George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Erik Larson have been recruited in the resistance against US president Donald Trump by a mystery benefactor in San Francisco, who has paid for copies of the three authors’ most famous dystopian works to be given away with the exhortation: “Read up! Fight back!”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 50 copies of the Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four were bought on Friday night from Booksmith, located in the famous hippy district Haight-Ashbury. The books were snapped up quickly after they were placed on a table with a sign that read: “Read up! Fight back! A mystery benefactor has bought these copies of ‘1984’ for you if you need one.”
Proprietor Christin Evans said that as soon as the copies were gone, the anonymous donor, who lives locally, repeated their act of generosity, this time with copies of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts.
We're out of free copies of 1984, but we have The Handmaid's Tale and In the Garden of Beasts up for grabs. #resist #thanksmysterybenefactor pic.twitter.com/a9AVkeZSzx
— The Booksmith (@Booksmith) February 4, 2017
Describing the act as a “fruitful, constructive form of resistance”, the bookseller told the SF Chronicle that the random act had inspired other customers to follow suit. “This has become a way for bookstores to play a role in this political climate,” Evans told the newspaper. “Bookstores believe greatly in the power of the written word to help inform, educate, inspire, and persuade.”
On Twitter on Monday, Booksmith announced it had ordered another 100 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and said it would continue to help people “sponsor” copies to pass on to others.
Since the new president took office, Orwell’s and Atwood’s dystopian classics have enjoyed what Time magazine is calling a “Trump Bump”; Nineteen Eighty-Four raced up book charts on both sides of the Atlantic following the inauguration, while Atwood’s 1985 bestseller toppled rightwing controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos from the No 1 spot on Amazon earlier this week. The Handmaid’s Tale also benefited from promotion during the Super Bowl, with an advert for the forthcoming TV adaptation, due for release in April, airing during a commercial break during the programme, which was watched by more than 111 million people.
Set in New England in the near future, The Handmaid’s Tale follows the story of Offred, a young woman chosen to bear the children of an infertile wife of a high-ranking official. In the book, the US has become a theocratic dictatorship in which women’s rights are destroyed following a coup in the wake of a staged assassination of the president. The new regime suspends the constitution and moves quickly to consolidate power, reorganising society along militarised, hierarchical lines. The book has been cited recently as one of a score of speculative novels, including Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, that predicted the rise of Trump and his administration. All have enjoyed a revival in the bestseller charts, with Lewis’s 1935 novel entering the top 30 on Amazon.
