Find your own flavor of pride with this definitive guide to pride flags of all stripes—their history, meanings, legacies, and cultural significance around the world. A whole spectrum of stories has unfolded since the original rainbow flag debuted in the 1970s. For the first time, here are over 30 pride flags collected together, accompanied by details about their symbolism, creators, usage, and sometimes controversial histories. It’s all presented with graphic flair by Icelandic designer and comedian Sindri “Sparkle” Freyr.
If you’re LGBTQ, you’re likely familiar with your community flags, but you’re not the only ones! Kinksters, bears, sex workers, and drag performers—there’s a flag for you. If you’re nonbinary, intersex, agender, genderqueer, disabled, polyamorous, two-spirt, ace-aro, or demi—you’ve got a flag, too. These flags and the motives behind them show us that there really is room for everyone. With both queer visibility and heteronormative hatred on the rise around the world, this bold, stylish celebration of vexillology (the study of flags!) shows how these symbols can help us share who we are, how we define ourselves, and where we find community.
Keep reading to learn more about pride flag history in this first-of-its-kind guide, shipping now from our site or available June 2 at your local Microcosm dealer.
Al Carroll is Associate Professor of US, American Indian, and Latin American History at Northern Virginia Community College, and a former Senior Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia. His latest book is “Indigenous Punk: A Definitive Guide to the Native, Aboriginal, and Pacific Islander Metal and Rock ‘n’ Roll Musicians Who Changed Music.”
This week on the pod, Al joins Joe and Elly to talk about Native punk and metal history, his favorite bands (incredible recs galore!), and how the book came together. (and keep an eye on the background for an adorable special guest appearance)
Who says you need a film degree, fancy equipment, or studio backing to fulfill your filmmaking dreams? Pick up your phone or the video or film camera you found at an estate sale, and make your own movies, music videos, documentaries, vlogs, and more.
Charmingly hand-written and -illustrated, this revised and updated edition of the beloved classic fits in your pocket and provides all the essential information you need, free of jargon or elitist obstacles. You’ll learn why movies move us, how film and video cameras work, how to light and expose shots, how to create eye-catching compositions, how to record crystal-clear sound, and more.
Whether you’re a content creator, journalist, artist, director, fundraiser, or activist, movies are a more powerful storytelling tool than ever. This book will help you improve your technical expertise on any equipment and any budget so you can achieve your dreams and reach the world with your story.
Want to know how you and your friends can make movies? Read on for an excerpt of this new and updated edition of Bill Brown‘s Action! Preorder your own copy from our site, shipping May 19, or find it at your preferred Microcosm peddler after its official release, August 25 🙂
We like to keep track of fun little holidays, noteworthy dates, and the titles we have to match. Our smart and well-organized marketing leader Abby shares these with us every month, and we thought you might appreciate having them in your pocket, too! Here are your notable dates and celebrations for July, because somehow we’re already almost halfway through the year.
We’ve been honing our software behind-the-scenes for decades, but this is our first public-facing website makeover since 2012! For 30 years, we’ve had a riotously maximalist ecommerce website. And it’s worked—pretty well. But lately, you’ve been telling us what you want it to do better and we’ve been scribbling notes and making plans.
This week on the pod, Joe and Elly talk about what went into the decision to rebuild the front end of our website, the cool new search features, and how we’ve made it even easier for buyers to use.
Holy cats! It’s a whole new look for the Microcosm website—and some exciting new features. We’ve been honing our software behind-the-scenes for decades, but this is our first public-facing website makeover since 2012!
For 30 years, we’ve had a riotously maximalist ecommerce website. And it’s worked—pretty well. But lately, you’ve been telling us what you want it to do better and we’ve been scribbling notes and making plans.
Our new features primarily fall into two categories: discoverability and ease. Read on for an overview of what’s changed … and how to use it.
Or watch this video…
Discoverability and Personalized Recs
You wanted to see more of what you wanted—and fewer things you would never buy.
We pride ourselves on our curation across a broad range of topics. And we know that not all those topics are what everyone is looking for. Especially since we’ve spent the years since 2020 adding thousands and thousands of titles to our “curated website.” It’s easy to get lost in there.
Our new features help you find what you’re looking for, plus the hidden gems you didn’t know you needed.
Maybe you run a lefty home and garden shop and want to know what’s selling well for gardening season, plus some activist zines to put by your register… but you don’t want to have to wade through a page of anarchist history and 90s punk retrospectives before you find what you need. But who are you kidding, you probably want those too! Oh, no? Okay.
Or maybe you want to buy every new issue of Cometbus and Fluke as it comes out. You don’t particularly need to see a bunch of pagan guides, children’s books, or political rhetoric—but would love to take a gander at the music scene histories that just came back into stock, and maybe queer pride stickers and patches for your newly out nibling.
Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got you.
To get personalized recommendations:
Click on the “Help me find cool stuff” button on the right side of the front page at microcosm.pub and tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re looking for.
Create an account and save those preferences so that every time you come back, you’ll see what’s new and recommended for you, both within and near your categories.
Want to see even more? Use the search bar at the top and refine your results with filters.
We use math and relational databases to personalize these recs—never AI, ew. And we will never share your preferences with another company. Or load up your browser with marketing cookies. Or creepily bombard you with ads for whatever you were recently discussing with a friend with your phone turned off.
Ease of Ordering for Stores
More and more stores are carrying books. And more and more of them are trying to get away from ordering on platforms owned by billionaires. So we’ve been hearing more and more of a question that we’re sorry you’ve had to ask: “how do I place a wholesale order?”
Our new How to Order page is easy to find, in the top nav bar. All of our discounts and terms are spelled out with loving clarity. If you’re ever left wondering, please drop us a line and we’ll clarify for you (and probably also update our language so it’s clear to everyone).
Plus . . . stores can now order thousands more titles on our website. Our full stock in our larger Cleveland warehouse is now easily available to resellers (and soon will be to regular folks buying for themselves).
Resellers, you can now put anything you want in one cart, and we’ll split off backorders after you check out. Add a cancel date to your order and we’ll be delighted to honor it.
Bookstore buyers, check out our Catalogs for frontlist and forthcoming seasons. (We are making even more improvements just for you, dear booksellers, in our 2.0 release.)
More nerdy Microcosm lore
We were early adopters of Web 1.0 and had one of the first ecommerce websites. We were also one of the first (and still very few) publishers to offer online ordering for bookstores and other resellers. This experience has made us, counterintuitively, want to be extremely deliberate about changing our website—we know too well the stakes of getting it right.
A page from our “Books (A-F)” catalog page in 2002, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
This week, Mark Host, who designed Microcosm’s first website in 1996, passed away. Founder Joe Biel would bike over to Mark’s house in the 90s with images they would scan, interrupting Mark’s steady consumption of Star Wars video games. To correct a website typo was an hours-long project. Mark was a rambunctious spirit who burned bright and a true believer in this project from the beginning. Microcosm made sense to him because he was a reader of 2600 and The Anarchist Cookbook in his childhood. We grow and change and we honor the ones that didn’t make it.
On a memorable day circa 1994, Joe, Mark, and friends carried this couch for a mile to their secret spot.
Our mission is forever to get life-saving, world-changing tools into readers’ hands. Our website has always been one of our key ways of doing that. This redesign has been a multi-layered labor of love two years in the making. We hope you love it too—and that you send us any kudos, bugs, feature requests, and wild ideas that come to you as you use it.
Most important, go out there and do that thing you’ve always dreamed of.
Love, Everyone at Microcosm
P.S. Still hate the internet? We sure do get that. You can always ask us for a paper catalog of all our published books. We make a new one every year with a new comic on the back, and we’d be delighted to send you one, or a stack to put in your local flyer spots!
Microcosm’s 2025/2026 paper catalog / map folding skills test. On the other side is a comic about the power of zines!
The punks, despite all the best efforts of society and time, are still kicking around, and we love that for them/us.
This week on the pod, J. Hunter Bennett, author of “More Punk than the Public Library,” joins Joe and Elly to talk about middle-aged punk life, starting a little free punk rock library during the pandemic outside his house on a well-trafficked corner of Chevy Chase, D.C., and more.
Where would we be without our lovely warehouse staff? (Lost, confused, bookless, most likely.) This week on the pod, join Joe and Elly as they talk about our warehouses, how they work, and the hardworking systems nerds that keep it going.
If you’re keeping up with publishing news at all, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the “Shy Girl” controversy, where Mia Ballard’s book was pulled by the publisher after claims it was written by AI. More and more stories like this are hitting the feeds all the time, from authors to book reviewers.
What does this mean for the industry, and are AI detectors even reliable? Jane Friedman of The Bottom Line is back on the pod this week with Joe and Elly to talk about the AI buzz!
