The total take from the Amnesty book sale is in and we raised £11,700! Our highest total ever. Many thanks to everyone who gave up their time, over the last five weeks, to get the sale together.
The leftover books, of which there were plenty, will go on sale again in November.
34th annual Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty book sale
Saturday 21st June 2008
9am until 5pm
Church of the Ascension
Dartmouth Row
Blackheath SE10 8BF
20,000 new and used books at bargain prices. Last year we raised a record-breaking £9,500 for Amnesty International UK. Can we beat our personal best this year?
This sale is dependent entirely on the hard work of a small team of volunteers and generous donations of books. Work starts around about Monday 19th May and continues up until the day of the sale.
If you would like to help with preparing for the sale, or would like to donate books, please leave a comment using the form below.
You can also find us on Upcoming and Facebook. Flyers can be downloaded from flickr.
PS. No <abbr> tags were harmed during the making of this blog post.
Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty turned out at the Millennium Dome yesterday to welcome the olympic torch to Greenwich. Thanks to everyone who showed up. I've posted some photos from the group on flickr.
I missed the protest. As secretary, I was representing the local group at the national AGM in Nottingham. It was a great conference. I met other London activists, heard some inspiring speakers from around the world, took part in an action in support of the Tiananmen mothers, and did a bit of dancing too.
I've just heard about this writing festival, next weekend at the South Bank.
I am writing to tell you about an event which is being organised by International PEN, Free The Word! festival, taking place around the Southbank from 11-13 April.
International PEN is the worldwide writers association, which represents the conscience of world literature, defends freedom of expression and promotes the development of a community of writers across cultures and languages.
This weekend of events promises to engage with stories from all over the globe in unexpected and extraordinary encounters. Be part of an intimate conversation, a raucous debate, a provocative cabaret or just listen to dialogues between eminent and emerging writers as they discuss their role as creators, thinkers and interpreters in society.
The full programme is printed in the Free the Word! PDF brochure (1.1MB download).
Spotted on flickr, Cambridge students formed a human Amnesty candle to protest against Guantanamo.
I was at work yesterday, so couldn't go to the demo outside the US Embassy. There's a nice set of photos posted in the Amnesty International UK photostream on flickr.
The November Amnesty book sale is behind us now and the total take was £3,250 last night. Slightly down on previous years, but our total for 2007 is over £12,000 - a phenomenal amount for two sales organised by a small number of very dedicated volunteers. Many thanks to everyone involved. We'll be back in June 2008 to sell a fresh batch of books.
Slave Britain is an exhibition of photos, by Panos Pictures, illustrating the reality of the modern trade in human beings, 200 years after the slave trade was legally abolished in Britain. Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty International will be displaying the photos in Lewisham Library from this Saturday (24th November) until 10th December.
The end of November will also see the opening of the new Atlantic Worlds gallery at the Maritime Museum. This new gallery deals with, among other thing, the triangular trade in African slaves.
£8,890.96 - the total take from yesterday's book sale. Our highest total, ever! And this year we were actually turning donations down, since we had more books than we could handle.
Many thanks to everyone who got involved, particularly everyone who gave up their evenings and weekends over the last four weeks to get all this together.
There are many high quality books still left unsold. We'll put those on sale later in the year. Tentative date for the second 2007 sale is 17th November.
Photos are up on Flickr.
Paul Eagle, from the Amnesty UK Business Team, kindly came down to Blackheath on Tuesday night and gave a talk about the Business & Human Rights campaign. Here are the notes from the evening, pasted straight from our newsletter.
I've been reading Amnesty's new report on the internet and freedom of expression in China. The specific focus is the complicity of Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in human rights abuses in China by facilitating and sanctioning government censorship.
The full report is available from the Amnesty UK website (you have to scroll down a bit to find a link to the PDF). It's worth reading if you're interested in business ethics and this whole Web 2.0 thing.
The November book sale is now behind us. Yay! I haven't got the official total for the day, but it exceeded £5,000 (cf. £3,400 last year.) Many thanks to everyone who helped out, everyone who bought books and everyone who showed up at the end to take away unsold books for free. Last year we had to dispose of two tonnes of unsold books. This year, the church was picked clean by 6pm.
I'm now very tired and very hungover.
This month, the Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty letter-writing evening is brought to you from the comfort of the first floor bar at the Greenwich Picturehouse. We'll have blank letters, concerning a range of current actions and cases, ready for members of the public to sign. We even handle the postage – all we need is your signature. Please come down and join us.
If all goes well, this will become a regular event at the Picturehouse.
From the Amnesty UK web site:
Mirza Tahir Hussain is due to be executed on 3 August. Mirza was tried and convicted of murdering a taxi driver while travelling to the village of Bhubar from Rawalpindi, Punjab Province, on 17 December 1988. The taxi driver reportedly stopped the car and produced a gun, and Mirza Tahir Hussain, who was 18 years old at the time, was reportedly physically and sexually assaulted by the taxi driver. In the scuffle that followed, the gun went off, and the taxi driver was fatally injured.
Time is short for this action but you can send an appeal on Mirza Tahir Hussain's behalf via this handy contact form for General Musharraf. There's even a suggested letter that you can use on Amnesty's action page.
Finding a brand new, as-yet-unpublished-in-the-UK book at the Amnesty book sale for £1.50, looking it up on amazon.co.uk and discovering that the retail price is ten times that. Go me! I am the king of bargain hunting.
So I've been reading Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's thoughtful and touching comic book account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This edition goes on to cover her life in Austria as a teenager and her return to Tehran before the Gulf War in 1991. It's well worth reading and quite enlightening about Persian culture and the Islamic state in Iran.
We've set a date for this year's book sale – Saturday 17th June (the day after @media). The venue, as usual, is the Church of the Ascension on Dartmouth Row, just up the hill from Lewisham Station.
There'll be 20,000(ish) books, as per usual, many new or nearly new and all very, very cheap. Come along and help us out by buying something to read for the summer. Last June we raised around £7,700 for Amnesty International, and a further £3,400 selling the leftovers in November.
Update: We're now collecting, sorting and pricing books for the sale. If you have books to donate, or have some time to spare to help us sort and price books, please come along to Dartmouth Row to help out. We're in a garage just down the hill from the Church of the Ascension. Times are:
Post-sale update: £6,814, all told! Our second highest take, I think. I've posted a few photos on Flickr.
There's an interesting article in Saturday's Guardian about land theft in China. The Chinese economic miracle is based on taking land from peasant farmers and giving it to wealthy developers, via corrupt local officials. A fairly old story of capitalist corruption in the People's Republic.
It's well worth reading the whole thing. Here's the part that interested me:
“China's reforms so far have been introduced under pressure. There hasn't been enough pressure in the field of land ownership yet. But there will come a time when our top leaders will be forced to reform the system to maintain social stability and prevent damage to the economy. We are not at that point yet. But I predict a change within five years.”
He may be too optimistic. There is a widely held assumption in the west that increased wealth automatically ushers in greater democracy and social justice. But what is happening in Guangdong suggests the opposite. This is China's richest province, but it has also witnessed some of the most violent demonstrations, bloody crackdowns and ruthless measures to silence media criticism and crush grass-roots activism. The government's answer to the unrest is to promise the peasants more money and to beef up its security forces. In the meantime, the land is being moved into ever fewer and richer hands.
Continuing the theme of China and human rights, Amnesty International's new web site has an e-mail you can send to Yahoo, regarding their role in the case of the imprisoned journalist Shi Tao. Here's a quote from their suggested message:
I am alarmed that in the pursuit of new and lucrative markets, your company is contributing to human rights violations. Yahoo! should urgently give consideration to the human rights implications of its business operations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls upon every organ of society, which includes companies, to respect human rights.
If you find Yahoo's actions in this case quite despicable, you can follow the linkabove and let them know. It only takes a second to send an e-mail. I've sent a message and I'll be interested to see if I get a response. Assuming, of course, that David Filo and Jerry Yang haven't outsourced reading their e-mail to under-paid Chinese peasants.
Amnesty International celebrates its 45th birthday this week, with a new campaign and a new website: irrepressible.info.
Here's a bit from the press release:
Around the world, Internet cafés are shut down, computers seized, chat rooms monitored, and blogs deleted. Websites are blocked or heavily censored, search engines are restricted and foreign news prohibited.
irrepressible.info highlights internet censorship and the cases of people imprisoned just for what they have written in emails or on websites. It also highlights the role of companies who have helped countries like China censor the web.
We’re asking people to go to www.irrepressible.info and sign our Pledge for internet freedom; send our e-postcard to the Chinese authorities calling for the release of Shi Tao – doing 10 years hard labour for sending an email – and show their support by putting our badge on their website or email.
The internet has become a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. A lot of has changed in 45 years – but some governments are still repressing their citizens, and Amnesty is still standing up against them.
From the Associated Press, via Boing Boing – Yahoo! Hong Kong provided evidence which was used against Shi Tao. Interesting, since Yahoo's defence of their actions had been that they were complying with mainland Chinese laws, which don't apply in Hong Kong. Their letter to Amnesty International (173K PDF) explicitly states that Yahoo! Hong Kong was not involved in the release of information to the Chinese goverment.
Shi Tao was jailed in April 2005, for ten years, after sending an e-mail from his Yahoo account regarding the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Amnesty International considers Shi Tao a prisoner of conscience. If you would like to take action in support of Shi Tao, Amnesty has further details on their website.
If you're local, and interested in corporate human rights, we will be having a workshop about the Business and Human Rights campaign at the next meeting of Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty - 11th April, 8pm, at St Margaret's Church in Lee Terrace.
Amnesty International began its 100 day countdown to the UN conference on small arms last week.
Roughly half a million people are killed every year by small arms. That's one death every minute. If you support tougher arms controls, visit the Control Arms campaign and add your face to the Million Faces Petition.
Amnesty have produced a video in support of the Control Arms Campaign. It's a home shopping ad extolling the virtues, and ease of purchase, of the AK-47 assault rifle. There's a number to text if you'd like to join the petition and support the control of sales of small arms.
The ad's running in cinemas nationwide, so yours truly will be up in the Vue cinema in Leicester Square on Saturday trying to sign people up to the petition.
UPDATE: 92 photos for the petition in a couple of hours! We rock! But not as much as those people who kindly gave their support to the campaign.
So the November book sale has come and gone, and we raised £3,444. The June sale almost reached £7,800, giving us just over £11,000 for the year. Not bad for two dozen people or so, working in their spare time, over a few weeks or so, to sell books for two days. Just goes to show what you can achieve if you really want to do something.
Many thanks to everyone who helped out. Many thanks to everyone who bought books too, or took away freebies at the end. We still had to dump two tonnes of leftover books down in Woolwich.
Now I have a big pile of secondhand/nearly-new books to get through before next June. This year's stash includes:
Many thanks to absolutely everyone who turned out tonight to help set up the Amnesty book sale. Rachel's garage is empty and the Church of the Ascension is full of boxes of books, ready to be emptied and set out. We still need lots of help to get the church ready by Saturday, but we're doing well.
If you came to this site to find out more about Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty, our November book sale is on Saturday, 19th November. We have somewhere in the region of 10,000 books to sell. If you can give any time at all to help, please consider coming along to the church tomorrow or Friday to help set up. We'll be at the Church of the Ascension in Dartmouth Row from 7 - 9pm on Thursday and Friday night.
If you fancy picking up some decent books at low, low prices, drop by the church on Saturday and have a look at what we've got.
