Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Stickers don’t ask permission. They’re slapped up under cover of night, hitching rides on lampposts and bathroom walls, whispering—or shouting—messages meant to question authority and disrupt the ordinary flow of power. Cheap, fast, anonymous, and at times illegal, political stickers have long been among the most agile tools of resistance. This book tells their story.
From early twentieth-century anarchist stickers and labor “stickerettes” to their later use in struggles against war, fascism, patriarchy, corruption, state violence, colonialism, and surveillance, this book traces how adhesive slips of paper have exerted political force far beyond their size. Often produced in moments of crisis or urgency, stickers function as “silent agitators,” portable calls to action designed to circulate ideas and demands when speech is dangerous, assemblies are banned, or institutions fail.
Through more than twenty essays by activists, artists, and scholars, readers encounter sticker campaigns born in union halls, feminist collectives, queer and AIDS-era direct action groups, revolutionary uprisings, fan cultures, and grassroots campaigns in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Whether denouncing corrupt presidents, confronting gender violence, calling for racial justice, or building solidarity across borders, these essays show how stickers have animated history and made politics visible in everyday life. These stickers trace generations of dissent, invention, and collective imagination but also hold current relevance as street-level interventions and testimony—proof for future generations that someone, somewhere, cared enough to print stickers and believed that even the smallest act could help change the world. Ordinary people, armed with ink, glue, and conviction, have always found ways to speak truth to power.
Contributors include Paul Buhle, Penelope Rosemont, CrimethInc. Ex-Worker’s Collective, Lincoln Cushing, Guerrilla Girls, Josh MacPhee, Ganzeer, Todd Lawrence and Heather Shirey, Kevin Howley, Jen Hoyer, Nazar Kozak, Irina Bukharin, Eric Corriel, John Collins, Marina Llorente, and Kiara Welsch.
“Over the last ten years, I’ve met some great kooks—ones who are experts on an extremely specific sticker-related topic or history. Catherine Tedford, a brilliant academic nerd gone to eleven, writes about political activism and looks at how and why the sticker medium is such an effective tool within that arena.”
—DB Burkeman, author of Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art
“Stickers have always done what other media can’t—they show up uninvited, say what needs to be said, and refuse to leave. Paper Bullets is a serious, deeply researched, and genuinely infectious account of how a cheap piece of adhesive paper became one of the most effective political tools in history. Catherine Tedford has been obsessing over this stuff longer than almost anyone, and it shows.”
—Oliver Baudach, founder and director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, Berlin
Preface
Introduction
1. Industrial Workers of the World’s Early “Stickerettes” or “Silent Agitators,” Catherine Tedford
2. Sticker Bombing: I.W.W. Stickerettes, 1910s-’70s
3. Silent Agitators, Their Secret, Penelope Rosemont
4. Stickers: The 1960s and After, Paul Buhle
5. U.S. War in Vietnam: Stickers and “The Struggle to Change America,” Catherine Tedford
6. Watergate: The Proof Increases Every Day, Kevin Howley
7. Sticker Bombing: President Richard M. Nixon, 1970s
8. I’d Rather Be Smashing Imperialism, Lincoln Cushing
9. Against Silence: ACT UP and Early AIDS Stickers, Catherine Tedford
10. Sticking It to the Patriarchy with SisterSerpents, Jen Hoyer
11. This Phone Is Tapped, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective
12. George W. Bush: No Intel Inside, Kevin Howley
13. Sticker Bombing: President George W. Bush
14. Sticker Robot and Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign, Catherine Tedford
15. The Silenced and Exiled Voices of Russian Activists, 2009-2012, Irina Bukharin
16. Three Things I Have Learned from the Mask of Freedom, Ganzeer
17. Rebel Stickers from Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests, 2013-14, Nazar Kozak
18. The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly
19. Trumping Hope, Kevin Howley
20. tiny trump, Eric Corriel
21. Germany’s Football Club St. Pauli: The Pirates of the League, Catherine Tedford
22. Murderous City of Lakes: Protest Stickers and the 2020 Uprising in Minneapolis, David Todd Lawrence and Heather Shirey
23. Contra la violencia machista en España: Against Gender Violence in Spain, Marina Llorente
24. The “Shut Rikers” Sticker Project, Josh MacPhee
25. ¡No al genocidio! Spanish Stickers in Solidarity with Palestine, John Collins
26. Linksjugend [’solid]/Left Youth Solid: A Grassroots Approach to the Political Art of Stickers, Kiara Welsch
27. Featured Artists: Dignidad Rebelde and Hecho Con Gonas
28. Sticker Bombings: U.S. Immigration Politics; Indigenous Rights in North America; Gender and Sexuality in the Trump Era; Cats as Symbols of Defiance
Afterward
Contributors
Illustrations