I have been thinking about the circulation of anarchist newspapers and magazines.I know that Mother Earth had a circulation of about 3.000 at its highest point.Liberty's highest circulation was around a thousand. Does anyone else out there have any figures??

Just reading 'Sacco and Vanzetti the anarchist background' - I think Avrich gives figures for some of the Italian-american papers. now i know you're interested i can look for numbers. john

Cronaca Sovversiva: 'never exceeded four or five thousand' - Avrich Sacco and Vanzetti p50.

L'Adunata dei refrattari: rose to 10,000 after WW2 (when copies were being shipped backto Italy) - Berman, The torch and the Axe.

According to Maximoff in The Syndicalists in the Russian Revolution: "Newspapers were published not only in the large administrative and industrial centres, like Moscow and Petrograd, which had several Anarchist newspapers (in Petrograd the circulation of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Golos Trouda and the Anarchist Burevestnik was 25,000 each; the Moscow daily Anarchia had about the same circulation), but also in provincial cities, like Kronstadt, Yaroslavl, Nizhni-Novgorod, Saratov, Samara, Krasnoyarsk, Vladivostok, Rostov on Don, Odessa and Kiev. (In 1918, Anarchist papers were coming out in Ivanovo-Vosnesensk, Chembar, Ekaterinburg, Kursk, Ekaterinoslav, Viatka.)"

Also Green Anarchy claims their current circulation is between 8000-9000. Ha! Nicole

How come I've seen the figure of 10,000 for Mother Earth's peak circulation? i.e. in the introduction to Peter Glassgold's anthology, and I'm sure in a couple of other sources. I've actaully been working on a database of US anarchist newspaper circulations (you stole my idea!); I've got about 29 figures so far (but some are estimates from authorities or historians, and this includes the 10,000 number for ME) and I'll post the results once they're in a more managable form.  --Kenyon

Yes.I have seen that.The figure 10,000 comes from Rebel In Paradise and Drinnon offers no source for it.The only figure I have seen EG mention is 3,000, but I'll go and do some counting of subscribers.A couple of other newspapers.According to Marcelino Garcia in "Anarchist Voices"  .." the top circulation of Cultura Proletaria" which I edited from the 1930s till it closed in 1952, was 4,000" (p392) Meanwhile  Frank Brand (Enrico Arrigoni) states that "Eresia" ( 1928-1932) had a print run of 2,000.(pp174) Database eh? Fucking students

You know I wouldn't be surprised if  those numbers for GA were correct.Does anyone have any sense of  circulation of other current publications?

Another general point,I guess,is the number of subscribers papers had/have.From my own experience, there was a  clear relatioship between number of subscribers to the paper and how long it existed!!

This also relates to the question of subscribers vs. circulation (i.e. print run)--I think often the two are conflated. Then of course estimating readership is a whole other question. In addition, there's the fact that anarchist publications knew no borders--papers published in the US went all over the world, while anarchists in the US regularly read foreign, wrote for, and funded papers like Freedom, Der Arbeter Fraynd, Studi Sociali, etc. --Kenyon

Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung 5000 in 1886 (EGPP Book 1). Anarchy: JODA has wide circulation but their numbers are probably extremely inflated. I wonder if they count the dozens of copies sent to us at PLP that I throw straight into the bin. Nicole

Yes.One of my reasons for thinking on this issue was just how many anarchists papers got/get out there, beyond subscriber lists.When John on donations to  KSL from various people in the UK I notice there are often 10 copies of the same issue of Class War,all new and pristine.They never went anywhere.I hope that wasn't repeated too much.Anyway I am at the archive this weekend and I'll see what other figures I can find.--Barry

You know you're freaking old when you stay up to 4 in the morning on a Friday night reading through the pages of The Blast  trying to figure out the paper's circulation. I scoured every page looking for some kind of clue and here is what I found. According to the 15 March 1916 it cost them $75 to produce each edition. The wholesale cost for the paper was 2.5 cents and a single copy was 5 cents. If we take these figures I would make a conservative estimate that the print run for the Blast at this time was 1500 - 3000 ($75/0.05 or $75/0.025). As to how many people actually read it, who knows. Then in the 15 July 1916 edition, during the height of the anti-preparedness movement, the editors announced that the Blast was going to double its circulation. This is confirmed in the 15 August 1916 edition when the paper states they have printed "an extra large issue this time" (p.7). This was probably necessary due to the attention the paper was receiving in the mainstream press after the bombing and arrests of Mooney, Billings, Nolan and Weinberg. The editors were using the paper to spread the word about their case.  In Anarchist Voices Marion Bell remembers mailing copies of the Blast to people all over the world (including Malatesta in London) from her hometown in AZ after AB had problems mailing it from San Francisco (p. 30). So in the end, I could not find a exact number of readers. Oh well. --Nicole the insomniac

Okay, here goes:

sub=subscribers rather than total circ.

e=estimate

r=recollection by someone involved in producing the paper

Di Fraye Gezelshaft    1910: 6-8,000 Di Fraye Gezelshaft, January 1910; May 1910

Regeneración            1910: 27,000r  Freedom (London), Dec 1922

                              1915: 4,000 (sub?) James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, 59

L’Allarme                  1915: 2,000   Hoerder, ed., 3:37

                              1916: 6,000   Hoerder, ed., 3:37

Freedom                  1919: 2,500   Freedom (New York), April-May 1919

Khleb i Viola            1919: 4,547 (sub?) New York State Senate, Revolutionary Radicalism, I:862

The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin 1920: 2,000e  RR, II:2004

Il Martello:                1920: 2,500e  RR, II:2004

                              1923: 6,500   Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 105

                              1924: 10,500  Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 105

                              1929: 8,000   Pernicone, Carlo Tresca, 105

Golos Truzhenika        1925: 1,400   Grigorii Petrovich Maximov to Mark Marachnyi, 22 June 1925; Mark Mrachnyi Papers, Labadie Collection

Cultura Proletaria      1920s-30s: 4,000r  Anarchist Voices, 392

Vanguard                  1930s: 3,000r   Anarchist Voices, 450

Freedom                   1933: c. 2,000  Freedom (New York), 18 March 1933

Spanish Revolution      1938: 7,000r     Sam Dolgoff, Fragments, 19

Delo Truda-Probuzhdenie 1939: 200-300  Hoerder, ed., 2:118

Also, the following figures are of Chicago's IWPA anarchist papers from Bruce Nelson's Beyond the Martyrs:

Paper                           1880    1881    1882    1883    1884    1885    1886

Der Verbote                5,000   6,000   6,500   7,000   7,115    8,000   8,000

Arbeiter-Zeitung          3,000   4,500   4,850   5,200    5,326    5,110   5,780

Die Fackel                   5,000   5,000   7,150   9,300   10,035  10,000 12,200

Den Nye Tid                1,600   1,600   2,000e  2,400e 2,800

The Alarm                                                              2,000   3,000   3,000e

Budoucnost & Lampcka                                 750e    1,000e  1,200e  1,500e

Der Anarchist                                                                                300e

--Kenyon, the fucking student...