Empowering? Illegal? Weird? Dangerous? -- Port Townsend's Loompanics Attracts Unusual Authors, Subversive Titles And, These Days, The Skeptical Eye Of The Law

WANT TO FIGHT BACK against pesky telemarketers? Do not hang up! Say you'd love to buy whatever is for sale, but someone's at the door. Say you'll only be a second. Then go read a book, watch television, take a shower, go to bed. Let the intruder into your privacy dangle all night if necessary.

A small thing, but by wasting their time, you've pared the telemarketer's chance to make money off not only you, but the next victim, according to the survival manual, "Street Smarts for the New Millennium."

Need to sabotage a company? There's "Out of Business," part revenge fantasy, part how-to manual for the obsessed person who can rationalize bad intent and risk jail time. It covers everything from the evil (blackmail and crippling computers) to the inspired ("get the weirdos on your side") to delinquency ("turn on the water in their bathrooms at night.")

Going to jail? Don't wear a suit or anything close to gang colors. Blend in. The layered look is best because you can't control the thermostat while incarcerated. If you have foresight, according to "You Are Going to Prison," you'll consider what you're wearing before you commit a crime because the cops don't let you go home and change.

There is a how-to book for just about anything:

Be a human guinea pig for profit.

Live a good life by scrounging through garbage.

Learn the "bootlegger's turn" and other car-chase maneuvers.

Sneak into movies.

Disappear without a trace or find someone trying to disappear without a trace.

Discover how to steal someone's identity or protect your own.

Trying to hang on to your stuff? Read "How to Hide Anything." Want to rifle through someone's stuff? Read "How to Hide Anything."

This is the tame stuff at Loompanics Unlimited, a Port Townsend book publisher of subversive, weird, anarchistic, outrageous, politically incorrect and offensive ideas. What really draws wrath upon it are the how-to books on bombs, poisons and drugs, which carry the disclaimer, "for informational purposes only."

The mail-order publisher has perched out on a limb of the First Amendment for two decades. Since 1982, it has operated from a brown building as purposely plain as a paper bag on the outskirts of town. It does about $1.8 million in sales a year and the genius behind most of its books, like "How to Start Your Own Country" and "How to Steal Food from the Supermarket," is that they are simultaneously high-camp entertainment and real underground manuals.

At least, they seem real.

You won't know if "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture" works unless you try and if you try, you might want to pay attention to what you're wearing, because you can't control the thermostat in jail.

The author of "Successful Armed Robbery" is in prison, which seems to taint his advice. Jesse Greenwald, who wrote "Document Fraud And Other Crimes of Deception," is in prison, too, but boasts he took more than $9 million before he was caught. He is sharing his expertise, he says, so the little crooks can compete against the government, which he calls the Big Crook.

Loompanics' position is that you have the right to know anything and it has right to charge $15 for a 100-page book about anything. What you do with the information is your responsibility. If you get hurt while trying to cook methamphetamines, then you didn't follow the directions correctly. If you follow through after reading about how to kill, you've made your own decision.

Yet this bravado, essential in the "action publishing" genre, has been shaken in just the past six months by lawsuits and proposed legislation.

The insurer for Paladin Press of Colorado, Loompanics' bigger, more violence-oriented competitor, reportedly paid six figures to settle a lawsuit over one of its books. Someone read "Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors" and hired a hit man. Three people were murdered in Maryland.

Paladin pulled the book, written by a housewife. Three months later it dumped all of its books about explosives as Congress debated whether to make it a felony to distribute instructions on how to make bombs.

Several coinciding developments have added to the chill. A jury ordered producers of television's "The Jenny Jones Show" to pay $25 million for embarrassing a man on air and allegedly helping set a murder in motion. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop a lawsuit against Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, whose ultra-violent movie, "Natural Born Killers," allegedly inspired a young couple to shoot and severely wound a woman.

After the Columbine High School tragedy in Colorado and the renewed debate about the influence of media and violence on youth, Loompanics' Internet provider decided it didn't want to be associated with those types of books or the publisher.

Loompanics dropped such mayhem staples as "Medicine Chest Explosives," "Kill Without Joy" and the poisonous "Silent Death." Loompanics founder and CEO Michael Hoy used to joke that he had two requirements for publishing a book: It wouldn't get him sued and it wouldn't get him arrested. Now, he says, he means it.

ANARCHY IS the Loompanics' buzzword, but not so much that Visa or Mastercard would ever be turned down. For a publisher who has sold a book titled, "The Abolition of Work" and markets one that instructs job temps in how to waste company time and steal supplies, Loompanics runs an efficient operation.

Books in the production area are stacked in neat piles and alphabetical order so a worker filling an order doesn't need to guess whether a book is in the murder or revenge section. Down one row are: "Economic Sodomy" . . . "The End of Privacy" . . . "Escape from Controlled Custody" . . . "Espionage: Down and Dirty" . . . "Execution: Tools and Techniques."

The catalog carries about 700 titles and Loompanics publishes about a quarter of those. Hoy approves each Loompanics book.

The shelves in his office are crammed with books about alien abduction, mind control, drugs and magic. A whole section is devoted to anarchism. High on one wall are sinister-looking weapons: a crossbow, a tomahawk, a stun light (designed to momentarily blind an adversary), brass knuckles, boomerangs. He collected them during one of his first publishing projects many years ago, a directory of exotic armament you could send away for.

Despite the trappings, Hoy himself looks more the accountant he used to be than a guerrilla publisher. He's 54, single, slight, balding, pale and spectacled. He is a legendary bookworm with a reedy voice. Someone years ago aptly named him, "Conan the Librarian." An angry author once called him, "Mr. Potato Head."

Probably like most Loompanics readers, Hoy is curious, skeptical and believes you have a God-given right to know how to pick a lock, play head games with an enemy, steal food, make a bomb.

One afternoon last summer, he sat in his office and at a desk cluttered with books. Splayed open were two publications, The Wall Street Journal and an alternative paper with a feature article on circus freaks. He pronounced himself an anarchist, saying libertarians have too many rules and are too fixated on government when corporations as big and powerful as Microsoft concern him more.

"I actually am probably a little beyond anarchy because anarchism is an `ism.' " he said. "I just think if you can make yourself safe from the big guys, whether the government, corporations, churches or whatever . . . you're better off."

He grew up in a tiny northern Michigan town called Mio, where he was a voracious reader of horror stories, science fiction, comic books and stories about freaks and crime. Hoy got an accounting degree from Michigan State University but found it too much work for too little reward. He started his own business, producing indexes to "National Lampoon," the humor magazine he considers brilliant. He twisted the name to come up with "Loompanics."

He admires comic Michael O'Donoghue, who wrote for National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live and was famous for humor so cruel you couldn't be sure he was joking. The libertarian author Ayn Rand is Hoy's other influence.

The index idea bombed, but Hoy sensed there was a publishing niche in serving readers of the weird and controversial. He moved to Port Townsend after visiting friends there and falling in love with the beauty and pace of the town.

One of the company's first big sellers was "Complete Guide to Lock-Picking," by a locksmith and parttime magician who went by the pen name "Eddie the Wire." Its all-time best-seller is "Secrets of a Super Hacker."

Hoy doesn't accept fiction or poetry. He's into how-to's. He is adamantly against drug laws, but feels publishing books debating them go nowhere. Instead, he prints instructional books like "Gourmet Cannabis Cookery."

Survivalist and back-to-the-land books have been hot, thanks to Y2K. You see the word "Waco" a lot inside the books. There is plenty in the Loompanics catalog to offend, from Holocaust revisionism to an instructional guide on the best ways for a man to dump his wife. A former Loompanics editor, Dennis Eichorn, recalls how the first customers Loompanics got at a Chicago book fair several years ago were members of the paramilitary anti-government group, the Michigan Militia.

In his office, Hoy keeps a proposal a would-be author sent him about sexual bondage that is strange even by its genre's standards. Hoy didn't see enough of a market to publish, but he kept it, fascinated by the level of detail, the author's care and the presence of another bizarre sub-world.

BOOKS ON BOMBS, guns and drugs overshadow the more imaginative and accessible Loompanics books. The writers are from across the country - and in various states of incarceration - but two of the better ones are from Seattle: John Hoffman and Jim Hogshire.

It is hard to imagine a more Loompanian character than Hoffman, whose legal last name is Hoff. He wrote only one book for Hoy, "The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving," but it was a classic. It is packed with detailed how-to tips and commentary on waste. He writes with wit but is hilarious mostly because he is serious about the subject. He does not accept the idea that your garbage is not his to collect. He has recycled, among other things, furnishings and food, clothes and rare coins, tapes and books and phones.

The book, published five years ago, tells you where to go, what to wear, how to deal with competition, cops and broken glass, how to work in the dark, and what you need to know about dumpster food. He picked up the lifestyle from his parents, and has evolved the skill through steady practice.

Hoffman, who used to be employed in a military psychiatric hospital and still works with the mentally ill, is resourceful, wary and as charming as it is possible to be when pawing through a dumpster. He calls the skill his "Darwinian advantage."

The dumpster-diving book inspired him to write a novel, which is being edited by HarperCollins. Like many first novels, it is partly autobiographical. Amid a plot about war, romance, politics and "electoral sabotage" is a key character who dumpster dives and finds a motherlode. Also populating the book are oppressed characters who think they are getting screwed at every turn. They are obsessed with a strange catalog that carries forbidden information on how to get rich, beat the system and just survive.

"Loompanics readers are rat-like creatures running around while the dinosaurs go extinct," Hoffman said. "I don't want the world to end but it's nice to know what to do just in case."

Hoffman, who lives in a University District apartment, is an activist for the homeless and other grassroots causes and uses his rummaging skills to forage through public records and take on city hall.

One bright morning he walked through neighborhood alleys showing the basic technique. He flipped open a few dumpsters and half-heartedly looked inside. Suddenly, his eyes got big. There, atop bundled white bags of trash was a small photo album. He opened it. "Wedding pictures! . . . I wonder why this got tossed . . . Maybe she wanted children and he wanted to ride his motorcycle."

He took it, shaking his head. "People act like they are throwing stuff in a volcano and that dumpster divers are either too stoned or stupid to find it."

A while later he found documents from a technical college, labeled "audit." He lifted the lid of a grocery-store dumpster to show piles of bread and bagged green beans inside. He grabbed a loaf and fed it to birds swarming garbage cans in a nearby alley.

If Hoffman illustrates certain Loompanics characteristics - independence, suspicion of mainstream culture, dogged search for angles - Hogshire is an example of how rough street publishing can be.

He is a former tabloid reporter who penned such classic Loompanics books as "Sell Yourself to Science," and "You Are Going to Prison." Both have been optioned for movies. He also authored "Opium for the Masses."

His life was turned upside down three years ago by a fellow underground writer who apparently was well-versed in another Loompanics book: "Snitch." The writer was staying a night at Hogshire's apartment but promptly argued with Hogshire and wound up on the street.

A week later, he wrote a letter to Seattle Police claiming Hogshire's apartment was a drug lab. In itself, that wouldn't seem enough evidence for a team of narcotics officers to get a search warrant, swoop into an apartment, ransack someone's possessions, and handcuff the young couple inside, but detectives carried with them Hogshire's opium book.

They didn't find anything resembling a drug lab. They came up with dried poppies Hogshire said he bought from a florist shop. He says he was the first person in the country ever to to be charged with possession with intent to manufacture or deliver opium poppies.

A King County judge was not impressed by the poppies and Hogshire eventually pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of possessing an explosive device involving a flare police collected in the raid.

The episode and resulting legal fight, Hogshire said, got him evicted, in debt and contributed to the breakup of his marriage. He has a civil-rights suit pending against the Seattle Police and one particular officer. He says he was dragged through the system not because of anything he did, but of what he chose to write.

"I want to show them that our rights and freedoms are serious," said Hogshire, whose latest book is "Pills-A-Go-Go." "Some of us take those rights and freedoms real seriously." AMONG LOOMPANICS' more notorious writers is Uncle Fester, whose real name is Steve Preisler. He wrote the first edition of his popular methamphetamine book while in prison. He is a chemist working in Green Bay, Wis., now and the book is in the fifth edition. His is one book that actually appears to be used, turning up at drug busts around the country.

"Half of the manuscript was typed on onion-skin paper with green ribbon because that was all he could get," Hoy said of the first draft. "He single-spaced to save paper and every other word was eight syllables. It was an editing nightmare."

That anything Uncle Fester writes - including "Silent Death" - is legible at all is a nightmare for Loompanics' many detractors. He's often brought up in Congress, which discussed this fall whether to criminalize publishing instructions on how to make methamphetamines. The proposed law prompted swift protest, including an Internet site dedicated to explaining how to make the drug.

Paladin reacted quickly after a similar bill on explosives was proposed, pulling its bomb books off the market in August, just a few months after paying for the Hit Man case. "If another politically charged crime happens we fear Paladin will be used as a scapegoat," said Jon Ford, Paladin editorial director. "We just spent three years defending ourselves from a civil case with a not very good outcome."

The so-called Hit Man Case involving the Maryland murders was noteworthy because the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals court ruling that Paladin's book wasn't protected by the First Amendment.

In September, OlympusNet asked Loompanics to leave its Internet service, which included sophisticated "shopping cart" ordering software. Ned Schumann, president and CEO of the Port Townsend communications company, said Loompanics had been a good customer, but the Columbine tragedy - in which authorities alleged the killers learned from the Internet how to make bombs - changed attitudes.

"It was more of a personal decision than a business one," Schumann said. "We got a real wakeup call with what happened in Colorado. I wished we had been more awake. We had to ask ourselves, `Do we want to participate in this?' Because we were."

Ford said what's being missed in the debate over specialty publishers is that someone with ill intent can easily find information on explosives from chemistry textbooks, military manuals, the internet, encyclopedias, even novels.

SO WHO READS this stuff? Creeps or simply the curious? Independent thinkers or bed-wetters? Druggies or narcs? Little people looking for empowerment? Walter Mittys in search of fantasy? The bored? The prepared? Probably all of the above.

There are 63 books in the Loompanics' catalog carrying titles that start with, "How to . . ." The word "secret" also plays well in a title. Most Loompanics books, as anti-social as they tend to be, contain familiar American themes, such as vigilance, independence and beating the system. When the subject involves bending rules and breaking laws, the books employ convenient rationales: Government and corporations are sucking the life out of you; the target of your dirty tricks deserves it because he's such a jerk; drug laws are fascist. The books never tell you to do it, only how.

One Loompanics author says they are mostly "stupid little books," but the Drug Enforcement Agency ordered Uncle Fester's meth book. The FBI has bought Loompanics books. A supermarket chain was interested in reading about stealing food. Occasionally law enforcement comes into the Port Townsend office with a search warrant forcing Hoy to tell them whether a certain person has ordered a book.

Many of the books seem to have a definite shelf-life. The folks running theaters no doubt have read, "How to Sneak into Movies" by now and have closed the gaps in security. "Secrets of a Super-Hacker," was written several years ago and seems dusty given how fast computer technology moves.

While some of the books are as serious as the First Amendment, others seem odd, unsettling jokes. That's how Hoy's hero, the comedian O'Donoghue, approached things. He'd zero in on the touchiest nerve and not care whether you laughed or cringed.

Hoy professes to be an anarchist and says no book could be as bad as banning one, but his company is a model of capitalism, too.

"It would be hard to imagine us doing this kind of publishing in any other country," he said. "I mean, you can send away in the mail for brass knuckles. Is this a great country or what!"

Richard Seven is a staff reporter for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine.