In a recent interview for the 50th anniversary of Verso, Tariq Ali explained that the founding of the British radical journal New Left Review was inspired by French editor François Maspero. Founded in 1959, Les Éditions Maspero quickly became a hub for transnational militants seeking out information about ongoing revolutionary struggles around the world, publishing works from Martiniquan theorist Frantz Fanon, French Marxist Louis Althusser, American Black Power militants and hundreds more. Maspero’s concerted efforts to build global distribution networks made revolutionary story-telling and theory-making accessible to an unprecedented number of readers.

What the case of Maspero shows is that the international networks of solidarity most associated with the “Global Sixties” were built on the backs of militant publishing. Shedding light on the networks that Maspero himself built, this talk highlights the underappreciated importance of publishing as part of the rise of global revolutionary culture in the 1960s. Particularly for the majority of militants who would never travel the globe, books provided an invaluable window into the world and allowed them to imagine that they were working in concert with revolutionaries in places they never dreamt of visiting.