Anarchy in the USA
BOUND TOGETHER: Anarchists Tom Brookner, Michael Fernandez, Rich "Tet" Tetenbaum, Patrich Hughes, Dan Foley, Joey Cain, and Tom Alder (from left).
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY ERIC SLOMANSON
San Francisco's legendary anarchist bookstore celebrates 20 years of free speech -- and continues to thrive.
By Belinda Griswold
INSIDE THE FAMOUS Bound Together anarchist-collective bookstore on Haight Street, seven guys sit wearing everything from dangly rhinestone earrings to old-style hippie headbands, with beers in their paws and cigarettes in their jaws. They're among the veteran members of this venerable countercultural collective, which began back in 1976 as an urban survival bookstore, and they're talking about old times and new -- and the upcoming 20th anniversary party of Bound Together.To celebrate two decades of trying to change the world, Bound Together will hold an anarchist book fair March 30 in Golden Gate Park, featuring books, food, spoken-word performances, and music.
But tonight, gathered around the store, they simply tell the story of how the bookstore came to be. In 1975, at a time when collectives around the Bay Area were thriving, a group of people started discussing the idea of creating a neighborhood bookstore that would "help people to live passionately, and to try to find resources that we could use," explains Rich "Tet" Tentenbaum, one of the collective's founding members. "We realized we had a community and we could fight for freedom, so it was a really interesting place to start as a bookstore."
The bookstore was first housed in a former pharmacy on Hayes Street at Ashbury, a location procured through grim circumstance. The man who owned the place had been robbed and decided he'd had enough of business, so he rented his space to the collective and gave them his leftover razors, aspirin, and stationary to sell. That where the seed money came from that got Bound Together started.
"Our rent was only 100 bucks a month," Tet explains. "Little by little we made contact with people in other collectives and groups, and got to know a lot about books by going to open houses at Book People [a small-press distributor]." Gradually the collective acquired a collection of hard-to-find antiauthoritarian titles.
It was during the early years at the Hayes Street space that the bookstore acquired its anarchist orientation. "The store didn't start out as an anarchist bookstore," Joey Cain explains. "Over the years it seemed that people identified with that particular set of ideas, and when we moved here to Haight Street [in 1983] we decided to call ourselves an anarchist collective bookstore."
Tom Alder, who joined the collective in 1979, took on the task of getting the store's anarchist section going. "It had started out as this little shelf," he recalls. But now the whole place is packed to the gills, with shelves up to the ceiling and filling every available surface.
"More than a political collective, it [became] a collective of friends," says Cain. "More people who were friends of people joined, more people coming from an anarchist background, so there were people who used the word anarchist to describe themselves and we started to feel that it was an important part of who we were."
The members who weren't already self-identified anarchists started to see themselves as ones after being exposed to anarchist literature and history. "I never knew the term anarchist was what I was," Tet says. "But it's people working together without someone on top saying, 'I know more than you do.' "
Because the collective believes that anarchism as an antiauthoritarian political philosophy has been erased from mainstream history, the members want to bring it back into the light.
"Anarchism is sort of like being queer, because in the past it became invisible," Alder says. "One of the reasons I was attracted to this collective and building up the anarchist section was that somehow I came to realize it was my politics -- if you're queer and you're sort of influenced by the Vietnam-era counterculture, it's hard to get involved with those very tight [communist or socialist] groups, because they're very puritan in their own ways."
So how have they kept the place going for 20 years, when so many other collective, and even capitalist, bookstores have fallen on hard times?
Dan Foley, who joined the collective in 1978, says it involves two words: volunteerism and consensus. "It's an old American tradition," he explains.
Joey Cain says, "For me it's about respecting the other people enough and them respecting me enough and being committed to this project enough that we sit down and talk through the differences we have to try to come to a common ground."
Adds Tom Brooker: "If one person disagrees, you put the brakes on, you reexamine." The bookstore runs smoothly as a business, paying its rent, donating a portion of its revenues to other anarchist projects, and providing free books to prisoners through the Prisoners Literature Project. Of course, the fact that no one gets paid helps.
But that's the point for these guys. The whole enterprise is based on a vision of collective action. "It's not just having your own personal individual philosophy that you're floating through the world with," Cain says. "You come together with other people and you attempt to change the world."
SF BAY GUARDIAN: POLITICS : ANARCHY IN THE USA
