In this, our inaugural issue, we present an editorial exploration into the themes and contexts of some of our 2013 publications. What is “we”? Funny that you would ask; the answer is more complex than it seems at first glance. We are the constellation of projects under the umbrella of Little Black Cart, which incubates, creates, produces, and distributes speculative, critical, and engaged anarchist thinking and ideas. We use different names to reflect the different editorial orientations and biases of our work. LBC Books is the name of our parent imprint but we have published books, just this year, under Ardent Press, Repartee, Pistols Drawn, Green Anarchy, IEF (the Institute for Experimental Freedom), and CAL Press.

As a publisher in this family of ideas we measure our own success partly by our own continued interest in our broad project, and on whether these ideas merit discussion and further research. This is a modest goal, perhaps, making it achievable in a way that material success is not. It’s can be enough to see ourselves and our friends as tinkerers in a workshop, perfecting an apparatus that awaits the right power source to set it in motion. We find it matters much less what things are named, what color the paint is, or how fast things move, than conversations about what could be in a thousand different permutations, in the experiential world rather than the theoretical one.

In the past two years, we have published twenty-four new titles and helped produce another dozen or so projects (including a North American production of the bulk of Elephant Editions titles, titles from Pallaksch Press, bound pamphlets like Copout and Desert, The Anvil Review, and more). If the goal was to produce engaged, interesting, anarchist material than it’s conservative to say that we have succeeded. If our goal was to shape the minds of a new generation of antiauthoritarians then our project hasn’t succeeded. This is the work we have ahead of us.

A goal for this Review is to make content available for free that would otherwise be inaccessible (aka cost-greater-than-zero) package. We will summarize the thinking behind each of our primary publications this year and share our broad thoughts about why other items distributed by Little Black Cart deserve reprint and specific acknowledgment.

email: editorial@lbcbooks.com

URL: https://lbcbooks.com

DOWNLOAD THE 2013 LBC REVIEW

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