Anarchist Letters

Abstract

In a letter dated January 14, 1945, the anarchist letterpress printer Joseph Ishill, from his printery in a lovely wooded area of New Jersey, wrote to the anarchist librarian Agnes Inglis in the archives of the University of Michigan Library: My mind is full of ideas for the future. I intend to be quite active again after the war. I have too many impor tant items which strug gle to be born, or better expressed: to be put in clear print so that others might enjoy reading them. One par tic u lar plan I have in mind is to start a periodical devoted exclusively to letters only; letters as yet unpublished which are of great historical value to our movement of the past, and which will serve as source material for future historians, biographers, etc. . . . I intend to call this periodical Life in Letters, with an appropriate subtitle to follow which would explain the tendencies and aims of such an unique publication. There is room for such an expression and I am the man for it. I do not know why, but that's how it is. 1This letter is part of a vigorous correspondence between Ishill, widely known as "the anarchist printer," and Inglis, who or ga nized the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of radical lit er a ture at the University of Michigan. While this planned periodical did not materialize, Ishill did succeed in publishing dozens of letters in other collections. He was the printer as well as the editor and sometimes the writer of these publications.