Invention of Printing - Gutenberg Taking the First Proof

2012 Curious Calendar

Introducing the amazing, astounding, astronomical

2012 Curious Calendar!

Just in time for the end of the world!

Liberating "Holiday Free" design. No longer shall you be at the mercy of your calendar, celebrating holidays you don't even believe in. Now, with the patented "Holiday Free" design you can choose to write in the holidays and events you want to remember.

Never again will you have to suffer the weight of some boring Canadian holiday (Boxing Day) or celebrate the birth of some bloody worthless monarch/tyrant/president.

The 2012 Curious Calendar comes pre-packaged with unique software to allow for ease-of-use perusal of all 365+ days of the year at any time.*

*Offer good during daylight hours (not including eclipses) or in properly illuminated rooms with candles or incandescent bulbs.**
**Not included in the 2012 Curious Calendar.

Bind it Fast, Make or Repair a Book With This Easy Technique

Adapted from an article in Boys' Life (October 1991) by Brook West.

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Does your "Boy Scout Handbook" look as though it has been read by a grizzly bear? Are pages falling out of your favorite novel? Has the cover come off of your copy of "The Hobbit?"

You don't have to buy new copies. It's easy to repair paperback books using Japanese bookbinding techniques. Just punch four holes through the book near the spine and lash it together with needle and thread. You can make sketch books, scrapbooks or blank books this way, too. To make smaller books, fold several sheets of paper paper carefully into halves or quarters, clamp the stack together and punch and bind it, then slit the pages apart with a sharp knife afterwards, being careful not to cut the binding threads.

To rebind a paperback you will need an awl or thin wire brads, heavy thread (eight times as long as the book 's height), a needle, pencil, and ruler. Use carpet thread, strong nylon thread, or waxed dental floss. If you use wire brads instead of an awl you'll want a small hammer. Binder clips are useful, too. For a scrapbook or blank book cut covers from card stock or a file folder.

Here's what you do:

1. Usinga ruler, draw a line from top to bottom of the front cover, about 1/4"from the spine. Make two marks on this line, one 1/4' down from the top of the book, the other 1/4" up from the bottom. Now divide the distance between these marks into thirds and mark the two middle points.

2. Even up the pages and clamp the book together with binder clips, or weight down the front edge to keep the pages from moving. Protect your work surface with a piece of scrap wood or an old phone book as you punch a hole at each of the marked points using the awl or wire brads.

Making these holes should not damage the text in the book. Most paperback books have an inner margin of 1/2" to 3/4", leaving plenty of room for rebinding.

3. Thread the needle and tie the ends together with an overhand knot. Open the book a few pages and, next to the lower middle hole, push the needle through about twenty pages. Pull the thread through until the knot is snug against the pages. Go back out to the front cover by pushing the needle up through the awl hole. This step anchors the thread.

4. Now sew the rest of the book as shown in the accompanying illustrations. Pull the thread tight each time you go through a hole.

Go around the back and back up through the starting hole, then down through the other middle hole. Pull the thread tight after going through each hole.
Around the back again, then up through the top hole.
Around the back, then...
...around the top of the spine and up through the top hole again. Keep going, down through one middle hole, back up through the next, and down through the bottom hole. Keep the thread tight.
Around the back again and...
...around the bottom of the spine and back through the bottom hole. Go up through the starting hole again.
To finish, tie off the thread so the binding won't come loose. Do this by slipping the needle under two of the top threads coming out of starting hole and back through the loop to form a tight knot.
Run the needle back down through the starting hole and cut the leftover thread flush with the back of the book.

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For more information on Japanese bookbinding, including decorative bindings, how to make cloth covered hard covers, making cloth covered boxes, and other useful techniques, check your library for Japanese Bookbinding: Instructions from a Master Craftsman, by Kojiro Ikegami (published by John Weatherhill).

Block Posters - an easy .pdf method for creating large posters

Upload an image from your computer and choose how many sheets wide
you would like your poster to be once printed

Once you're happy with your selection, you can download the PDF file containing your newly created images and print each one massively blown up, resulting in a
huge pixel poster to stick on your wall

No More Fucking Around!

Okay, yesterday did not go as well as planned. Yes, the new press is beautiful, but true beauty is inside. Namely, if the damn thing doesn't want to work on the inside then it doesn't matter how it looks. Give us a hammer...

Alright, done ranting for the time being. Let's try and print something, shall we? Here we go. Wish us luck.

Tribute to Loompanics

Loompanics Founder & Editor Mike Hoy, in his office in the 1980s

Dug this one up the other day, not a bad piece. And I think you can google around and find the missing links this author mentions at the end of the article... though I still can't find Claire Wolfe's tribute to Loompanics... any ideas?

(Originally published at Earthblog.net)

When I think of America, the picture in my mind is not the Statue of Liberty or the flag, but the Loompanics Unlimited catalog. Loompanics is the apotheosis – a word I’ve always craved the opportunity to use – of free speech, the most perfect example of everything that’s right with our beloved country. As Marilyn epitomizes movie stardom, as Willie epitomizes country music –in the same way, Loompanics is the ideal example of what America is all about. Or was meant to be.

Both distributor and publisher, in a typical year the company produced 15 books under its own imprint, and added around 150 new titles from other houses. Four-time Loompanics author Claire Wolfe, who has been called America’s most eloquent anarchist and the Ayn Rand of the 21st century, says, “Loompanics had a well-deserved reputation as the most bold, eclectic, and in-your-face of all freedom-oriented book catalogs.” I’d certainly never received another that featured a disclaimer, warning the customer that the bookseller can’t be responsible for the fate of your package if it happens to cross the path of certain government officials.

The news that Loompanics is folding its tent comes as a real blow to many. “They were one of the only book publishers in the world to publish Ace Backwords. And now they’re closing down. I just hope there wasn’t a connection there,” says the author of Surviving on the Streets, continuing, “Loompanics occupied a special niche in the book publishing world, and now that niche is no more. Which is a sad state of affairs. A lot of would-be rebels, pseudo-nonconformists, and arm-chair anarchists talked ABOUT subversion. Loompanics showed you how to BE subversive.”

The company has published and/or carried the works of Karl Hess, L. Neil Smith, Jim Goad, Russ Kick, Vin Suprynowicz, Paul Krassner, and many other notable thinkers. “I have seen the best minds of my generation…..in the Loompanics catalog,” as Allen Ginsberg might have said in his most famous poem.

The arrival of the 200-plus page, non-shiny, black and white catalog always promised several evenings of delight. Many of those pages were accounted for by articles about the latest abhorrent schemes of the government and big business, making it as much a magazine as a catalog. Other gems also turned up, original essays you can’t find anywhere else, like an Ace Backwords memoir of working in the red-light district.

You Are What You Know
You Are What You Do
Help Yourself
No More Secrets
No More Excuses
No More Limits

That’s the Loompanics philosophy, summed up in 6 precepts. Not a bad platform. If a Presidential candidate offered the same, I’d vote for her.

Loompanics never hesitated to take a stand, announcing Jack Herer’s masterpiece The Emperor Wears No Clothes, as “the most important book we have ever sold!” Some of its offerings were pure philosophy, like William J. Murray’s Anarchic Harmony and Unconditional Freedom. Others sound like an outlaw curriculum: how to do armed robbery, pick pockets, beat a lie detector, collect illegal debts, bury your contraband, change your identity, and disappear.

Before saying “tsk-tsk,” a rational person will pause for moment to consider the multitudes of fellow citizens incarcerated for victimless crimes, who emerge months or years later with a full set of thug credentials. When it comes to manufacturing career criminals, nobody does it better than the American justice system. No mere book of dirty trickery or exotic weaponry could hope to have a fraction of the impact. Government goons may be the only ones remaining who hold the touching faith that books have tangible power. Most real thugs don’t or can’t read.

Loompanics books can help protect your computer from viruses, your phone from tapping, and your house from unauthorized entry. They can also help you promulgate computer viruses, tap somebody else’s phone, and unauthorizedly enter someone else’s house. You could learn how to lie with statistics, and also how to unmask their lies. How to cheat on your wife without being caught, and how to win a street fight in case you get caught anyway. How to create a revolution or a nuclear strike, and also how to survive a revolution or a nuclear strike. It’s equal-opportunity knowledge and, like all knowledge, a sword with two edges. What if everybody knew everything, all the time? Us and them – what then? Can you imagine living on a planet of telepaths?

It goes without saying that Loompanics provided a full complement of sex books and drug books. Not to mention cannibalism, conspiracy theories and female serial killers (one book features 182 of them.) Subjects ranged from the practicalHow to Get Your Filipina Finacee to the U.S. to the ecclesiastical Sex, Drugs, Violence and the Bible to the whimsical yet totally useful Complete Guide to Science Fiction Conventions.

Yes, Loompanics has published some unapologetically awful things. Former chief editorial director Steve O’Keefe reminisced to an interviewer about a book (not named) which “so upset the staff that the entire staff revolted against working on it…. Seven printers refused to print it……” The company’s ads have been banned, either permanently or partially, by The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, and Google Adwords, Which is their perfect right, but still…..Soldier of Fortune???

Before accusing Loompanics of being a dreadful bad influence, pause and take a look at some of the stuff you can get at the most respectable giant chain bookstores: for instance, Writers Digest puts out a compendium of poison information, including symptoms, forms, methods of administration and reactions. A similar volume, on murder and forensic medicine, reveals “how police distinguish between accidents and foul play.” But this is okay, according to the party line: such reference books are only for professional writers, who require accuracy in their fictional violent acts. Yeah, sure, you bet.

Many books on tamer, more life-affirming skills could also be found in the catalog: food growing, bee keeping, brain expansion, language-learning. Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead has been a perennial best-seller. It’s typical of the many works teaching vonu, a life of voluntary simplicity, usually mobile, that keeps you off the grid and under the radar. This may be combined with tax “avoision,” a made-up word encompassing avoidance and aversion. A whole catalog sector was devoted to self-sufficiency: taking care of yourself without government “help.” Because once you stick out your arm for a handout, that’s where they put the handcuffs.

To think the company’s chosen books are dangerous because you can learn how to pick locks or handle explosives, is a superficial view. It’s much worse than that. It’s the ideas, such as tax avoision and vonu, which pose a real threat to the encroaching national Dark Age. There is genuine empowerment in the knowledge of skills we hope we won’t need, but might anyway: how to pass a pee test, fight police abuses, prevent identity theft, or navigate the underground economy. However you or I may feel about it, there are things it would behoove us to know, before the day arrives when we regret our ignorance.

Being as how the US keeps a larger proportion of its people behind bars than any other country, the ugly and unfortunate truth is that even in the best of families, someone is likely to wind up a convict. The several books about how to survive in prison become more relevant, as fewer and fewer of us reach the end of life without needing such information.

The founding and sustaining genius behind Loompanics is Mike Hoy, whose interview at AuthorViews.com, recorded only a few months ago, now has an ironic flavor. “I’ve been doing this for approximately thirty years and the good lord willing I’ll be doing it for another thirty.” Willing as any disembodied spirit undoubtedly is, other factors intervened.

If one had a paranoid cast of mind, one might suspect pressure from the authorities. In the current political climate, a publisher with such a customer database as Loompanics must have – not to mention the true identities of authors who write about things nice boys and girls aren’t supposed to know – such a publisher might find discretion the better part of valor, and close the doors before the inevitable visit from mofos in suits sneering, “Hand over your records.”

But that’s only paranoia. One person familiar with the operation says, “The feds haven’t been so bad. Hell, they’re one of Loompanics’s biggest customers.” It’s possible that a mundane factor like insurance costs pounded the final nail into the coffin. Attempts have been made to hold the company responsible for people’s actions, and to collect damages. Mike Hoy says it’s just been a steady decline in sales. Boring, but also reassuring. I’m glad it wasn’t jackbooted goons in the night. Too many Americans have already become martyrs to the sadly misdirected quest for “security.”

(Originally this piece had 3 links, which have apparently now all disappeared. What’s up with that?)

Interview with Mike Hoy on Loompanics’s own site          gone
Hoy on the AuthorViews site                                                       gone
Claire Wolfe’s tribute to Loompanics                                       gone

Last Earth Distro Unearths Another Interview with Michael Hoy, Founder and Editor of Loompanics

Loompanics Unlimited's Logo

We plan on publishing a little zine or pamphlet of all the interviews with Michael Hoy we can dig up, as well as conducting our own one of these days. So if you come across one we haven't posted yet, let us know!






Thanks to Sunni at Sunni's Salon, for the rights to republish! Here's an excerpt, float on over to Last Earth Distro for the full text of the interview.


SUNNI: I think most freedom lovers have a similar story, don't you? We never seem to fit in, sometimes even with other freedom lovers. But, speaking of being young, who inspired and motivated you when you were young? Who do you count among your heroes?

MIKE: I have been inspired and motivated by lots of people, including Edgar Allan Poe, Ayn Rand, especially the brilliant and late Michael O'Donohue, and Lysander Spooner. My heroes include Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Paul Krassner, Michael O'Donohue, Lysander Spooner, Durk & Sandy, Pedr Lund of Paladin Press, my late father when he was young and strong, and Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog.