The Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company (“subversive literature for the whole family since 1886”) is located on the North Side of Chicago (1726 W. Jarvis Avenue) and is one of the world’s premier publishers of radical, socialist, and labor history. Founded by Charles H. Kerr and Mary Walden, it’s known for distributing books on socialism, free thought, economics, history, hygiene, American fiction, music, and more, as well as reissues and translations.

Between 1906 and 1909, Charles H. Kerr published Ernest Untermann’s translation of the first three volumes of Marx’s Capital—the first full text in English—and the initial popular edition of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, as well as works by Clarence Darrow, Peter Kropotkin, Carl Sandburg, and Jack London. In 1908, with the help of Mary Marcy, it began publishing the vibrant International Socialist Review. During World War I, the company remained publically and uncompromisingly revolutionary, thus opposing the war, and so the U.S. Government banned the International Socialist Review from the mail under the Espionage Act. In 1928, Kerr retired after directing the company for forty-two years, leaving the company in charge of John Keracher and other members of the Proletarian Party, who would direct through 1971.

At that point, the Proletarian Party was defunct and so its leaders gave the company over to a new board, including Fred Thompson, Joseph Giganti, Virgil Vogel, and Burt Rosen. The company published new biographies of Eugene Debs and Lucy Parsons, as well as Daniel Fusfeld’s Rise and Repression of Radical Labor and reissues of old Kerr titles by Engels, Marx, Lafargue, and Mother Jones. Charles H. Kerr, in large part thanks to Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, continues as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit educational association to this day.