The CrimethInc. Kite Flying Society strikes back! Off the Map is now available as a book! Yep, we took the plunge and truthfully we feel really great about it — hold a copy in your hand and it feels like a design well made. Per usual, we have a nice little mini-site all about it, but here is the skinny: 146 pages, all the same text as the zine, better photos, all those lil’ drawings in their full offset-press glory, a fancy new cover by the illustrious Nikki McClure, and, oh yeah, it is $3 postage-paid — in bulk you can get 10 copies for $15. Here is a quick explanation of why we made it into a book if our 1,250 word version seems daunting: it was the only way we could sustain its distribution, was what we saw as the next step towards helping it gain a wider audience, and we just plain love the story and want it to be presented as well as possible. Oh, and we’d like to take this opportunity to publicly proclaim our enormous affection for and appreciation of Viv-o, who is the best damn proofreader and pal we could could ever ask for.

Also, we put together a little deal called the Letter Opener Set, limited to the first 250 mailorder copies, which includes copies of the first two titles in the CrimethInc. Letters series (Stone Hotel & Off the Map), wrapped in a handsome, hand letter-pressed paper band proclaiming such. Two books together for $10 — it’s basically $3 off and a fancy wrapper as a thanks for those who are so generous in supporting our anarchist publishing projects.

Speaking of Stone Hotel, well, we wanted to try and maybe convince some more of y’all to give it a try. While many of you have indeed obtained the book, and the feedback has been absolutely gushing, it is clear to us that still more of you are holding off. We’d guess the two most obvious reasons are a) it is a poetry book and b) it is expensive. Well, frankly those are good reasons, but the book is very important to us, we feel its role to be vital as part of what CrimethInc. has published to date, and we really want it to make a little more headway in the world. Yes, it is poetry, but here is a link to some new reviews, including a rather eloquent one from Clamor (“One of [CrimethInc.’s] best yet”), maybe they will help relax your doubts? And yes, it is $10, but it is a fundraiser for FFOL, and with the above Letter Opener Set, it just got a little more affordable.

As many of you begin to head out on summer adventures, we have decided to thin out our reserves of FFOL, and offer boxes of 150 copies to those of you putting on events or going on tour in one way or another. If this is you, send us an email (house@crimethinc.com) briefly describing your plans, and including your shipping address, and we’ll get ‘em right off to ya. Of course, donations are delightful (and at this point, very helpful), but not necessary. On a similar note, we are beginning to run out of even our last copies of both Harbinger.4 and Hunter/Gatherer #1. We send out copies in individual mailorders, and we’d like to very nicely request that anyone who has even a small amount of either paper lying around — that never quite got distributed — to please send them back to us, we could really use them. We promise we won’t be mad — in fact we’ll have a mini-party in celebration of each stack we get back. Thanks for reading this long update, folks, and make sure to get a whole heaping serving of that summer sun — your skin isn’t meant to last forever.