I wish to entreat you to allow me to speak not on the sciences of weather or geology, or even the wild speculations of astronomical influences. We need merely to step outside these doors to know that we have been cast into a sunless world distinguished only by periods twilight and night. There is not a man present who does not know that we now live in a land that is being buried under ever more snow.

The world has been remade in winter and twilight, and life in Victorian England will never be the same again. These three short stories show us a frozen apocalypse and two very different paths to salvation. While communities grow embittered with each passing year, struggling to keep themselves alive, the enigmatic Afflicted hunt down what survivors are left for purposes unknown.

From the radical steampunk pioneers The Catastrophone Orchestra and Margaret Killjoy comes a foray into and out of madness.

In these first issues of SteamPunk Magazine, some out of print for years, there are articles and interviews on music, fashion, politics, history, and mad science. Groundbreaking steampunk fiction and breathtaking illustration run beside bizarre philosophy and manifestos. Learn to etch copper, to build a pennyfakething from an old bike or a jacob’s ladder from trash. Discover vertical windmills or sew a pair of spats.

Here collected now are over 400 pages of awesome steampunkery. SteamPunk Magazine has always been known for keeping the punk in steampunk, for being willing to celebrate steampunk subculture as a part of the global counterculture.

The volume is introduced by the illustrious Jake von Slatt and features a cover illustrated by the remarkable John Coulthart.

]]> 118 pages of articles, interviews, and photography. Discover bold new manifestos, read of our predecessors and help us ponder what greatness the dark scene might aspire to in the future.

It can be downloaded for free in either print resolution (300dpi, over 100mb) or web resolution (72dpi, about 10mb).

“In What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, the estimable Margaret Killjoy takes a story-form usually associated with younger readers and infuses it with decadence and absinthe along with delirious and dissolute fantasy. If you’re choosing your own adventure, I strongly recommend you make it this one.”
—Alan Moore, author of Watchmen

"Reading What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower is a bit like play­ing Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of grad students while Monty Python’s Flying Circus marathons in the background. It offers the pleasure of watching someone very smart do some­ thing very silly, and do it with style and skill. You will laugh­ and while you laugh this trickster author will unleash goblins in your mind to ferment a cognitive revolution."
—William Alexander, for Rain Taxi

Descend into the depths of the undercity and embroil yourself in the political struggling of colonialist gnomes and indigenous goblins. Fly in air balloons, drink mysterious and pleasant cocktails, smoke opium with the dregs of gnomish society. Or dream and speak of liberation for all the races. Fall in love and abscond into the caverns.

It’s up to you, because this is an adventure of your own choosing.

From Margaret Killjoy, the founder of SteamPunk Magazine and the editor of Mythmakers & Lawbreakers comes an interactive novel of danger, drugs, and revolution.

“Catastrophe Orchestra is a slim, lovely volume full of defiance and beauty, philosophy and art. It is a banner, a challenge, a rallying cry—and a marvelous read.”
—Cherie Priest, author of Boneshaker

Venture into New York City’s Lower East Side in the late 19th century with the incorrigible miscreants of the Catastrophone Orchestra. Drug-addled, pugilistic, and benevolent, they run a free clinic and experiment with the music of machines.

The underside of the city is laid bare in this collection. The Orchestra itself provides only the bookends for five seasonals, a distinctly Victorian genre of short fiction that has been given new life in these pages. Street brawls and gangs, mechanical mothers, slaughterhouses and circuses, magicians and orphanages, laborers and strikes, the Catastrophone Orchestra has seen it all.

Five seasonals, a backstory, and two groundbreaking steampunk essays are herein collected.

Available for free download:
Web Quality (31 mb!)

In 2009, the US government stole this book from us. They took every remaining print copy and all the original files and their backups. So we scanned a copy and put it back into print. This second edition is published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, an imprint of Combustion Books.

A free pdf of the second edition is available for download.

The name of this collection of poetry is no mere hyperbole. When the G-20 met in Toronto, Canada in 2010 behind armed thugs and fortress walls to discuss the fate of the world, Kelly Pflug-Back was among those who took to the streets to counter it with the militancy that the situation demanded. The cops dragged her off and tormented her in jail for a month while the government attempted to frame her as the leader of the infamously leaderless Black Bloc. Many of her charges were dropped, but she pleaded guilty to the destruction of several police cars and corporate storefronts and awaits sentencing. She was sentenced to fifteen months behind bars for daring to be free, for writing her poetry with action and words alike. Every dollar received by the publisher from the sale of this volume will go to aid her in her struggle against the state.

All profits received by Combustion Books will be passed along to Kelly Rose Pflug-Back until she is free.

Also available as a zine for free download for both web viewing and printing half-letter.

Deliciously dirty, seductively steamy, and scientifically sexy in its nature, A Steampunk’s Guide to Sex lifts our dickies to give us a gander at true Victorian naughtiness. If the tintype images don’t turn your crank (and I bet they do), then the bawdy glossaries, essays, and how-tos will certainly steam your goggles.
—Shanna Germain, Editor of Geek Love and Bound by Lust

Prostitution, pornography, sex toys, dirty stories, BDSM, gay New York, can-can dancers, strippers, tight-laced corsets, prudery, polyamory, consent, venereal diseases, piercings, birth control, aphrodisiacs, creepers, floggers, steam-powered vibrators, sex slang—mad historian Professor Calamity and his assembled crew of steampunk authors, artists, and performers share everything you want to know, and more, about sex under the reign of Victoria and sex in our modern subculture.

180 pages, 215 full-color photographs.

Available for free download:
web quality (36 mb)

The Super Happy Anarcho Fun Pages ran for six years, from 2004-2010, and cover such subjects as: anarchy, squatting, direct action, animal liberation, dishes, endless meetings, cliquishness, infighting, pacifists, liberals, shoplifting, environmentalism, free trade, and book fairs.

This first printing comes with a green and black cover.

This issue covers such subjects as: dieselpunk, anti-fascist fashion, DIY miniature airships, paper dolls, the New Orleans general strike of 1892, loaded dice and swindles, the Red Fork Empire, surrealism, machine intelligence, and post-mortem communications!

Including interviews with Cory Doctorow, Cherie Priest, Eric Larson, the Vagabonds, Frenchy & The Punk, and BB Blackdog.

Fiction by Katie Casey, reginazabo, Erin Searles, David Z. Morris, and the Catastrophone Orchestra.

Free to download:
web | printing

• Goldman
• Berkman
• Kropotkin
• Makhno
• Tolstoy
• Parsons (Lucy)
• Parsons (Albert)
• Noe Itō
• Michel
• Magón

• Malatesta
• Nikiforova
• Bakunin
• Lingg
• Engel
• Riot Dog
• de Cleyre
• Novatore
• Fumiko
• Saornil

• Curie
• Houdini
• Tesla
• Nadar
• Eberhardt
• Wilde
• Wollstonecraft
• Brown
• Turing
• Lovelace

• "No Gods, No Dungeon Masters"
• a circle-A in a gear
• "Death to Various Things
• "Chaotic Good"
• "Chaotic Neutral"
• "Lawful Ain't Good"
• </Capitalism>
• "Anarchism For the Win"
• "I'll Wave a Black Flag Until They Make a Darker One
• "Destroy All of the Things"
  ]]> Anarchy buttons!
  Pack of 10 1" pin-back buttons! (Plus a bonus Combustion Books button.) This pack features a variety of anarchisty images and slogans, including:
  • a circle-A
  • "We Fight for the Trees For the Trees Have No Swords
  • "Steal Shit from Rich People"
  • "Steal Things From Cops"
  • "Support Your Right to Injure the Police"
  • "Hucking Rocks at Cops is Not a Crime"
  • "Death to the Capitalist Bourgeoisie"
  • "Chinga la Migra"
  • "Por Cada Anarquista Muerto Naceremos Mil"
  • "Stripmalls Are Ugly and Should Be Destroyed"
    ]]> Geeky buttons!
    Pack of 10 1" pin-back buttons! (Plus a bonus Combustion Books button.) This pack features a variety of anarchisty images and slogans, including:
    • "Read Books and Destroy"
    • "Read a Motherfucking Book"
    • "If You Tell Me To Smile I Will Stab You With A Knife"
    • "Fuck Irony"
    • "Keep Steampunk Punk"
    • "Fuck Yeah Steampunk"
    • "Disregard the Constabulary"
    • "Naysayers Gonna Naysay"
    • "Love the Machine, Hate the Factory"
    • "Teapunk"
      ]]> In 1913, Sophie Lyons wrote her memoirs, chronicling six decades of bank robberies, prison breaks, cons, and swindles that left her a rich woman. One hundred years later, we’re bringing this important work back into print, casting back the veil of the 19th century criminal underworld. This is the world of fences and art thieves, bank sneaks and conwomen, but it is punctuated by a remarkable and nearly universal honor among thieves. Fully illustrated throughout with numerous diagrams of robbery methods and ways of concealing stolen valuables.

      This is the first book in our new Rogue's Gallery series that will showcase interesting lives lived outside the law.

      Edited by Matthew Whitley of Cicada Press.

      ]]> The final issue of Occupied London, an anarchist journal of theory and action. Put out by the minds behind From the Greek Streets, the premiere source of English-language updates and analysis related to the crisis in Greece. 108 pages of art and action and analysis. US edition published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

      From the editorial:

      This is the last issue of Occupied London, a journal that started in the political freeze-frame that was London in the mid 00s. In December 2008, at the continent’s other end, the frames started moving again; as they sped up, new movements, revolts, ripples of transformation appeared. We changed our shape to respond to this unfolding condition. For a few years, we focused on regular blog updates from the streets in Greece; then, taking a few steps back and a deep breath, we put a book together, trying to understand the state of the antagonist movement in Greece with our comrades.

      And now? The frames have reached a dazzling speed; the consensus of democracy’s good ol’ times has broken and sheds its glass all over the continent, and beyond: the old world is in crisis, and along with it is its previously imposed global consensus on what counts as “progress”, “democracy” or “development”. Are these the creaks and sighs of a new global order settling, are they the early days of global economic fascism, or, could they be the cracks and moaning of its collapse?

      [...]

      Around four years since our last print issue, we have decided to end this phase of the Occupied London project with one final tribute to our journal format. This, our last issue, features reflections from many recent sites of mass revolts from the past few years: it is reminiscent and eagerly awaiting the times to come.

      ]]> by John Withee

      A middle-grades book (aimed at 3-5 graders) from debut author John Withee. 160 pages. Fully illustrated throughout.

      When ten sailors are shipwrecked onto a desert island, they lock their tyrannical captain in a cage and live off the bounty of the land--until one sailor’s greed gets the best of him. The rest must learn how to cooperate and learn how to break the rules. They must learn how to become the scallywags of Nobody’s Island.

      ]]> by Margaret Killjoy

      “An exciting and mysterious novel, a story of war and love.”
      —Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy

      Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him.

      His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all the while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

      From the editor of Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction and author of What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower comes a seditious novel of utopia besieged, a novel that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

      ]]> A complete deck of Combustion Books marked playing cards. The suits are bombs, balloons, hats, and gears, and the face cards include some of our favorite historical figures, from Emma Goldman the Queen of Bombs to Edgar Allan Poe the Jack of Balloons. Comes packaged in a tin along with instructions for reading the cards.
      ]]> There’s a revolution going on in northern Syria, one that challenges everything we know about government and society and freedom. With centuries of ethnic oppression behind them, their backs against the embargo wall of Turkey, and the ruthless forces of the Islamic State laying siege to their cities, the people of Rojava are trying what might be the most ambitious social experiment of our times. Two-and-a-half million people are trying to live without a nationstate, using direct democracy to build a society ruled from the bottom up. As the Syrian civil war rages, the Kurds and other ethnic groups of Rojava fight for autonomy, feminism, ecological stewardship, cooperative economics, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism.

      It behooves us to understand their struggle as best we can. This book, compiling the words of militia members and academics alike, lays out the Rojava Revolution in plain language.

      The introduction and overview of the Rojava situation can be read in its entirety at tangledwilderness.org.

      ]]> by the Tilted Scales Collective

      The Tilted Scales Collective presents a comprehensive guide to facing charges in the criminal legal system to help defendants not only figure out how to handle their legal cases, but also how to think about their cases. Rather than being a how-to guide, this book offers a way of thinking about criminal charges that is based on defendants' goals: personal, political, and legal. This book was written by dedicated legal support activists and draws on the wisdom of dozens of people who have weathered the challenges of trials and incarceration.

      Available for free in electronic formats: epub, mobi, and pdf.

      ]]>