The Anarchist's Cookbook
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| Author | William Powell |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Lyle Stuart |
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Publication date
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1971 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 120422 |
The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book that contains instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for home manufacturing of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era in order to protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
After writing the book as a teenager, Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976, and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation. He was powerless to stop publication because the copyright had been issued to the original publisher (Lyle Stuart), and subsequent publishers that purchased the rights have kept the title in print. Powell publicly renounced his book in both a 2000 statement for the Amazon bookstore and a 2013 piece calling for the book to "quickly and quietly go out of print". William Powell died of a heart attack on 11 July 2016..
The copyright of the book never belonged to its author, but to its publisher Lyle Stuart. Stuart kept publishing the book until the company was bought in 1991 by Steven Schragis, who decided to drop it. Out of the 2,000 books published by the company, it was the only one that Schragis decided to stop publishing. Schragis said publishers have a responsibility to the public, and the book had no positive social purpose that could justify keeping it in print. The copyright was bought in 2002 by Delta Press (aka Ozark Press) an Arkansas-based publisher that specializes in controversial books, where the title is their "most-asked-for volume".
At the time of its publication, one Federal Bureau of Investigation memo described The Anarchist Cookbook as "one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted".
In 2010, the FBI released the bulk of its investigative file on The Anarchist Cookbook.
Advocates of anarchism dispute the association of the book with anarchist political philosophy. The anarchist collective CrimethInc., which published the book Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook in response, denounces the earlier book, saying it was "not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power – and was barely a cookbook, as most of the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable".
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