Left Bank Distribution, or LBD, is a project that was started by the Left Bank Books
collective in 1980 and essentially stopped functioning in 2001. LBD was a book distribution project that
provided direct mail-order service of radical book, zines and magazines to
individuals and bookstores during the 1980s and 1990s. We provided wholesale distribution of radical
and alternative books, pamphlets, magazines and zines to independent
bookstores, tabling projects, libraries and other organizations, as well as
individuals. We produced a yearly mail
order catalog. At the time LBD was in
existence it offered one of the largest selections of anarchist & radical
books in the world - conveniently providing difficult-to-locate materials to
customers around the world, from Finland,
to Brazil to Japan. Before
AK Press existed there was LBD.
In the late 1990s the market for bookstores really began
changing. Corporatization caused chains
to proliferate, putting a lot of independent bookstores out of business. Financially, book distribution projects made
an even smaller profit margin than most bookstores. One key way to make a book distribution
project successful was to do business on a large scale. But, other radical book and literature
distributors started up, as well, and the market became saturated in the 1990s,
and LBD found it more and more difficult to run the mail-order project in a way
that was financially sustainable.
Publishing is another way to make a larger profit margin, but Left Bank only published occasionally, and this was not
our focus, so making profit from publishing was not reliable for LBD. In the end the collective chose to end the
mail order distribution project, so that it would stop losing money. Slowly, over the following ten years we paid
off our debts from the distribution project with money we made from donations
and from bookstore profits. Some
accounts were no longer in existence by the time we had the money to pay off
our debt, and other accounts forgave our debt as solidarity with our project.
Overall the record of the LBD project is sort of a time
capsule, representing a snapshot of what was going on in the world of radical
publishing during the 1980s and 1990s in the USA, and internationally. Some of the accounts we had during that time
are independent and radical bookstores, publishers, magazines and authors that
are no longer in existence. The archive
of the LBD project is, in some ways a record of LBD itself, and is in other
ways, a record of the radical and independent literary community during that
time period.
You can visit our in-store Library that consists of many of the titles we used to distro as well as publish, or check out numerous titles to take home from the L@s Quixotes Lending Library located in Autonomia Community Center.
