Merritt Clifton and Samisdat

Merritt Clifton and Samisdat

by Gary S. Trujillo

Well, by a strange accident of fate, I was going through some old magazines a couple of days ago, and came across mention of Clifton's name in the July/ August, 1980 issue of _Environmental_Action_ magazine (a publication of the organization with the same name - at 1346 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20036 202-833-1845). This issue carried an article written by Merritt Clifton, entitled "Small and Recommended: An environmentalist's guide to the small press."

Clifton writes of himself:

Merritt Clifton is one of the few people around who can trace the history of the small press movement back to the days when Stephen and Rebecca Day hauled the first printing press from England to the American colonies. He's also an independent publisher in his own right. In 1973 he began putting out _Samisdat_, a digest sized magazine whose stories, poems, essays and reviews explore what he calls "the inexorable trend toward self reliance, conservation, live and let live anarcho-libertarian politics and transcendental philosophy" (sample issues available at $2 of $12 a year from Box 129, Richford, VT 05476) [Bear in mind that this information is from 1980.]

Clifton's article in EA is in a box, incorporated in an article by staff writer Janet Marinelli, entitled "Return of the pushcart press." This article by Marinelli has the following to say about Clifton:

Merritt Clifton, a small press writer and publisher from Quebec, represents the most radical arm of the small press movement today. Clifton and his wife grow most of their own food and otherwise survive on the $300 or so a month that their magazine _Samisdat_ pays them.

Until recently, says Clifton in an essay "On Small Press as Class Struggle," the independent press did not challenge the publishing status quo. Small pressdom was the domain of the righ, "the minority privileged by birth with the wealth to buy letterpress equipment . . . the time to write, edit, print and publish--free of economic pressure--and the education necessary to knowing how."

This is the only information I have, as the All Things Considered story merely refers to Clifton as the author of the Vanguard Press article cited by Project Censored.