Trash Fascism, Not Books! 🗑️

This benefit sticker supports our Banned Books Back! campaign to return books banned by Duval County Public Schools to kids! All proceeds go to cover postage, packaging materials, printing, and related campaign costs.

Printed by Off Color Decals on high-quality vinyl with eco-solvent inks, this kiss-cut sticker features an adorable antifascist possum illustration by Des. The removable 3" sticker is waterproof and safe for outdoor use. It is also scratch and UV fade resistant for up to 5 years of extreme cuteification of your car, laptop, or water bottle!

We’re almost 80% funded! Help us get all the way by heading to https://firestorm.coop/products/21029-banned-books-back-benefit-sticker.html

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (-Esmé).

Join our first Banned Books Back! packaging party and help us send books removed from Florida public schools back to kids in Florida! On Sunday, January 28th from 11am - 2pm ET we'll be packaging free picture books and chapter books along with zines and stickers. No experience is necessary, we'll show you how it's done! 🫡

For the past few weeks we've been collecting requests from kids and their advocates in Florida and at we've got a backlog of hundreds of orders to fulfill! Do you read the news about the rise in book-banning in our region and want to do something about it? Now is your chance!

Invite your friends of all ages! https://firestorm.coop/events/3139-banned-books-back-packaging-party.html

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (Esme)

We just passed the halfway point of our fundraising goal for Banned Books Back! Moms for Liberty, eat your hearts out! 😏

To recap, our collective received a serendipitous donation of children's books that had been removed from Florida schools as part of an ongoing effort to censor titles depicting queer joy, civil rights history, immigrant stories, and more. Right now, our collective is harboring dozens of boxes of these "dangerous" titles — but not for long. Later this month, we'll be calling on our local community to help package bundles and send these Banned Books... Back!

Thank you so much to the folks who have boosted this effort, including but not limited to Autostraddle, The Washington Post, LGBTQ Nation, so many rad bookseller buddies, and the 270+ folks who've donated. 💓

You can still help by contributing to the crowdfunding campaign (https://givebutter.com/bannedbooksback), or request a book package directly if you're a kid or for a kiddo in your life through https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/XYzGVoEYnT+hkblrTJy2D8aYzHb295vmVgyJc0NTz+0

Keep reading dangerously, kids! If it didn't matter, they wouldn't try so hard to stop you 👀

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (Esme)

We've been sitting on something exciting... and we're finally ready to share! In 2023, our focus was on building a new home for Firestorm. Well, our next big project will launch in January, reaching far beyond our local community: with your support, we're going to send thousands of books pulled from schools and classrooms in Duval County, Florida, back to the kids they were intended for!

It's kind of a wild story! Last winter our co-op was unexpectedly entrusted with 22,500 books for grades K-5 that would otherwise have been destroyed. More than half feature queer characters or history, and many revolve around Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Asian protagonists. That's 11,000 pounds of titles that right-wing politicians and small-minded school administrators conspired to keep out of the hands of young folks in one of Florida's most racially diverse counties.

We love giving away free books, but this project is a little complex because we're committed to getting as many of the books as possible to kids in Florida, and Duval County in particular. Packaging and delivering thousands of titles across state lines will take serious resources, so today we're launching a crowdfunding campaign to support the effort. Will you help us?

Visit https://givebutter.com/bannedbooksback to learn more, make a donation, and share our call to action!

#BannedBooksBack #TrashFascismNotBooks #FreedomToRead #BannedBooks #MutualAid #DuvalCounty #DuvalCountyPublicSchools #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop

Timothy Bella & Hannah Natanson: Teacher fired after #DeSantis says bookshelf video was ‘fake narrative’

"Brian Covey, a substitute teacher at Mandarin Middle School in Jacksonville, posted a video to Twitter last month showing rows of empty bookshelves at the school’s library. Covey is one of several teachers in Duval and Manatee counties who’ve posted photos or videos in recent weeks showing how school districts are responding to new Florida laws regarding books and materials available to children in classrooms and libraries. Duval County Public Schools, the district for Mandarin Middle School, urged educators last month to follow the new laws and ;err on the side of caution' to determine whether a book 'is developmentally appropriate for student use.'"

DeSantis is quintupling-down on his #fascism #Florida effort.

#manateecounty #duvalcountypublicschools
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/18/florida-teacher-empty-school-bookshelves-video-desantis