---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2002 13:44:32 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Still a Steal (new edition of Steal This Book)
<http://www.narconews.com/stealthisintro.html>
May 31, 2002
Publisher's Note: Last year, the publishing house Four Walls Eight Windows
asked me to write a fresh introduction to the new edition of Abbie
Hoffman's Steal This Book.
The new edition is now available and also includes a new introduction by
Lisa Fithian, who worked with Abbie, Johanna Lawrenson and I (and many of
you!) causing trouble in the 1980s. Of course, we're still at it, for as
long as tyranny is on the loose. ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre! Here's what I
wrote...
Still a Steal
By Al Giordano
"He just had the idea it would be a good little gag to liberate this book
from the bookstores. And we put 'STEAL THIS BOOK' on the back cover of
Woodstock Nation and the Random House sales manager went bananas. 'We can't
do this!' The crazier he went, the more Abbie loved it.
"At that point Abbie decided that his next book was going to be called
Steal This Book and that's at least part of the reason that Random House
refused to publish it. Also, they had a few problems with instructions for
how to blow up things. I don't know if they ever noticed that the little
Random House logo on Woodstock Nation was the little Random House being
blown up."
- Chris Cerf, Editor, Random House
From Steal This Dream, by Larry Sloman (1998, Doubleday)
Abbie Hoffman was one hundred percent into anything he did. There was no
such thing as halfway with Abbie. A task was either something worth going
to jail for, worth dying for, or it was not worth doing.
Abbie had the same approach to writing books.
He wrote the introduction to Steal This Book from the Cook County Jail in
1970, from where he boasted that he was learning "the only rehabilitation
possible - hatred of oppression."
Of all his seven published works, Steal This Book was the most widely read,
the most notorious.
Revolution for the Hell of It, or Woodstock Nation, or The Autobiography of
Abbie Hoffman may be better
books - where his writing skills shone and he made arguments, to convince
the reader, rather than the how-to manual structure of this one - but Steal
This Book was, and remains, the most memorable of his literary works for
the scandals it caused. It was also probably his most effectively radical
because it was, largely, a how-to book.
"The title is 90 percent of the work," lamented the late independent
filmmaker Jack Smith, but
Abbie would somehow find another 110 percent, and that's what he put into
Steal This Book. It was a
"survival guide," exhaustively researched, to finding "Free food^Å free
clothing and furniture^Å free
transportation^Å free land^Å free housing^Å free education^Å free medical care^Å
free communication^Å
free play^Å free money^Å free dope^Å." to list the opening chapter titles. A
lot of Steal This Book seems,
today, three decades later, so, well, basic. Today, any 15-year-old already
knows how to do a lot of these things. And part of why they know it is
because Abbie didn't just push the envelope - he ripped it open, and
declared everybody the winner of the treasures inside. I was one of many
early teens who used that book to make free long distance telephone calls,
to set off firecrackers and M-80s as "time bombs" with a simple wind-up
alarm clock and some wires, and otherwise cause trouble. Steal This Book
was, above all, utilitarian and working-class. It dealt with the basic
necessities of life: how to eat, find clothing and shelter, and (we accept
this, as Abbie did, as a basic human instinct) to have fun.
The press usually refers to Abbie as a "sixties radical" (never mind that
this, his most famous literary work, came out in the seventies, or that his
masterpiece political organizing work occurred in the eighties). And it
associates Abbie, accurately, with the most well known causes of that era:
particularly civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War and the defense of
the youth counter-culture that, today, has been thoroughly marketed to
death to three generations by the same forces that once opposed it. Less
spoken of, today, was the economic theory he laid out with his first
pamphlet - titled Fuck The System - and in his first book, Revolution for
the Hell of It. There must be, said Abbie, "a better means of exchange than
money."
And that's what Steal This Book focused on: How to live free. He found
cracks in the system, and rather
than hoard them for himself, he revealed his secrets. Some long-accepted
"facts of life" - that teenagers
must obey their parents, or other authorities, for example - simply fell by
the wayside. Other cracks
found by Abbie and his pals were later sealed up by the system (techniques
revealed here for hacking
public telephones have long been technologically corrected and thus are
obsolete; Caveat Emptor). For that reason, many - but not all - of the tips
in Steal This Book are obsolete. Hitchhiking, anyone? Ripping off automats?
(Anyone under 30 know what an automat is?) Draft dodging? Yes, there was a
military draft to avoid back then; there's not one today. Thank you, Abbie.
So when you get to the points of the book that are merely pointing out the
obvious and you proclaim,
"Jesus! He's telling us how to make a bookcase out of cinder blocks and
lumber? How lame is that?" that is the precise moment to pay attention. On
those pages, we see just how far behind American society was only a few
decades ago. Kids didn't have the Internet then to seek out the information
that their parents and the media didn't want them to have. They didn't even
have a hundred cable TV channels. They had three television networks in the
major markets, and maybe one or two in rural areas. It was an atmosphere of
total control. There was no Bart Simpson. But there was Abbie Hoffman,
without whom Bart would not have been possible. And he was a living,
breathing person who got clubbed over the head, spied on, infiltrated,
outlawed, imprisoned, exiled, forgotten, rediscovered, forgotten again,
then, as Artaud wrote about Van Gogh, he was suicided by society. And a
whole hell of a lot of what we take for granted today as basic "rights" are
here and present because real human beings fought for them, and were
persecuted for waging that fight. His era was full of heroes. But none were
as effectively heroic as Abbie.
To read Steal This Book today, in the 21st Century, is an historical
adventure. Thus, a little historic
context may be helpful. When he wrote Steal This Book, Abbie had been on
trial in Chicago in a
conspiracy case - stemming from demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic
National Convention - in what the American Civil Liberties Union later
called "the political trial of the century." He was
America's most widely-recognized radical, a media personality, an emblem, a
symbol, a myth, and still - I may be giving away his secret weapon here - a
human being, obviously so, to anyone who encountered him in person or
through any media. He wasn't bigger than life, or better than it. He was,
in a word, alive.
And this was better and more exciting than the walking death that most
celebrities offered then and now.
Abbie recounts a dialogue between Random House publisher Jason Epstein and
he when he was
preparing to write Steal This Book. He described it in the May 1974 issue
of Harper's magazine, in an
essay titled "Steal This Author: In which the master of the rip-off learns
that anything he can do, big
business can do better." Abbie recounted that Epstein "roared with
laughter" at the idea of writing a book no one would publish. "He had
studied society," Abbie wrote of Jason. "He knew how fame was bottled and
that infamy was even more salable in the fanciful world of pop politics."
The dialogue part is repeated here:
Jason: "What book are you going to do next?"
Abbie: "Jason, I'm going to write a book no one will publish^Å I'm going to
call it Steal This Book, and it'll be a handbook for living free, stealing,
and making violent revolution. I'm going to take on the entire publishing
industry. I want to test the limits of free speech."
Jason: "You'll lose, Abbie; everybody does in the end."
Abbie: "We'll see."
The result is now legend. After being rejected by 30 publishers, the book
finally made it into print when Grove Press agreed to publish Steal This
Book, and was it one of the most smashing successes, probably the most
notorious, in publishing history. Abbie turned the publishing of Steal This
Book into a public teach-in on the entire industry of bestsellers.
"Grove estimated that half the book sales were made in New York City,"
wrote Abbie in his Harper's piece. "In Pittsburgh no stores carried the
book. In Philadelphia only one store did, and it charged a dollar more than
the cover price. No books were to be found in Boston when I took reporters
on a tour.
None in the San Francisco Bay area either. The entire Doubleday chain of
bookstores was boycotting the book. Vice-president George Hecht stated, 'We
don't want to tell people to steal. We object only to the title. If it was
titled How to Live for Free, we'd sell it.'"
Dotson Rader then reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review during
John Leonard's disobedient
tenure as editor, even as the Times refused to accept advertising for Steal
This Book. "I clipped the
review, wrote a check, and sent the Times its own review for an ad,"
recalled Abbie. The ad was rejected by the Times, that self-defined
cathedral of Freedom of the Press.
In one feel swoop, Abbie had accomplished what he'd set out to do: "Test
the limits of free speech." He exposed where those fences truly were, and
kicked many of them down in the process.
Today, the lid is back on the book publishing industry. I can hardly find a
book worth shoplifting in the
chain stores that now dominate the industry. It's all formula. But if you
like books, or once liked them,
even if you end up paying for the new edition of Steal This Book, you're
getting an authentic book^Å and that, in this age of corporate tyranny, is a
steal.
- Somewhere in
Mexico, August 2001
Al Giordano worked with Abbie Hoffman as a young political organizer in the
1980s. Today he is publisher of The Narco News Bulletin - www.narconews.com
- reporting on the drug war from Latin America and is (WAS!) a free speech
defendant - being sued by billionaires - in the Drug War on Trial case in
New York City.
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