Kickstarter campaign for “Paper Bullets”

PM press launched a Kickstarter campaign for Paper Bullets: 120 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World last Monday, October 5, 2026, that reached its $7,000 goal in less than three days. With one’s pledge, one can choose from several different rewards, including a paperback copy of the book, an e-copy, an exclusive Ursula K. Le Guin “Stories” shirt, book combo packs, sticker packs, and sticker grab bags. One of the publisher’s sticker packs is a set of five early 20th-century stickerette designs by I.W.W. artist, poet, and songwriter Ralph Chaplin! The campaign runs through October 30, 2026.

PM Press Promo for “Paper Bullets: 120 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World”

Catherine Tedford, editor and author Overview Stickers don’t ask permission. They’re slapped up under cover of night, hitching rides on lampposts and bathroom walls, whispering—or shouting—messages meant to question authority and disrupt the ordinary flow of power. Cheap, fast, anonymous, and at times illegal, political stickers have long been among the most agile tools of resistance. This book tells their story. From early twentieth-century anarchist stickers and labor “stickerettes” to their later use in struggles against war, fascism, patriarchy, corruption, state violence, colonialism, and surveillance, this book traces how adhesive slips of paper have exerted political force far beyond their…

Use of AI to transcribe 1906 I.W.W. sticker and early newspaper clippings

I’ve been using Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 4.7) over the weekend to transcribe text found in early 20th-century I.W.W.-related advertisements and newspaper clippings and to provide accompanying Library of Congress subject headings, in order to catalogue a digital image collection I’m curating in JSTOR called History of I.W.W. Silent Agitators” or “Stickerettes. In doing so and without me prompting it to, Claude offered additional commentary and analysis for each item being catalogued, identifying themes as it went, a chronology, historical references, patterns over time, etc. I then asked Claude to summarize the several items it had transcribed, and the results are…

Early U.S. Anarchist Stickers

In the United States, some of the earliest political stickers date to the early 1900s when anarchists Benjamin Tucker and Steven T. Byington urged writers to embellish letters sent through the mail with small, text-based gummed labels in forty-eight different designs. Quotes included “Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse,” “If there were more extremists in evolutionary periods, there would be no revolutionary periods,” and “What I must not do, the Government must not do.” Advertised in Tucker’s journal Liberty in April 1904 and May 1905, the stickers were described as: “aggressive, concise Anarchist assertions and arguments, in…

Dissent Through Design (variation of “Paper Bullets” book afterword)

Political graphics dotted the walls of my family home when I was a child during the 1960s and ’70s, while my father was actively involved in U.S. civil rights and peace movements, though in far less prominent roles than others better known. An oversized print of Lorraine Schneider’s War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things hung in the stairwell leading upstairs, and Sister Corita Kent’s yellow submarine and other posters protesting the war in Vietnam lined his home office. As a young man in the early 1950s, my conservative Ohio-born father enrolled at Yale Divinity School to…

Generative AI Cataloguing Instruction Template

For the past several months, I’ve been exploring the use of generative AI to catalogue political stickers from Ukraine and Germany. Over time, I’ve fine-tuned my prompts, and ChatGPT 4o is producing some impressive results. At one point, a student was going to help catalogue some of the German stickers, and I asked AI if it would remember the work we had done together for another user. “No—I won’t retain memory of this conversation across different accounts. If someone else logs into another ChatGPT account, they’ll be starting fresh, without access to your previous chats, preferences (like formatting styles), or…

FOIA Request – September 5, 1917, Raids on I.W.W. Offices

Last week, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Justice. Per the FOIA website, “Since 1967, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has provided the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.” The FOIA request was related to my research on I.W.W. “stickerettes” listed in FBI case files from 1917-1918 that I wrote about in my previous post. FBI agents produced the case files in response to the September 5, 1917, government raids…

“Stickerettes” in early FBI Case Files

A few years ago, I had temporary free access one weekend to Fold3.com and quickly took some screen shots of early documents that contained the word “stickerettes” created by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). Most documents looked like detailed inventory lists, but at the time, I didn’t save the bibliographic citations. In my ongoing research on the history of stickerettes, however, I came across the screen shots again and decided to track down more information. Here is what I’m learning. Most of the documents are reports made after the U.S. Department of Justice raided hundreds of I.W.W. offices…

“Re-Writing the Streets 2.0” at PA College of Technology

Re-Writing the Streets: The International Language of Stickers 2.0 is on display at the Pennsylvania College of Technology through March 5, 2025. Incorporating the finest examples from two collectors, Oliver Baudach in Germany  and Catherine Tedford in the United States, the exhibition includes over 900 original, unused stickers grouped by artists, themes, dates, and geographic locations. Based in Berlin, Oliver Baudach is the founder and director of Hatch Kingdom, the world’s first museum devoted to sticker art. Representing three decades of work, his international collection numbers over 30,000 stickers spanning genres from character design to skateboarding, streetwear, and music. With…

I.W.W. members accused of sedition for using “stickerettes,” 1917-1918

For the past few years, DJ Alperovitz, an I.W.W. uber-archivist who lives in the Pacific northwest, has very kindly been sending me old newspaper clippings documenting early examples of I.W.W. “stickerettes” or “silent agitators” from such newspapers as Solidarity and Industrial Worker. You can read my essay about the early history of stickerettes, for example, and see a timeline at the links provided here. Up until now, I’ve been focused on finding the earliest examples of political stickers made in the USA. All roads have led to the I.W.W., though I’ve also found some stamps related to women’s suffrage from…