This is the rare 1971 first printing of "The Anarchist Cookbook", William Powell's legendary guide to the manufacture of explosives, phone phreaking devices and illicit drugs, written at the apex of the counterculture era & the anti-Vietnam War protests. 1/
The first print-run of 1500 copies sold out immediately, and few survive today - the book was read to destruction. It has since gone through more than 30 further editions, totalling well over 2 million copies. The draconian warning on the rear of the dj no doubt helped sales. 2/
The Anarchist Cookbook includes a recipe for extracting hallucinogens from banana peels. This hallucinogenic property of bananas was a 60s urban myth that - as countless disappointed college kids subsequently found out - sadly has no basis in reality. 3/
io9.gizmodo.com
io9.gizmodo.com
The - entirely fictional - hallucinogenic substance that could be purportedly extracted from bananas was called "Bananadine", a name of such inspired stupidity that it still has its own Wikipedia page. 4/
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The Anarchist's Cookbook remains controversial and is still frequently the target of censorship. William Powell himself (who sold the copyright to Lyle Stuart at the time of publication) later had a change of heart and publicly called for the book to be taken out of print. 5/
At the time of its publication, an FBI memo described The Anarchist Cookbook as "one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted." In 2013, William Powell wrote an article in The Guardian calling for the book to "quickly and quietly go out of print". 6/
In December 2013, it was reported that the copyright had been bought back in 2002 by Delta Press, an Arkansas-based publisher that specialises in controversial books. The Anarchist Cookbook is apparently their "most-asked-for volume". 7/
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