The next time a TSA goon manhandles your junk, thank a writer named William Powell. His Anarchist Cookbook, which turns 40 this year, laid out how to build nitric acid explosives out of everyday objects, cook homemade nitroglycerin, and sabotage communications systems from the comfort of your home, all in concise, approachable language. It launched the era of the everyman bombmaker—and the notion that no one's above suspicion.

Powell wrote the book as a 19-year-old antiwar activist, "pissed off," as he would later write, "at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in." But the "secrets" he revealed were hidden in plain sight; he conducted most of his research at the New York Public Library—not exactly the stuff of WikiLeaks. And his instructions weren't always correct. (Smoking banana peels won't get you high, Spicoli.) Yet they were accurate enough, breezily written, and even encouraging ("making tear gas is so simple that anyone can do it").

Powell may have thought he was cooking up a homegrown revolution, but he ended up unleashing waves of violence beyond his wildest nightmares. Timothy McVeigh, Kip Kinkel, Puerto Rican separatists, and Croatian nationalists have all been influenced by The Anarchist Cookbook. All the mayhem and notoriety would lead Powell, who now works on education issues in the developing world, to disown it. In 2000, he declared that he wanted the book taken out of circulation.

But it wasn't his decision to make. Lyle Stuart, a provocateur and first amendment activist, bought the rights to the text when he first published the Cookbook. And he remained the tome's most ardent supporter. When he sold his publishing company in 1990, he repurchased the rights to The Anarchist Cookbook to prevent the new publisher from letting it go out of print. He finally sold the rights in 2001, shortly after 9/11. (The two events were unrelated, he said. "We just needed the money.") The company he sold it to, Ozark Press, still publishes it.

Today, the book itself has become largely irrelevant, but not in the way Powell would have wished. PDF copies circulate on the Internet. Over the years, its instructions bled across electronic bulletin boards with names like the Temple of the Screaming Electron. Updated versions appeared, penned by anonymous scribes such as the Jolly Roger and Exodus. "Anarchy Cookbook Version 2000," for example, focuses not only on pipe bombs, napalm, and dope growing but also hacking and phone phreaking (how quaint). And would-be terrorists can always Google "how to make an IED" and have a Home Depot-ready shopping list in seconds.

But if you must have the classic black-bound text, you can pick it up from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and plenty of other booksellers, as well as libraries everywhere. (Sorry, not available for Kindle.)

The Anarchist Legacy Timothy McVeigh read The Anarchist Cookbook. So have abortion-clinic bombers, school shooters, and small armies of would-be revolutionaries—a sad cavalcade of crazies with twisted ideals and horrible ambitions. Here’s a timeline of DIY destruction. — M.H.

1976 Croatian nationalists hijack a plane and plant a bomb in Grand Central Station, killing a police officer. The leader says he learned to make the bomb from The Anarchist Cookbook.

1976 Phoenix hood John Adamson plants a car bomb that kills a reporter who has been investigating organized crime. Police find a copy of the Cookbook in Adamson's apartment.

1980 Police find the book, along with a list of 50 targeted businessmen, in a New Jersey apartment used by Puerto Rican separatists who have set off more than 100 bombs.

1984 A New Jersey cop nabs two fugitives linked to the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. In their car? Explosives, guns, and the Cookbook.

1985 Police find a copy of the Cookbook in the storage locker of Thomas Spinks, who led a group of fanatics that bombed 10 abortion-related facilities on the East Coast.

1993 A group of white supremacists is arrested for plotting to kill Rodney King. Their arsenal includes grenades, pipe bombs, and other weapons built following recipes in the Cookbook.

1998 Kip Kinkel murders his parents then goes on a shooting spree at his Springfield, Oregon, school, killing two students and wounding 22. Earlier, he brought the Cookbook to school.

2005 A search of the apartments used by the London 7/7 bombers yields explosives, an improvised detonator, and excerpts from the Cookbook on the shards of a broken CD.