoreau’s Walden, it is hard to find and unlikely to be taught in universities.
Enter the world of open source. Anyone can steal this book by downloading it for free.
(Library of Congress number 72-157115 (stolen from Library of Congress)
copyright ©1971 PIRATE EDITIONS) Abbie lives! (more)
You may enjoy this story of a famous copy of Steal This Book:
http://orgoneresearch.com/2009/10/19/steal-this-book/
Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but I always thought that Abbie Hoffman was a phony, an unethical exploiter, and a plagiarist. Try reading Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan for an eye-opener about Hoffman and Leary and the rest of those professional media manipulators.
Sure, I was only a street kid with barely a ninth grade education but even I could see beyond their phony brand of fluff.
There is no nostolgia in my mind for those guys, just memories of the damages their selfish hijinks caused They were preeminent A-Holes of the very first order.
http://kmarulis.wordpress.com/
I’m looking foward to rereading this book through my “grown-up” eyes and evaluating how the ideals of the counterculture may have contributed to my current values. Any class on the 60s should have this book as part of the required reading since it was a popular “underground” book in its day. Reading it with an historical perspective is required otherwise you won’t get it.