Pound the Pavement #31: Palestinian Vinyl Graphics
Pound the Pavement #31: Palestinian Vinyl Graphics
Art & Culture / Anticolonial Politics / Partner Publisher
Graphics from the Sleeves of Vinyl Records of Palestinian Resistance and Existence
This booklet compiles almost 60 examples of graphics, typography, and photography culled from the sleeves of Palestinian vinyl records. It also features a short essay and a full discography of the records the images are culled from.
This bundle includes a book preorder, and will ship December 2026
Josh MacPhee
Art & Culture / Labor / Social Movements
The Sounds of Resistance Bundle includes one print copy of Barricade Sounds, Strike While the Needle is Hot, and An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels; along with a digital download of the Barricade Sounds mixtape and a digital download of the forthcoming expanded edition of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels. That’s over $100 of political music history and inspiration for $70!!
Barricade Sounds: Music and May '68
In this short, graphic volume, Josh MacPhee explores the role of music and sound in the student and worker revolt on May 1968 in France through the lens of the vinyl records that emerged out of—and were produced to comment on—the struggle.
“A beautiful and inspiring read about music as a form of resistance, imagination, and collective action.” —Brage Aronsen, Norwegian bookseller, publisher, and record label manager
Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker's Revolt, co-authored with Kennedy Block
Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
“Throughly researched and invaluable.” —The Wire
An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels
A groundbreaking exploration of the parallel rise of social movements and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution in the second half of the twentieth century, alongside a compendium of over 750 record labels that propelled political music and resistance on an international scale.
“Josh MacPhee has done a great service for all of us interested in the intersection of independent records and radical politics. . . . Every entry opens a window onto a different story of creativity and resistance and I couldn’t stop hopscotching around from page to page, each one sparking off vectors for further thought and exploration. A totally mind-blowing accomplishment.” —Guy Picciotto, Fugazi
Daniel Tucker
Josh MacPhee
Art & Culture / Abolition / Urban Studies / Partner Publisher
A new 2026 reprint of this zine originally published in 2018, slightly redesigned, some corrections, and better printing!
This issue of Pound the Pavement is a look back on—and documentation of—the God Bless Graffiti Coalition project. The God Bless Graffiti Coalition was a short lived public art project conceptualized by Josh MacPhee and Daniel Tucker, and actualized by an international network of graffiti writers, street artists, and sympathizers in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Josh MacPhee
Art & Culture / Partner Publisher
In 1962, Penguin Books carried out an unprecedented experiment in Anglophone paperback book cover design. Deploying a new design grid created by Romek Marber, they released a flood of crime and mystery novels wrapped in simple, efficient, green and black covers. An unheralded peak of late-Modernist design, many of these covers still stand out today as some of the most interesting and compelling ever created for Penguin—or any press!
This publication, in which Josh MacPhee tells the history of this design experiment, includes nearly 70 cover reproductions as well as a bibliography and bios of key designers. In addition, it features a 2-sided poster with a giant grids of 128 book covers.
The content draws on earlier research MacPhee had done on the Penguin Crime series for his Judging Books By Their Covers blog post series on Justseeds.
Forthcoming, ships December 2026
Josh MacPhee
Preface by Grégory Pierrot
Art & Culture / Capitalism / Labor / Social Movements
In this short, graphic volume, Josh MacPhee explores the role of music and sound in the student and worker revolt on May 1968 in France through the lens of the vinyl records that emerged out of—and were produced to comment on—the struggle. From the chanson enrages that sung on the barricades, the birth of an independent and politicized music infrastructure in France, the explosive emergence of free jazz and rock scenes, and the enduring legacy and embedding of the sounds and aesthetics of '68 into experimental and pop music to this day, this book shows the impact of liberatory politics and action on our audio landscape.