Paper Bullets: 120 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World

Available for preorder.

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.

Additional 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.

Praise

“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

“Catherine Tedford's Paper Bullets is exactly the kind of book you would expect Catherine to make: ambitious, obsessive, detailed, and driven by a genuine love of sticker culture. What might seem like a niche subject in someone else's hands becomes, in Catherine's, a fascinating story of politics, art, public space, and street culture. By bringing together contributors who you might think have no business sharing the same pages, Paper Bullets captures the many worlds that exist together through stickering. The result is mind blowing. Read it.”
—Sterling "SEAZ" Downey, founder Under Pressure Annual Graffiti Festival, Montréal

About the Editor

Catherine Tedford has been researching and writing about political stickers for over twenty years. Her collection of original, unused stickers from around the world numbers over eighteen thousand and counting. She has organized traveling sticker exhibitions in the United States, Germany, and Canada. In 2015, she received a five-year grant from the Council of Independent Colleges to digitize her stickers as an open access archive. She writes about stickers at stickerkitty.org. She lives in upstate New York.

Click here for one-page information sheet on this product