Loompanics going out of business

Jesse Walker writes a brief obituary for one of the oddest businesses in the anarchist/libertarian world:

Loompanics Unlimited, the self-proclaimed "lunatic fringe of the libertarian movement," is going out of business. That's sad news for those of us who always enjoyed perusing the company's catalog, which reads like a D.I.Y. guide on crystal meth — the list of titles published under the Loompanics imprint ranges from How to Start Your Own Country to How to Rip Off a Drug Dealer. I'll certainly miss it: As a publisher and as a bookseller, Loompanics was the go-to joint for tomes on radicalism, survivalism, and what the catalog itself described as "weird ideas."

While I never ordered anything from them, I'm sorry to see 'em go under. They always struck me as a couple of pages from the Erisian "bible", the Principia Discordia, brought to commercial life. Of course, in my younger, more paranoid, days, I thought it was probably just a front for allowing anarchists and other malcontents to self-identify for some FBI/CIA database.

Update, 19 January: Brian Doherty has more on Loompanics.