Someone's giving away copies of '1984' and urging people to 'fight back'
Even if our president doesn't read, that doesn't mean that we can't settle down with a disturbingly accurate depiction of what our country will likely become.
At a San Francisco bookstore a mysterious benefactor has made it that much easier to curl up with some dystopian classics by giving away free copies of certain books over the past few days.
The unnamed person donated over 50 copies of George Orwell's 1984 to the Booksmith store in Haight-Ashbury, along with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts.
The books were lined up on a table with the instruction to “Read up! Fight back!”
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A Booksmith employee said Wednesday that Orwell's famous 1949 novel has been going fast, but that there are still a few copies left.
The book has been hard to secure in the Trump era. Just days after his inauguration -- and Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" saga -- online copies were decimated as the book quickly sold out.
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The store employee said the Atwood novel (which is set in a future U.S. turned into a theocratic dictatorship and has been adapted into a Hulu series coming out in April) has been almost as popular as 1984.
On Wednesday afternoon the store said there were still some free copies of the dystopian novel, as well as a few of Larson's nonfiction recounting of an American family living in Hilter's Berlin.
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There's no word on who the mysterious book giver is, but they seem to be part of the #resistance.
Topics Books
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
