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Merritt Clifton and Samisdat
by Gary S. Trujillo
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Well, by a strange accident of fate, I was going through some old magazines
a couple of days ago, and came across mention of Clifton's name in the July/
August, 1980 issue of _Environmental_Action_ magazine (a publication of the
organization with the same name - at 1346 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington,
D.C. 20036 202-833-1845). This issue carried an article written by Merritt
Clifton, entitled "Small and Recommended: An environmentalist's guide to
the small press."
Clifton writes of himself:
Merritt Clifton is one of the few people around who can trace
the history of the small press movement back to the days when
Stephen and Rebecca Day hauled the first printing press from
England to the American colonies. He's also an independent
publisher in his own right. In 1973 he began putting out
_Samisdat_, a digest sized magazine whose stories, poems,
essays and reviews explore what he calls "the inexorable trend
toward self reliance, conservation, live and let live
anarcho-libertarian politics and transcendental philosophy"
(sample issues available at $2 of $12 a year from Box 129,
Richford, VT 05476) [Bear in mind that this information is
from 1980.]
Clifton's article in EA is in a box, incorporated in an article by staff
writer Janet Marinelli, entitled "Return of the pushcart press." This
article by Marinelli has the following to say about Clifton:
Merritt Clifton, a small press writer and publisher from
Quebec, represents the most radical arm of the small press
movement today. Clifton and his wife grow most of their own
food and otherwise survive on the $300 or so a month that
their magazine _Samisdat_ pays them.
Until recently, says Clifton in an essay "On Small Press as
Class Struggle," the independent press did not challenge the
publishing status quo. Small pressdom was the domain of the
righ, "the minority privileged by birth with the wealth to buy
letterpress equipment . . . the time to write, edit, print and
publish--free of economic pressure--and the education
necessary to knowing how."
This is the only information I have, as the All Things Considered story
merely refers to Clifton as the author of the Vanguard Press article
cited by Project Censored.
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