Free The Steal by Rachel Shteir Page B

from anyone. If you can ever get over the Protestant ethic you will see what I mean.” But where Rubin provides epigrams, Powell gives readers “commonsense tactics” in the form of an eleven-point list. Two of the items instruct the would-be revolutionary (shoplifter) how to disguise herself as a civilian: “Operate in pairs with one person holding the employee’s attention, the other stealing him blind,” and “If caught for shoplifting or robbery never admit to being part of the movement. It will get you more time in jail.”
    These handbooks of the counterculture mark the first time that any American had argued for shoplifting as a revolutionary act. While Elizabethan pamphlets noted that shoplifters wore silk to disguise themselves as nobility, and Enlightenment memoirs blamed stealing on class inequity, yippie books and articles advised liberators to gear up as establishment squares to steal for politics’ sake. In the underground feminist newspaper Rat , “Lizzie Liftwell” and “Pearl Paperhanger,” reportedly the pen names of Sharon Krebs, later a Weatherwoman, wrote one column, “Rip Off,” instructing the would-be shoplifter, who perhaps prior to becoming a revolutionary enjoyed the op-ed page on the commuter train from Connecticut: “If you read a New York Times , buy one before you go to the A&P.”
    The figure most responsible for pushing the shoplifting-as-revolution meme into the mainstream, Abbie Hoffman, was not content with dressing up as the Man. In January 1971, after more than two dozen New York publishers rejected his manuscript, Hoffman scrounged $15,000 from friends and set up Pirate Editions to put out Steal This Book . Grove Press distributed the book, which endorsed Hoffman’s stealing from rage at bourgeois America’s materialism. Barney Rosset, Grove’s publisher, wrote me, “We chained the books to the counter (in other words, buy the book, don’t steal it).”
    Reading Steal This Book today gives a sense of how innocent the world used to be: Scamming free plane rides simply by boarding without a ticket is unimaginable in our post-9/11 world. Even some of Hoffman’s notes on stealing are a bit dated. “Ripping off . . . is an act of revolutionary love,” he writes. A section on free food, invoking Robin Hood, offers a slightly more up-to-date line: “We have been shoplifting from supermarkets on a regular basis without raising the slightest suspicion, ever since they began. . . . We are not alone and the fact that so much stealing goes on and the supermarkets still bring in huge profits shows exactly how much overcharging occurs in the first place.” Hoffman includes helpful hints, photos with funny captions, and a bibliography. He also advises that “the food tastes better” shoplifted.
    At his best, Hoffman elaborates on how-to: “Sew a plastic bag onto your tee shirt or belt and wear a loose fitting jacket or coat to cover any noticeable bulge,” he writes. “Fried chicken is the best and easiest to pocket, or should we say bag.” Other tips Hoffman incorporates: Work with a partner to distract security; slide sandwiches between your thighs; cart stolen goods into the ladies’ room and rewrap them in the stalls. “Specialized uniforms, such as nun and priest garb, can be most helpful.”
    In four months, Steal This Book sold upward of 100,000 copies. No newspaper would review it. Few radio stations would advertise it. Many states banned it. In Ohio, stores wrapped the state shoplifting law on a brown paper band around the book. Canada seized copies at the border; Doubleday bookstores refused to stock it, blaming the title. Some authors might have seen this as failure; not Hoffman. He set up a table outside the Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and sold books there.
    Thirteen New York bookstores declined to sell the book. Only the San Francisco Chronicle ran ads. The New Left political journal Ramparts published an excerpt as well as an