About us

Andaleeb Cartonera is an independent cardboard-cover book press (editorial cartonera) based in the city of Madison and run by a small team of volunteers with the purpose of publishing books about Palestine.

We are not affiliated to any institution, and we work with community members who contribute their skills to our initiative, in an effort to raise awareness about the Palestinian cause and the genocide in Gaza.

Our publications wouldn’t exist without the generosity of authors, compilers, interviewers, projects and organizations who give permission to print their texts (already available online), or whose content is under Creative Commons License. They wouldn’t exist either without the wonderful community of volunteers who come together in solidarity to help us make handcrafted books in our workshops.

Our project continues the tradition of Latin-American cartoneras, small alternative publishers, in some cases grassroots cooperatives, that produce low-cost, handcrafted books using recycled cardboard. They spread throughout Latin America and other parts of the world after 2003, when the first cartonera was created in Argentina. Since then, its cardboard-cover books defined by an anti-establishment spirit have gained attention from prestigious libraries and universities, which began collecting and preserving them, as is the case of the British Library, the New York Public Library, the University of London’s Senate House Library, Harvard University’s Widener Library, and the library systems of Cambridge University, Brown University, University of Pittsburgh, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Andaleeb Cartonera values archival work and contributes to it, but at the same time, as an independent grassroots project, we believe that the cardboard-cover books we produce with the community in solidarity with Palestine belong in the streets and are meant to be read, handled, shared and passed on, even if that makes their life ephemeral. We’ll continue to make books and bringing them out to the streets with the means we have and no matter how small our distribution might be. As Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi has put it: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now.”

Andaleeb Cartonera is but a handful of sand thrown into the cogs of a colossal and unrelenting machine of death and destruction.

* The inspiration behind the name Andaleeb Cartonera comes from the poem Defiance, by Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish:

“You may fasten my chains
Deprive me of my books and tobacco
You may fill my mouth with earth
Poetry will feed my heart, like blood
It is salt to the bread
And liquid to the eye
I will write it with nails,
eye sockets and daggers,
I will recite it in my prison cell –
in the bathroom –
in the stable –
Under the whip –
Under the chains –
In spite of my handcuffs
I have a million nightingales
On the branches of my heart
Singing the song of liberation.”