Blog post

Comrades! Verso Needs Your Support

We need your help to launch our Autumn 2024 books after the bankruptcy of our UK distributor.

25 September 2024

Comrades! Verso Needs Your Support

Verso Kickstarter campaign: pledge today!

UPDATEWe are announcing a stretch goal for the last week of our Kickstarter campaign. Our goal: to reach £300,000 in pledges to put Verso on solid footing this autumn.  Based on an outpouring of interest and support for rewards that include ebook editions of Verso books, we have added five new ebook bundles with titles delivered in both ebook and PDF formats.

For more than fifty years Verso has been an essential radical publisher, publishing landmark books by Benedict AndersonJudith ButlerNoam ChomskyMike DavisNorman FinkelsteinNancy FraserWalter Rodney, and Edward Said.

Our world is changing quickly, from environmental collapse to the rise of right-wing political movements and new economic crises. What has not changed is Verso’s 50-year commitment to radical publishing – publishing books that challenge capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism, and provide a glimpse into the radical future we can build together.

Since its founding Verso has been supported by book sales, allowing us to remain independent as the larger book business has been taken over by international conglomerates.

But Verso now faces an unprecedented threat to its existence. In July we were informed that our UK distributor of many years, Marston Book Services, along with its parent company United Independent Distributors and its other subsidiaries, was beginning the process of filing for bankruptcy. The company entered administration on July 25, impacting not only Verso but a long list of independent publishers.

Publishers contract with book distributors to store their books and ship orders bound for  bookstores, libraries, and individual customers. Crucially, book distributors manage billing and collection, paying their client publishers for sales each month.

At the time it entered administration, Marston owed Verso nearly £1 million for book sales stretching back to January. Marston suspended shipping our books at the end of July, having laid off most of its staff, effectively severing Verso’s access to the UK market. Though Verso invested significantly in acquiring, editing, printing, and marketing books it published in the first half of 2024 it has received virtually no revenue for these sales in the UK.

The collapse of Marston is a major blow to Verso. We are asking any comrade who has the ability to consider making a pledge in support of Verso and our Autumn 2024 list, which will be published as we navigate this crisis.

REWARDS!

We are offering backers of this campaign an array of rewards: print and ebook book bundles selected from our Autumn 2024 publishing list; Verso merch including bookmarks, limited-edition Comrade pins, t-shirts, and tote bags; and more. We will also add more rewards throughout the campaign, so please check back for more reward offerings.

Verso Kickstarter campaign: pledge today!

Highlights from our Autumn/Winter publishing:

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"] 

Overshoot
The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming – just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of c...
Disaster Nationalism
The rise of the new far right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bol...
Ten Myths About Israel
In this groundbreaking book, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. This h...
The Killing of Gaza

The Killing of Gaza

Gideon Levy is one of the most respected critics of Israel's apartheid policies against the Palestinian people. He is the outspoken award-winning journalist who has been writing on the conflict for...
Crude Capitalism
This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse',...
Feeling at Home
Housing is more than bricks and mortar. The home is where our hopes and dreams play out, and it lies at the heart of our lives. This is where we rest, eat, and relax. The home we enjoy can determin...
If Only

If Only

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the m...
Loot

Loot

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of...
Moral Abdication
Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Wes...
My Country, Africa

My Country, Africa

Andrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial lead...
Marxist Modernism
Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...
Shattered Nation
Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further...
Taking Back Control?

Taking Back Control?

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centra...
The Commune Form
When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles ...
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth
Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted ...
The Jewelers of the Ummah
Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...
The Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil

Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire’s infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of erotici...
The History of Disruption
Why do we think of social struggles as movements? Have struggles been practiced otherwise, not as motion but as interruption, occupation, disturbance, arrest? Looking at three hundred years of Atla...
The Master's Tools
Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In The Master's Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up w...
This Fiction Called Nigeria
In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous coun...
You Can't Please All
The revolutionary upsurge of 1968–1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can’t Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to w...