Welcome to the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive

Based in Nottingham (UK), we look after tens of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, zines, leaflets, posters and other items documenting the anarchist movement in the UK and beyond, as well as local radical history. Browse our catalogue, access digitised records in our free Digital Library and get in touch to arrange a visit.
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Hello everyone and welcome to another round up of news on the Sparrows’ Nest.

Much has happened since the last report, most noticeably our reorganisation of the website and the addition of loads of materials to the Digital Library (see below). When using our catalogue, you will now notice that we have stopped displaying it as a massive HTML table. The easiest way to avoid various technical problems with those old HTML catalogues is that we now upload the catalogue as spreadsheets, which are more accurate and a bit easier to use (still, if there is someone out there who can offer support to design a proper online database to improve search functions etc., please get in touch!).

Aside from welcoming more researchers and interested readers, we have been visited in the last few months by a number of artists, for instance Kajal Nisha Patel and Sunil Shah who accessed our collections whilst working on their installation A Rebel Scene for the New Art Exchange (NAE). It was great to see some of our documents being appreciated as the amazing pieces of art they are. We also took part in a panel discussion at the NAE, so thanks again for getting us involved in all that!

We were also very happy that we could (at least marginally) support the organisers of the excellent Commoners’ Fair which was recently held in Radford.

As always, we have been busy taking in new donations of books and other materials (thanks e.g. to the ever generous AK Press and Kate Sharpley Library, who e.g. donated an awesome edition of Osvaldo Bayer’s Rebellion in Patagonia).

Among the many new materials we added to the Digital Library are the (humble) beginnings of a systematic digitisation of our Freedom newspaper collection, with sixteen issues of Freedom (Vol: 41, issues 1-16, 1980) now available to be accessed online:

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 01

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 02

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 03

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 04

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 05

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 06

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 07

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 08

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 09

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 10

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 11

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 12

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 13

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 14

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 15

Freedom, Vol:41, issue 16

Other documents which can now be found online include:

Trotwatch – An Anarchist Commentary on the Life of the Left (published locally back 1992 – how little things have changed…)

Armand: Anarchism and Individualism

Furthermore we digitised a bunch of issues of Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism:

Solidarity – A Libertarian Socialist Journal, issue 09

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 10

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 11

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 12

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 13

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 14

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 15

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 16

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 17

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 19

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 20

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 22-23

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 24

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 25-26

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 27

Solidarity – A Journal of Libertarian Socialism, issue 28-9

As always, let us add a big thank you to all those who have donated materials and funds and our appeal not to throw out heaps of old, potentially awesome papers, but to get in touch!

Our regular opening times are every Thursday 11am-2pm (contact us if you cannot make these days, we can always arrange for a visit on other times/dates).

Till next time, keep reading, archiving and fighting!

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