The original Anarchist Cookbook was incredibly scary to the feds. It was filled with mostly useless and dangerous (mostly to the “Anarchist”), but the name and the feelings at the end of the Vietnam war captured the public’s attention.

It was passed around mostly by Xerox machine or fax copies. By the time I saw a version in the late 80’s the one I ran into was a blurry and unreadable mess. The original author is on record saying that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote it and that no one should follow any of the bomb making bits because he’d never made one himself.

Even with all of that, it holds a serious impact on our communal memory and social ideas. The name alone is going to live forever, even if the original text is lost to time.

I haven’t flipped through one in since I was a kid but, if I remember correctly, it actually did contain a bunch of recipes for cooking meals. Pretty much all of them were horrible ways to add marijuana to spaghetti and stuff like that.

I came ridiculously close to blowing my hand off as a kid, the one kid in my circle of friends with the internet printed out a few copies on his dot matix printer… anyway one Saturday morning a group of us decided to try make a tennis ball bomb, it was just snapped off matchstick heads and the strikers stuffed through a small cut in a tennis ball and then tape the ball up. So pooled all out money together and go a dozen boxes of matches, tennis ball and a roll of duct tape and sat at a table in the park snapping off match heads. Once we made it we headed back to one of my mates flat and someone threw it up again a wall while the rest of us hid behind a wall looking over and… Nothing it hit the wall and bounced off and rolled around before stopping on the ground, we all waited and after a few minutes someone gave it another go with the same result, after about 10 attempts we were all out and just picking it up immediately off the ground and throwing it again. After about 15mins it just turned into a game of us throwing a ball against the wall and catching it before it hit the ground… Now I ran to catch the ball off someone else’s throw and i was about a foot off catching it when it exploded with a fucking boom, bits of tennis ball flying all over the place, you couldn’t see the shit but you could feel it hitting you on the way passed. Our reaction was fuck that was cool, let’s make another one…

Idk if it was just a rumor so please correct me, but I heard just buying it can put you on a no fly list? Either way I got a copy with my dad’s card, cause he was an alcoholic and I knew he wasn’t gonna fly anytime soon lol

TIL that the anarchists cookbook was not just something from Dungeon Crawler Carl…