32 ms·

Anarchist Cookbook (1971) [pdf]

167 points by brudgers 4y ago

bluedino 4y ago
I remember passing a floppy disk with this on it before we got online. And I remember people lying about what they made and blew up etc
Growtika 4y ago
Wasn't familiar with the book until I came across this Reddit thread few years ago. "The author of the Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous instructional book on homemade explosives, weapons, and drugs, regretted its publication. He attempted to have it removed several times, only to be thwarted by the publisher Lyle Stuart." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b2b3m7/til_the_author_of_the_anarchist_cookbook_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b2b3m7/til_t...
- culi 4y ago
  The original author went as far as to publish a "second edition" more recently. This second edition is actually literally a cookbook. It's geared towards the mutual aid scene and the recipes are recipes you can make for hundreds of people We actually used it when starting a new Food Not Bombs chapter locally and most activists I talked to seemed to mainly be familiar with the followup. So I guess it had some level of success in covering up the original
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Do you have a reference? I'd love to see a literal anarchist cookbook, but a bit of searching turned up nothing.
    - culi 4y ago
      https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20interior%207-30-15-1.pdf https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20int... Ah I guess it's more specifically a Food Not Bombs thing. Also it wasn't mostly written by the original author, but the original author provides a forward (page v) and obviously gives his blessings for this work to take the namesake I guess it being Food Not Bombs specific explains why most people I knew only knew of this version XD
ada1981 4y ago
I remember being a teenager in the 90s in Erie, PA and making things from the AC was our go to entertainment. Many a weeknight was spent cutting the heads off matches, stuffing them into PVC pipes and throwing bombs at each other in the woods. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we all made it out of that time period alive, with our limbs and fingers intact, and not in federal prison.
- cameron_b 4y ago
  I was a half-step back from you. I was in high school after Y2K and some had already paved the way of foolish use of this stuff such that I got long quiet interrogative looks from my dad over the material. Glancing through the introduction, I'm sure I never understood that stuff at the time. I remember looking through the electronics ideas and wanting to make a pen-microphone-transmitter, but then wondering why go to all the trouble. I'm glad I filed it away as "I know where to look if I need the information" and didn't do anything with it. I do remember the discussion of the honeypot nature of some topics and keywords. It is important to understand more about the giant before you attempt to stand on his shoulders.
- deleted 4y ago
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- starkd 4y ago
  I think most people were intrigued because of the experimentation and just having that kind of knowledge (ability) at your fingertips. There's a very strong DIY mentality that gets spawned from information like this. I don't think the mere presence of such material should be discouraged for that very reason. Anyone who seriously wants to implement any of these projects for nefarious purpose will need an extraordinary amount of self-discipline to carry it out. Even if they succeed, it's hard to believe any will succeed without raising red flags. The societal benefits outweight the risks.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    In my specific case, I never actually wanted to blow anything up, I was just curious as to /how/ and /why/ things could be blown up.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
I got in trouble for reading this on a school iPad in middle school. The anarchists cook book is severely outdated. Most of the info it contains is straight up fabricated. It's no longer worthy of the controversial reputation that it has.
- mingus88 4y ago
  The prevailing theory when I was in high school was that this AC was a honeypot. Anybody trying to order the misspelled chemical names in the AC to cook homemade explosives would get a visit from the FBI Even the size of it suggests that it’s not an actual revolutionary manual. The thing was huge, and couldn’t fit in a bookshelf. Not exactly something you could hand out and conceal if it wanted to do covert ops outlined in it like blowing bridges and sabatoge. It’s like the only purpose it served was to be found and tip off who was interested in that stuff. And it also served to indoctrinate a generation of us that Anarchism as a social movement was nothing more than blowing up shit; illegal and violent by definition.
  - greesil 4y ago
    The term "bomb throwing anarchist" has been around a lot longer than the cookbook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
    - mingus88 4y ago
      Yes the AC didn't start that bit of indoctrination, but renewed it for a new generation. It was published in the 70s when the counter culture was at it's strongest.
      - greesil 4y ago
        Maybe it's time for a re-brand with a new name. This worked for Joe Camel. Also, Christianity.
        4y ago
waynecochran 4y ago
Classic. Had a copy in high school in the 1980’s. I always loved the warnings at the beginning of some of the instructions that went something like this: “do not create this — it can be very dangerous… maybe lethal —- here is how you do it.”
- brk 4y ago
  Yup, gave my dot-matrix a good workout printing and selling copies!
jabthedang 4y ago
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kypro 4y ago
Just FYI, assuming this is a legit link (I'm not checking). You can get into legal trouble here in the UK for downloading this book onto your hard drive. At a minimum it's presence on your hard drive can be used against you in a criminal trial.
- generalizations 4y ago
  Checked for you. It's legit. It's too bad that the UK is so locked down.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    It's ok, the UK is only going to get better.
    - danuker 4y ago
      How do you know?
      - bombolo 4y ago
        He's going to make some anarchy real soon.
        DAVer98 4y ago
        [dead]
      - celticninja 4y ago
        Well when you are at rock bottom it can only get better you see
        phpisthebest 4y ago
        If you think UK today is "rock bottom" then you really need to study both history, and the current state of other nations...
evanwise 4y ago
Please, for the love of God, don't follow any of the recipes in here. Many are dangerously wrong (as in blow yourself and your neighbors up dangerous).
- brk 4y ago
  FWIW, I am living testament to the fact that they weren't that wrong, at least not to a "blow yourself up" extreme.
  - evanwise 4y ago
    While it's true that some of the simpler recipes will work, a lot of the others just won't work or are dangerous. From memory, the TNT and mercury fulminate recipes are wildly dangerous and omit key steps. Messing with stuff like this in any capacity is dangerous, even with proper PPE and good procedures, but if you must, there are much better resources available freely online these days.
- sph 4y ago
  Meh. Follow them at your own risk. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and blow your neighbours garage, not being prevented from doing so by someone else.
  - evanwise 4y ago
    I hope this is sarcasm.
    - culi 4y ago
      There's just some lessons everyone's gotta relearn in life. Touching the stove, accidentally committing manslaughter of your childhood friends, etc
    - sph 4y ago
      Your comment I replied to is overbearing, overprotective advice about something titled the Anarchist Cookbook, for God's sake. I tried to restore a bit of that reckless spirit with a cheeky comment, but I am very sad to see the nanny state is out in force today. Gah, so boring.
sb8244 4y ago
I used this to make NI3 (feather explosive) in high school as part of my senior project. It was somehow blessed by the teacher. The book very specifically says to not make this due to how volatile it is. We made it in the morning and put it in the undisturbed back room to dry for the afternoon. We got news of it exploding during a silent study hall and scaring the crap outta everyone there, especially since it was a different teacher in the room. The air current from the AC set it off. We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.
- deleted 4y ago
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- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Assuming you did this in the past 30 years, it’s doubly worrisome that you got this blessed, because the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate. Supposedly the “The Terrorist Handbook” series of filez from Usenet corrected the errors, but I’m not a chemist, so I can’t judge either’s reputation.
  - sb8244 4y ago
    We did not say that we got the idea / recipe from this book of course. We actually got the idea from our previous chem teacher who retired the year before. (Meaning first year for the new teacher.) This was in 2010.
    - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
      In ~2006 a group in my brother's AP Chemistry class got permission to make thetmite for their class project. Set it off in a fume hood which I believe was already scheduled to be replaced that summer. In 2010 my AP Physics teacher gave us all really long leashes in terms of how much we could. One fellow made what equated to a water bottle capacitor, charged on a Van de Graff generator. After playing with it for a few days, trying to get the practicum teacher to touch it, and various other shenanigans, he felt a shock across his chest and was writhing in pain on the ground for a few minutes. We all lost Van de Graff privileges after that. Somehow that happened in 2010-2011 and there wasn't really concern to call for medical supervision. He's still doing great today thankfully.
lampshades 4y ago
I remember downloading this and something published by some Islamic group on Freenet almost (or exactly?) 20 years ago. Never read either of them. I just wanted them because I wasn’t supposed to have them. Edit: really makes you feel old when you start talking about things you did 20 years ago on the internet.
- brudgers 4y ago
  I read my older brother's borrowed copy when I was in junior high. Me and two buddies went to the Ace Hardware and bought more than a dozen packets of morning glory seeds and then some cheese cloth at the Publix in the shopping center across Michigan Ave. June, 1980.
  - abruzzi 4y ago
    i had a copy back in the early 80s. Made the mistake of lending it to somone and never got it back. It was notorious as a book that once borrowed, was never returned. I've hear from many other people who lent it then lost it. I wonder if your brother ever returned it?
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      Maybe his brother is the one that borrowed it from you :thinking_party:
    - brudgers 4y ago
      I have a memory of its return, but it has been a few years. But I know it left after a few weeks, and then at the end of summer he went off to UF.
    - zafka 4y ago
      Then of course there was "Steal this Book". I will claim the fifth in regards to our library copy
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Usually these things end up with instructions like: How to make a car bomb: Ingredients: 1 car 1 bomb (large) Directions: Mix. That may be practical instructions if you’re in a war zone, but getting four live 105 mm artillery rounds is bit harder in the suburban United States
nickt 4y ago
In a similar vein, from back in the BBS days, The Big Book of Mischief. https://archive.org/details/Big_Book_Of_Mischief/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Big_Book_Of_Mischief/mode/2up
- superkuh 4y ago
  TBBOM was hilarious in middle school. But not nearly as funny as the "Bananarchy" text; a whole set of banana based explosives and weapons that was probably just a joke on the anarchist cookbook / the big book of mischief and their often not quite right "recipes". Things like making explosives out of banana peels or freezing bananas into ice bullets, etc. Unfortunately I can't find the file anymore with a restaurant called "Bananarchy" polluting the namespace.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Did any of them involve sticking a banana in a car's exhaust pipe?
- amatecha 4y ago
  This book was so much better. A friend got in tons of trouble for printing it out and bringing it to school when we were kids. Too funny! It was awesome to learn some real-world stuff that you'd never be taught in school though.
jimnotgym 4y ago
Wasn't there a similar one that floated around in the 90s called something like 'the terrorists handbook'? I never saw it myself of course...
- lampshades 4y ago
  Yeah, that was one of them (the Islamic book I mentioned above).
  - jimnotgym 4y ago
    It was rather more than 20 years ago that i... heard about this book. I am guessing the Islamic group you mentioned simply redistributed it
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
A couple of times a year, the FBI scrapes up the remains of someone trying to make explosives with the recipes in this book.
cratermoon 4y ago
I still have my hardcopy that I bought at a punk music/book store in the 80s. It's on a shelf next to titles like J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, and Book of the SubGenius.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  RE/Search was and is an incredible source. They saw the future of literature and media as far back as 1982. They were way ahead of everyone.
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h2odragon 4y ago
see also: https://archive.org/details/The_Poor_Mans_James_Bond_Vol_1_Kurt_Saxon https://archive.org/details/The_Poor_Mans_James_Bond_Vol_1_K...
jonathankoren 4y ago
The author of this book was interviewed for a documentary. It’s kind of interesting to watch the author’s relationship to a book he wrote (I believe) in high school as a man of 66 years. Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anarchist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anarchist
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal Had it been a feemw years later when he wrote it, he could have reclaimed the copyright between 35-40 years thereafter, even having sold it. (Note as well as transfer, this applied to all licenses, expressly “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”.) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203
speedplane 4y ago
“Power is not a material possession that can be given, it is the ability to act. Power must be taken, it is never given.” “‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’ Abraham Lincoln”
- astrange 4y ago
  > Power must be taken, it is never given. Seems self-evidential that you should not let anyone who says this become a leader. And similarly, the problem solves itself if you elect someone who doesn't believe it.
dang 4y ago
Related: “Anarchist Cookbook” author William Powell has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001238 - March 2017 (85 comments) Burn After Reading: William Powell and the Anarchist Cookbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132852 - March 2015 (10 comments) I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936672 - Dec 2013 (190 comments) Anarchist Cookbook authors hopes for discontinuation (read the author review) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694601 - Sept 2010 (41 comments)
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  The quality of comments do stand in old threads do stand out to be much more thoughtful than the current breed.
  - dang 4y ago
    Sometimes the old threads suck and the new ones are better, so it's hard to judge overall.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Perhaps an update is in order, but to make it more releveant, use a modern title like "Walter White's Guide to Improvised Chemistry" (hmmm... would that be an IP violation of some kind?) In reality all the information needed to make a wide variety of explosives, chemical and biological weapons, illegal drugs and so on is available in any university library and quite a few public libraries as well as the Internet - a Google Books search for "History of Explosives" is illustrative. The training necessary to successfully carry out the required protocols is available in any university chemistry program. Requisite raw materials are more carefully tracked and monitored than in the past, however (with good reason), but even so, such materials can themselves be synthesized by the skilled industrial chemist from non-trackable sources. The real risk is not that some isolated nutcase will go on a rampage, however - such people are more likely to blow themselves up or poison themselves than anything else - it's that nation-state governments and the private contractors they hire will decide to do something psychotic like produce drone warfare systems for the wide-area distribution of biological and chemical weapons in some place like eastern Ukraine (indeed, there may be some evidence that this is already going on or being planned). The real sociopaths all go to work for governments, as history as shown. The largest bioweapon and chemical warfare programs in history were run by the Japanese, British, American and Soviet governments, and they employed hundreds of trained scientists who justified their lunatic behavior with vague appeals to patriotism, duty, and national defense.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  Please keep your kremlin propaganda off this website, and take a long and hard look at yourself.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    The Soviet bioweapons program was arguably the largest and longest-running of them all (see for example Sverdlovsk anthrax), so I'm not sure how drawing attention to it counts as 'Kremlin propaganda': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak The use of drones to deliver biological and chemical weapons is also a long-standing issue of concern in all warzones, not just in Ukraine. (Not every comment is part of some organized PR war between NATO & Russia)
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nathias 4y ago
ah yes, the artefacts of the good old web
euroderf 4y ago
Tried the stink bomb recipe but no dice. Anyone else had luck ?
mgarfias 4y ago
Grab the army’s improvised explosives handbook instead.
GTP 4y ago
I found it funny to see a copiright notice inside such a book :D
insane_dreamer 4y ago
A classic, but not one I'd want to have on my hard drive these days
Ishmaeli 4y ago
I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s. The only chapter I remember was the one about tamping explosives in order to concentrate the force of the blast in the direction you want. That was really interesting to me for some reason.
- Normille 4y ago
  >I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s... Slightly veering away from the subject. But your comment reminded me of 'The Little Red Schoolbook' --which was the [supposedly banned] book that we all passed around in school. Although being sadly older than you, this would have been the early 80s. I wonder if anyone else remembers it? As I recall it was pretty subversive in content, with sections on sex, drugs and anrachist politics. EDIT: Seems it was quite well-known after all. Wikipaiedia has an article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook
gfd 4y ago
Oh man this is nostalgic. I remember finding this when I was in junior high and wanted to try out their recipe for a smoke bomb (mostly because it seems to be the least complicated thing on there, requiring only sugar + potassium nitrate). But living in the city, it was hard to find some place that sells fertilizers/stump remover! So that was the end of that. Fun trip down memory lane.
Giorgi 4y ago
Good old totse days.
- cheeze 4y ago
  Talk about websites I shouldn't have had access to when I was young. Porn, drugs, and bombs. A great time to be alive.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Hehe, I remember finding an “underground” bookstore that published all of this stuff. It made for fun reading and was a great conversation starter. I was even watching Nightmare on Elm Street and the girl was setting booby traps for Freddy and I was like holy smokes, this is pretty much Poor Man’s James Bond in chapter order. But I never made any of this stuff so I can’t say if the recipes are valid or not, but at the time of their release the US was much more concerned by communists then terrorists and this seems like the sort of thing they’d sprinkle out there so that patriotic hero types could wage a war of insurrection and attrition if ever needed to defend the country from an occupation.
IAmGraydon 4y ago
It's funny how I loved reading the AC as a kid in the early 90s vs now how I wouldn't even click that link due to the surveillance state we live in. If you've ever wanted to see a panopticon in action, just look around.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Or maybe everyone clicks on it so that the surveillance lists are polluted by false positives, forcing lazy spies to actually investigate real criminals and not just geeky curious people. I just did: From page 114 ("How to make mercury fulminate"), 1st line of the recipe says "take 5 grams of pure mercury and mix it with 35 ml of nitric acid".
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  It's also interesting how a simple paper book is so much more "free"
chris1993 4y ago
I had a holiday job at the police forensics lab library in Auckland in the early 80s. This was one of the many documents that had been confiscated by police and carefully catalogued and stored away.
sammalloy 4y ago
I ordered this book from a local bookstore in 1984 because I heard about it in a book or a movie I saw, but I can’t remember which since it was so long ago. Four months later I got a call from the store telling me it came in and quoting me an exorbitant price to pick it up. I never did, and I’m sure they didn’t have any difficulty selling it off the shelf. Coincidentally, just a short while later, I got a phone call from an Army recruiter asking me if I was interested in JROTC. I think I was put on some kind of watchlist for ordering the book.
alasdair_ 4y ago
There was also the Jolly Rodger Cookbook (http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/ http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/) that was thee first set of "philez" that I read as a kid. Finding more like that led to me frequenting a bunch of interesting BBS, then learning how to, um, creatively pay, for those international calls and later into setting up my own board. It all kind of died off as the web became a thing but it was still a lot of fun.
- deleted 4y ago
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nickpinkston 4y ago
Be careful with this - IIRC some of the recipes aren't very safe. I think the Army's "Improvised Munitions Handbook" is better/safer - for educational purposes only of course... :-) https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handbook/dp/1684112737 https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handboo...
- paulirish 4y ago
  PDF of the original 1969 edition: https://www.militarynewbie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TM-21-210-Improvised-Munitions-Handbook-1969-Department-of-the-Army.pdf https://www.militarynewbie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TM...
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Yeah, Has nothing do with anarchism and as a bonus the recipes in it have a strong chance of exploding on their maker. The only thing clever about the thing is the title. I think many actual anarchists have produced better books (succeeding by default) with the same title since the time of this thing's publications. Not everything old is good, this is garbage.
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KMag 4y ago
In the late 1990s, MIT's East Campus dorm organized an annual Sodium Drop from the Longfellow Bridge. (Later discontinued after a chunk of sodium survived, oxidized to concentrated lye, and chemically burned an unfortunate clean-up worker who mistook it for styrofoam.) As I remember, the MC of the event would first throw 500g of some foodstuff (I forget which) into the river for comparison, and then throw 500g of metallic Sodium into the river. At least one year, I remember them following up the Sodium with a salute made with a few hundred grams of TATP (apparently called "Mother of Satan" by Hamas, due to its tendency to detonate during manufacture). A friend of mine described the assembly line process they used for making the TATP. It sounded like they had several kg of TATP out drying on baking sheets at one time. My understanding that around that time, TATP was the most common filler for Hamas suicide vests. I don't think it took very many kg to blow up a whole bus. Batshit insane.
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  Kilos of TATP sounds like insanity. There's a documented case of around 60grams killing a Swedish teenager. Very lucky and careful folks at MIT it seems.
- KMag 4y ago
  Jogging my memory from over 20 years ago, the "reference" reactive foodstuff they used was "processed pork product" (Spam). Looking at the available Spam can sizes, maybe it was 340g processed pork product. Maybe they then used 300g Sodium, and 300g TATP. In any case, the third-hand description I heard over 20 years ago of the TATP factory in a residential kitchen was horrifying. They made at least several times as much as they used publicly at the Sodium Drop.
issa 4y ago
This was a very exciting book to get my hands on as a teenager. Now I think this is the best take on it: https://thehardtimes.net/blog/recipes-anarchist-cookbook-taste-like-shit/ https://thehardtimes.net/blog/recipes-anarchist-cookbook-tas...
thetopher 4y ago
In high school, I had a friend that printed out a copy and put all the pages into a binder. Another friend and I had borrowed the binder, and flipped through it one day to pass the time during health class. The following day, our teacher came over and crouched at our desks to talk to us. She said that she has found a piece of paper with instructions on how to make a bomb, and she has given the paper to the principal. She told us that we weren’t in any trouble, but that we were never to bring anything like that to school ever again. I also remember another friend writing an essay for English class, and then reading it aloud in class, recounting his experience building and detonating a “pipe bomb” in his backyard using gunpowder and a mayonnaise jar. Different times. (This was 1996-1997)
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Discussion here of the making of explosives brought back memories. A guy at school used to nick nitric acid (edit: and sulphuric) and glycerine from the chemistry lab and make guess-what. No, the chemistry teacher didn't know and would have strangled us had he discovered. Well, it turns out to be hard to make, being very exothermic, and it usually just burnt itself up (brown fumes). Failure provoked him into trying for progressively larger amounts, and we would just get closer and closer to it losing all caution. His one success was a very small amount that embedded pieces of the glass container into our study walls. Everything else, especially including the larger amounts just failed – it really is very exothermic. And we would be standing around this right up close. The angel of very very very very stupid children put in a lot of overtime. If I could I would reach back through time and punch us both in the face.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I knew a guy that had his left hand blown off, by a bottle of nitroglycerine. He picked it up, and, boom.
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    Sure it was that? NG is terrifyingly unstable, harsh words can set it off. I couldn't conceive of it being bottled without a stabilising agent added. At least he only lost his hand :/
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      That's what he told me. He also said that he didn't keep it in an ice bath, which, I guess, you're supposed to do. William Friedkin used the instability of nitro as the basis for his movie Sorcerer[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film)
      - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
        I'll keep an eye out for the film, thanks.
m463 4y ago
Serious question - what would bring someone to write and publish a book like this? also, I read the preface and found this interesting: I believe it is usually the "square guy" who wants to know what is going on, though (or because) shocked and even tantalized by such subjects.
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tamaharbor 4y ago
I tried the lsd/morning glory seed thing (page 44) while in high school back in the 1970s… Was sick as a dog for three days.
cjohnson318 4y ago
The first chapter describes "New York White", a super strain of weed that grows white due to lack of sunlight deep in New York City sewers is totally made up, or at best, not researched at all. Weed doesn't grow in the dark, and it doesn't grow albino from lack of light.
Maursault 4y ago
Anarchist Cookbook is fun, but with all the stories here about high school chemistry, I would have expected most would have also discovered PiHKAL[1] and found it infinitely more entertaining. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

167 points by brudgers 4y ago

I remember passing a floppy disk with this on it before we got online. And I remember people lying about what they made and blew up etc

Growtika 4y ago

Wasn't familiar with the book until I came across this Reddit thread few years ago. "The author of the Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous instructional book on homemade explosives, weapons, and drugs, regretted its publication. He attempted to have it removed several times, only to be thwarted by the publisher Lyle Stuart." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b2b3m7/til_the_author_of_the_anarchist_cookbook_an/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/b2b3m7/til_t...

culi 4y ago
The original author went as far as to publish a "second edition" more recently. This second edition is actually literally a cookbook. It's geared towards the mutual aid scene and the recipes are recipes you can make for hundreds of people We actually used it when starting a new Food Not Bombs chapter locally and most activists I talked to seemed to mainly be familiar with the followup. So I guess it had some level of success in covering up the original
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Do you have a reference? I'd love to see a literal anarchist cookbook, but a bit of searching turned up nothing.
  - culi 4y ago
    https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20interior%207-30-15-1.pdf https://www.foodnotbombs.net/a.%20Anarchist%20Cookbook%20int... Ah I guess it's more specifically a Food Not Bombs thing. Also it wasn't mostly written by the original author, but the original author provides a forward (page v) and obviously gives his blessings for this work to take the namesake I guess it being Food Not Bombs specific explains why most people I knew only knew of this version XD

ada1981 4y ago

I remember being a teenager in the 90s in Erie, PA and making things from the AC was our go to entertainment. Many a weeknight was spent cutting the heads off matches, stuffing them into PVC pipes and throwing bombs at each other in the woods. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we all made it out of that time period alive, with our limbs and fingers intact, and not in federal prison.

cameron_b 4y ago
I was a half-step back from you. I was in high school after Y2K and some had already paved the way of foolish use of this stuff such that I got long quiet interrogative looks from my dad over the material. Glancing through the introduction, I'm sure I never understood that stuff at the time. I remember looking through the electronics ideas and wanting to make a pen-microphone-transmitter, but then wondering why go to all the trouble. I'm glad I filed it away as "I know where to look if I need the information" and didn't do anything with it. I do remember the discussion of the honeypot nature of some topics and keywords. It is important to understand more about the giant before you attempt to stand on his shoulders.
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starkd 4y ago
I think most people were intrigued because of the experimentation and just having that kind of knowledge (ability) at your fingertips. There's a very strong DIY mentality that gets spawned from information like this. I don't think the mere presence of such material should be discouraged for that very reason. Anyone who seriously wants to implement any of these projects for nefarious purpose will need an extraordinary amount of self-discipline to carry it out. Even if they succeed, it's hard to believe any will succeed without raising red flags. The societal benefits outweight the risks.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  In my specific case, I never actually wanted to blow anything up, I was just curious as to /how/ and /why/ things could be blown up.

JoeyBananas 4y ago

I got in trouble for reading this on a school iPad in middle school. The anarchists cook book is severely outdated. Most of the info it contains is straight up fabricated. It's no longer worthy of the controversial reputation that it has.

mingus88 4y ago
The prevailing theory when I was in high school was that this AC was a honeypot. Anybody trying to order the misspelled chemical names in the AC to cook homemade explosives would get a visit from the FBI Even the size of it suggests that it’s not an actual revolutionary manual. The thing was huge, and couldn’t fit in a bookshelf. Not exactly something you could hand out and conceal if it wanted to do covert ops outlined in it like blowing bridges and sabatoge. It’s like the only purpose it served was to be found and tip off who was interested in that stuff. And it also served to indoctrinate a generation of us that Anarchism as a social movement was nothing more than blowing up shit; illegal and violent by definition.
- greesil 4y ago
  The term "bomb throwing anarchist" has been around a lot longer than the cookbook. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
  - mingus88 4y ago
    Yes the AC didn't start that bit of indoctrination, but renewed it for a new generation. It was published in the 70s when the counter culture was at it's strongest.
    - greesil 4y ago
      Maybe it's time for a re-brand with a new name. This worked for Joe Camel. Also, Christianity.
      - 4y ago

waynecochran 4y ago

Classic. Had a copy in high school in the 1980’s. I always loved the warnings at the beginning of some of the instructions that went something like this: “do not create this — it can be very dangerous… maybe lethal —- here is how you do it.”

brk 4y ago
Yup, gave my dot-matrix a good workout printing and selling copies!

jabthedang 4y ago

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kypro 4y ago

Just FYI, assuming this is a legit link (I'm not checking). You can get into legal trouble here in the UK for downloading this book onto your hard drive. At a minimum it's presence on your hard drive can be used against you in a criminal trial.

generalizations 4y ago
Checked for you. It's legit. It's too bad that the UK is so locked down.
- boomskats 4y ago
  It's ok, the UK is only going to get better.
  - danuker 4y ago
    How do you know?
    - bombolo 4y ago
      He's going to make some anarchy real soon.
      - DAVer98 4y ago
        [dead]
    - celticninja 4y ago
      Well when you are at rock bottom it can only get better you see
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        If you think UK today is "rock bottom" then you really need to study both history, and the current state of other nations...

evanwise 4y ago

Please, for the love of God, don't follow any of the recipes in here. Many are dangerously wrong (as in blow yourself and your neighbors up dangerous).

brk 4y ago
FWIW, I am living testament to the fact that they weren't that wrong, at least not to a "blow yourself up" extreme.
- evanwise 4y ago
  While it's true that some of the simpler recipes will work, a lot of the others just won't work or are dangerous. From memory, the TNT and mercury fulminate recipes are wildly dangerous and omit key steps. Messing with stuff like this in any capacity is dangerous, even with proper PPE and good procedures, but if you must, there are much better resources available freely online these days.
sph 4y ago
Meh. Follow them at your own risk. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and blow your neighbours garage, not being prevented from doing so by someone else.
- evanwise 4y ago
  I hope this is sarcasm.
  - culi 4y ago
    There's just some lessons everyone's gotta relearn in life. Touching the stove, accidentally committing manslaughter of your childhood friends, etc
  - sph 4y ago
    Your comment I replied to is overbearing, overprotective advice about something titled the Anarchist Cookbook, for God's sake. I tried to restore a bit of that reckless spirit with a cheeky comment, but I am very sad to see the nanny state is out in force today. Gah, so boring.

sb8244 4y ago

I used this to make NI3 (feather explosive) in high school as part of my senior project. It was somehow blessed by the teacher. The book very specifically says to not make this due to how volatile it is. We made it in the morning and put it in the undisturbed back room to dry for the afternoon. We got news of it exploding during a silent study hall and scaring the crap outta everyone there, especially since it was a different teacher in the room. The air current from the AC set it off. We were again (somehow) given permission to remake it since it went off.

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jonathankoren 4y ago
Assuming you did this in the past 30 years, it’s doubly worrisome that you got this blessed, because the book is absolutely notorious for being dangerously inaccurate. Supposedly the “The Terrorist Handbook” series of filez from Usenet corrected the errors, but I’m not a chemist, so I can’t judge either’s reputation.
- sb8244 4y ago
  We did not say that we got the idea / recipe from this book of course. We actually got the idea from our previous chem teacher who retired the year before. (Meaning first year for the new teacher.) This was in 2010.
  - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    In ~2006 a group in my brother's AP Chemistry class got permission to make thetmite for their class project. Set it off in a fume hood which I believe was already scheduled to be replaced that summer. In 2010 my AP Physics teacher gave us all really long leashes in terms of how much we could. One fellow made what equated to a water bottle capacitor, charged on a Van de Graff generator. After playing with it for a few days, trying to get the practicum teacher to touch it, and various other shenanigans, he felt a shock across his chest and was writhing in pain on the ground for a few minutes. We all lost Van de Graff privileges after that. Somehow that happened in 2010-2011 and there wasn't really concern to call for medical supervision. He's still doing great today thankfully.

lampshades 4y ago

I remember downloading this and something published by some Islamic group on Freenet almost (or exactly?) 20 years ago. Never read either of them. I just wanted them because I wasn’t supposed to have them. Edit: really makes you feel old when you start talking about things you did 20 years ago on the internet.

brudgers 4y ago
I read my older brother's borrowed copy when I was in junior high. Me and two buddies went to the Ace Hardware and bought more than a dozen packets of morning glory seeds and then some cheese cloth at the Publix in the shopping center across Michigan Ave. June, 1980.
- abruzzi 4y ago
  i had a copy back in the early 80s. Made the mistake of lending it to somone and never got it back. It was notorious as a book that once borrowed, was never returned. I've hear from many other people who lent it then lost it. I wonder if your brother ever returned it?
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    Maybe his brother is the one that borrowed it from you :thinking_party:
  - brudgers 4y ago
    I have a memory of its return, but it has been a few years. But I know it left after a few weeks, and then at the end of summer he went off to UF.
  - zafka 4y ago
    Then of course there was "Steal this Book". I will claim the fifth in regards to our library copy
jonathankoren 4y ago
Usually these things end up with instructions like: How to make a car bomb: Ingredients: 1 car 1 bomb (large) Directions: Mix. That may be practical instructions if you’re in a war zone, but getting four live 105 mm artillery rounds is bit harder in the suburban United States

nickt 4y ago

In a similar vein, from back in the BBS days, The Big Book of Mischief. https://archive.org/details/Big_Book_Of_Mischief/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Big_Book_Of_Mischief/mode/2up

superkuh 4y ago
TBBOM was hilarious in middle school. But not nearly as funny as the "Bananarchy" text; a whole set of banana based explosives and weapons that was probably just a joke on the anarchist cookbook / the big book of mischief and their often not quite right "recipes". Things like making explosives out of banana peels or freezing bananas into ice bullets, etc. Unfortunately I can't find the file anymore with a restaurant called "Bananarchy" polluting the namespace.
- starkd 4y ago
  Did any of them involve sticking a banana in a car's exhaust pipe?
amatecha 4y ago
This book was so much better. A friend got in tons of trouble for printing it out and bringing it to school when we were kids. Too funny! It was awesome to learn some real-world stuff that you'd never be taught in school though.

jimnotgym 4y ago

Wasn't there a similar one that floated around in the 90s called something like 'the terrorists handbook'? I never saw it myself of course...

lampshades 4y ago
Yeah, that was one of them (the Islamic book I mentioned above).
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  It was rather more than 20 years ago that i... heard about this book. I am guessing the Islamic group you mentioned simply redistributed it

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

A couple of times a year, the FBI scrapes up the remains of someone trying to make explosives with the recipes in this book.

cratermoon 4y ago

I still have my hardcopy that I bought at a punk music/book store in the 80s. It's on a shelf next to titles like J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, and Book of the SubGenius.

sammalloy 4y ago
RE/Search was and is an incredible source. They saw the future of literature and media as far back as 1982. They were way ahead of everyone.

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h2odragon 4y ago

see also: https://archive.org/details/The_Poor_Mans_James_Bond_Vol_1_Kurt_Saxon https://archive.org/details/The_Poor_Mans_James_Bond_Vol_1_K...

jonathankoren 4y ago

The author of this book was interviewed for a documentary. It’s kind of interesting to watch the author’s relationship to a book he wrote (I believe) in high school as a man of 66 years. Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anarchist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anarchist

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Especially since he repeated tried to stop the book from being published, but couldn’t because the sold the copyright with the initial publishing deal Had it been a feemw years later when he wrote it, he could have reclaimed the copyright between 35-40 years thereafter, even having sold it. (Note as well as transfer, this applied to all licenses, expressly “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”.) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203

speedplane 4y ago

“Power is not a material possession that can be given, it is the ability to act. Power must be taken, it is never given.” “‘This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.’ Abraham Lincoln”

astrange 4y ago
> Power must be taken, it is never given. Seems self-evidential that you should not let anyone who says this become a leader. And similarly, the problem solves itself if you elect someone who doesn't believe it.

dang 4y ago

Related: “Anarchist Cookbook” author William Powell has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001238 - March 2017 (85 comments) Burn After Reading: William Powell and the Anarchist Cookbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132852 - March 2015 (10 comments) I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936672 - Dec 2013 (190 comments) Anarchist Cookbook authors hopes for discontinuation (read the author review) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694601 - Sept 2010 (41 comments)

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
The quality of comments do stand in old threads do stand out to be much more thoughtful than the current breed.
- dang 4y ago
  Sometimes the old threads suck and the new ones are better, so it's hard to judge overall.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Perhaps an update is in order, but to make it more releveant, use a modern title like "Walter White's Guide to Improvised Chemistry" (hmmm... would that be an IP violation of some kind?) In reality all the information needed to make a wide variety of explosives, chemical and biological weapons, illegal drugs and so on is available in any university library and quite a few public libraries as well as the Internet - a Google Books search for "History of Explosives" is illustrative. The training necessary to successfully carry out the required protocols is available in any university chemistry program. Requisite raw materials are more carefully tracked and monitored than in the past, however (with good reason), but even so, such materials can themselves be synthesized by the skilled industrial chemist from non-trackable sources. The real risk is not that some isolated nutcase will go on a rampage, however - such people are more likely to blow themselves up or poison themselves than anything else - it's that nation-state governments and the private contractors they hire will decide to do something psychotic like produce drone warfare systems for the wide-area distribution of biological and chemical weapons in some place like eastern Ukraine (indeed, there may be some evidence that this is already going on or being planned). The real sociopaths all go to work for governments, as history as shown. The largest bioweapon and chemical warfare programs in history were run by the Japanese, British, American and Soviet governments, and they employed hundreds of trained scientists who justified their lunatic behavior with vague appeals to patriotism, duty, and national defense.

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
Please keep your kremlin propaganda off this website, and take a long and hard look at yourself.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The Soviet bioweapons program was arguably the largest and longest-running of them all (see for example Sverdlovsk anthrax), so I'm not sure how drawing attention to it counts as 'Kremlin propaganda': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak The use of drones to deliver biological and chemical weapons is also a long-standing issue of concern in all warzones, not just in Ukraine. (Not every comment is part of some organized PR war between NATO & Russia)

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nathias 4y ago

ah yes, the artefacts of the good old web

euroderf 4y ago

Tried the stink bomb recipe but no dice. Anyone else had luck ?

mgarfias 4y ago

Grab the army’s improvised explosives handbook instead.

GTP 4y ago

I found it funny to see a copiright notice inside such a book :D

insane_dreamer 4y ago

A classic, but not one I'd want to have on my hard drive these days

Ishmaeli 4y ago

I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s. The only chapter I remember was the one about tamping explosives in order to concentrate the force of the blast in the direction you want. That was really interesting to me for some reason.

Normille 4y ago
>I read a hard copy that was passed around my high school in the early 90s... Slightly veering away from the subject. But your comment reminded me of 'The Little Red Schoolbook' --which was the [supposedly banned] book that we all passed around in school. Although being sadly older than you, this would have been the early 80s. I wonder if anyone else remembers it? As I recall it was pretty subversive in content, with sections on sex, drugs and anrachist politics. EDIT: Seems it was quite well-known after all. Wikipaiedia has an article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook

gfd 4y ago

Oh man this is nostalgic. I remember finding this when I was in junior high and wanted to try out their recipe for a smoke bomb (mostly because it seems to be the least complicated thing on there, requiring only sugar + potassium nitrate). But living in the city, it was hard to find some place that sells fertilizers/stump remover! So that was the end of that. Fun trip down memory lane.

Giorgi 4y ago

Good old totse days.

cheeze 4y ago
Talk about websites I shouldn't have had access to when I was young. Porn, drugs, and bombs. A great time to be alive.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Hehe, I remember finding an “underground” bookstore that published all of this stuff. It made for fun reading and was a great conversation starter. I was even watching Nightmare on Elm Street and the girl was setting booby traps for Freddy and I was like holy smokes, this is pretty much Poor Man’s James Bond in chapter order. But I never made any of this stuff so I can’t say if the recipes are valid or not, but at the time of their release the US was much more concerned by communists then terrorists and this seems like the sort of thing they’d sprinkle out there so that patriotic hero types could wage a war of insurrection and attrition if ever needed to defend the country from an occupation.

IAmGraydon 4y ago

It's funny how I loved reading the AC as a kid in the early 90s vs now how I wouldn't even click that link due to the surveillance state we live in. If you've ever wanted to see a panopticon in action, just look around.

squarefoot 4y ago
Or maybe everyone clicks on it so that the surveillance lists are polluted by false positives, forcing lazy spies to actually investigate real criminals and not just geeky curious people. I just did: From page 114 ("How to make mercury fulminate"), 1st line of the recipe says "take 5 grams of pure mercury and mix it with 35 ml of nitric acid".
iancmceachern 4y ago
It's also interesting how a simple paper book is so much more "free"

chris1993 4y ago

I had a holiday job at the police forensics lab library in Auckland in the early 80s. This was one of the many documents that had been confiscated by police and carefully catalogued and stored away.

sammalloy 4y ago

I ordered this book from a local bookstore in 1984 because I heard about it in a book or a movie I saw, but I can’t remember which since it was so long ago. Four months later I got a call from the store telling me it came in and quoting me an exorbitant price to pick it up. I never did, and I’m sure they didn’t have any difficulty selling it off the shelf. Coincidentally, just a short while later, I got a phone call from an Army recruiter asking me if I was interested in JROTC. I think I was put on some kind of watchlist for ordering the book.

alasdair_ 4y ago

There was also the Jolly Rodger Cookbook (http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/ http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/) that was thee first set of "philez" that I read as a kid. Finding more like that led to me frequenting a bunch of interesting BBS, then learning how to, um, creatively pay, for those international calls and later into setting up my own board. It all kind of died off as the web became a thing but it was still a lot of fun.

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nickpinkston 4y ago

Be careful with this - IIRC some of the recipes aren't very safe. I think the Army's "Improvised Munitions Handbook" is better/safer - for educational purposes only of course... :-) https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handbook/dp/1684112737 https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Army-Improvised-Munitions-Handboo...

paulirish 4y ago
PDF of the original 1969 edition: https://www.militarynewbie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TM-21-210-Improvised-Munitions-Handbook-1969-Department-of-the-Army.pdf https://www.militarynewbie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/TM...
joe_the_user 4y ago
Yeah, Has nothing do with anarchism and as a bonus the recipes in it have a strong chance of exploding on their maker. The only thing clever about the thing is the title. I think many actual anarchists have produced better books (succeeding by default) with the same title since the time of this thing's publications. Not everything old is good, this is garbage.
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KMag 4y ago

In the late 1990s, MIT's East Campus dorm organized an annual Sodium Drop from the Longfellow Bridge. (Later discontinued after a chunk of sodium survived, oxidized to concentrated lye, and chemically burned an unfortunate clean-up worker who mistook it for styrofoam.) As I remember, the MC of the event would first throw 500g of some foodstuff (I forget which) into the river for comparison, and then throw 500g of metallic Sodium into the river. At least one year, I remember them following up the Sodium with a salute made with a few hundred grams of TATP (apparently called "Mother of Satan" by Hamas, due to its tendency to detonate during manufacture). A friend of mine described the assembly line process they used for making the TATP. It sounded like they had several kg of TATP out drying on baking sheets at one time. My understanding that around that time, TATP was the most common filler for Hamas suicide vests. I don't think it took very many kg to blow up a whole bus. Batshit insane.

RF_Savage 4y ago
Kilos of TATP sounds like insanity. There's a documented case of around 60grams killing a Swedish teenager. Very lucky and careful folks at MIT it seems.
KMag 4y ago
Jogging my memory from over 20 years ago, the "reference" reactive foodstuff they used was "processed pork product" (Spam). Looking at the available Spam can sizes, maybe it was 340g processed pork product. Maybe they then used 300g Sodium, and 300g TATP. In any case, the third-hand description I heard over 20 years ago of the TATP factory in a residential kitchen was horrifying. They made at least several times as much as they used publicly at the Sodium Drop.

issa 4y ago

This was a very exciting book to get my hands on as a teenager. Now I think this is the best take on it: https://thehardtimes.net/blog/recipes-anarchist-cookbook-taste-like-shit/ https://thehardtimes.net/blog/recipes-anarchist-cookbook-tas...

thetopher 4y ago

In high school, I had a friend that printed out a copy and put all the pages into a binder. Another friend and I had borrowed the binder, and flipped through it one day to pass the time during health class. The following day, our teacher came over and crouched at our desks to talk to us. She said that she has found a piece of paper with instructions on how to make a bomb, and she has given the paper to the principal. She told us that we weren’t in any trouble, but that we were never to bring anything like that to school ever again. I also remember another friend writing an essay for English class, and then reading it aloud in class, recounting his experience building and detonating a “pipe bomb” in his backyard using gunpowder and a mayonnaise jar. Different times. (This was 1996-1997)

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

Discussion here of the making of explosives brought back memories. A guy at school used to nick nitric acid (edit: and sulphuric) and glycerine from the chemistry lab and make guess-what. No, the chemistry teacher didn't know and would have strangled us had he discovered. Well, it turns out to be hard to make, being very exothermic, and it usually just burnt itself up (brown fumes). Failure provoked him into trying for progressively larger amounts, and we would just get closer and closer to it losing all caution. His one success was a very small amount that embedded pieces of the glass container into our study walls. Everything else, especially including the larger amounts just failed – it really is very exothermic. And we would be standing around this right up close. The angel of very very very very stupid children put in a lot of overtime. If I could I would reach back through time and punch us both in the face.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I knew a guy that had his left hand blown off, by a bottle of nitroglycerine. He picked it up, and, boom.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  Sure it was that? NG is terrifyingly unstable, harsh words can set it off. I couldn't conceive of it being bottled without a stabilising agent added. At least he only lost his hand :/
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    That's what he told me. He also said that he didn't keep it in an ice bath, which, I guess, you're supposed to do. William Friedkin used the instability of nitro as the basis for his movie Sorcerer[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film)
    - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
      I'll keep an eye out for the film, thanks.

m463 4y ago

Serious question - what would bring someone to write and publish a book like this? also, I read the preface and found this interesting: I believe it is usually the "square guy" who wants to know what is going on, though (or because) shocked and even tantalized by such subjects.

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tamaharbor 4y ago

I tried the lsd/morning glory seed thing (page 44) while in high school back in the 1970s… Was sick as a dog for three days.

cjohnson318 4y ago

The first chapter describes "New York White", a super strain of weed that grows white due to lack of sunlight deep in New York City sewers is totally made up, or at best, not researched at all. Weed doesn't grow in the dark, and it doesn't grow albino from lack of light.

Maursault 4y ago

Anarchist Cookbook is fun, but with all the stories here about high school chemistry, I would have expected most would have also discovered PiHKAL[1] and found it infinitely more entertaining. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL