The Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary is a new not-for-profit prisoner support fundraising project that was officially launched by Brighton Anarchist Black Cross and associates at the 2012 London Anarchist Bookfair. Our plan is to create a long-term stable income for prisoner support activities, delivering a publishing template that can be used by a hopefully independent self-sustaining collective that will go on to produce the diary in future years.

This stylish new radical European counterpart to the Slingshot pocket diary focuses on a new area of radical politics and history each year: the 2013 Bottled Wasp featured an introduction to prisoner support and general prison-related history and issues; and the 2014 edition covers the history of radical arts and artists, focusing on the importance of anarchist and libertarian thought on the Arts, revealing its lesser known and hidden histories in the areas of the plastics arts, music, literature, photography, film, dance, etc.

Thus, the 2014 Bottled Wasp contains short introductions on Anarchist detective fiction, science fiction, Berlin Dada, Russian Anarcho-Futurism and its Italian counterpart, the Czech and Japanese artistic anarchist avant gardes, Néo-Impressionism, Octave Mirbeau, Nancy Cunard and the anarchist magician Mystag. We also reveal the hidden libertarian connections of Franz Kafka, August Strindberg, Georges Simenon, Mark Rothko, Hans Richter, Luigi Russolo, Pablo Neruda, Marcel Duchamp, John Cowper Powys, Lawrence Durrell, Lucien Pissarro, Albert Camus and many more.

The cover of the 2013 Bottled Wasp featured artwork courtesy of Clifford Harper, and for the cover art for the 2014 diary we have a cover designed by the well-known London street artist Stik. The diary itself is also lavishly illustrated with numerous vignette illustrations of the artists (and their works) that we are featuring this year.