Steal This Book
In 1967 a book called "F--k The System" was published privately under the pseudonym George Metesky, a favorite fake name of political theater artist Abbie Hoffman. It was the prototype for this edition, in 1971 greatly expanded and retitled "Steal This Book" and distributed by Grove Press from a label called Pirate Editions. Both books were designed to help political radicals on the lam from the authorities maintain their existence off the radar screens of polite society. The latter book (in three sections, Survive!, Fight! and Liberate!) describes late 1960's resources for free food, clothing, transportation, education, medical care and communication. The final pages offer specifics for NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco, and also a list of "other books worth stealing". Draft dodging, woodworking, legal aid, locksmithing, avoiding listening devices... it's all here, at least as it existed then. "Steal This Book" was Hoffman's fourth book, with "F--k The System", "Revolution For The Hell Of It" and "Woodstock Nation" coming earlier in that order.
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7recommend
37mentions
34people
2010–2026years
22% recommend73% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I have no doubt. He hails from the fine countercultural tradition of literary civil disobedience, a.k.a., writing and distributing information about subjects "the government doesn't want you to know" that strongly influenced early hacker subculture.
C.f., e.g., William Powell (The Anarchist Cookbook), Abbie Hoffman (Steal This Book; my personal favorite, while much of the information is outdated, the style is charming, and where else can you find information about phone phreaking, hitchhiking, shoplifting, street fighting, cooking (food, not drugs), panhandling, explosives, camping, firearms, birth control, welfare fraud, and Henry Kissinger's home phone number between the same two covers? At its core, it's a book of "life hacks", disreputable and otherwise, written decades before the term was coined.).
- Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman
- >The real OG of hacking
Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book and Kevin Mittnick taught me the noun form meaning of exploit. RIP
- Steal this book, by Abbie Hoffman [0]. Certainly not unknown, but not exactly something you find by accident. It's a book detailing 60s counterculture activities, and took a lot of work to find a publisher. Really interesting look back on history at general creative problem solving, and very entertaining. The most common theme in the book is "how to do x, for free".
- Steal This Book: https://leanpub.com/stealthisbook (Apparently no longer available from LeanPub... heres's a dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qm6vkabvd8jc3le/stealthisbook.pdf?... )
Don't Just Roll the Dice: http://download.red-gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf
- I also thought it would be about Abbie Hoffman's book. I read it in highschool just after Jerry Rubin's Do It!, because Rubin talks about Hoffman's book in his own. To this day Do It! is still my favorite book, and Steal This Book is close to second. It was my first encounter with what I naturally called "hacking" outside of the computer field.
