Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a print run by the end of 1983 of 1300. It printed pretty well everything it got sent ("unless the Collective judged it racist, sexist, right wing, or supportive of oppressive religions"). It aimed to provide a decent alternative coverage of local news and issues from a radical non-aligned position; to promote subversive and creative initiatives; to provide a forum for unorthodox views; to allow some sort of co-existence between a huge variety of interests. And in its first four years it had never sold a single copy. 1982-83 was a period of rapid growth. The print run doubled twice; and1300 copies can be assumed to equal a readership of around 4,000. The issue size also doubled. The Collective came into being. In the summer of 1982 we moved from stencils & duplicators & near total illegibility, to photo reduced type (12cm down to 10): camera- ready copy offset lithoed at Acorn Bookshop late every second Saturday evening. Each of us had their own preference between cow gum and pritt stick, we all learned how to do paste up, and some of us took typography lessons up at the University which Mark had arranged. Many covers and some entire issues were works of art. There was no deep consistency on format. 
 Mistakes happened. Illegibility, anything from a line of text to whole pages missing repeated or inverted, whole issues missing if your distributor went on holiday without telling anyone... These were all the norm. We got by. Content: a heady brew of Going Out Guide, Events column, news comment and opinion. Ranged from excellent to dross. If you didn't like what you read you were always free to write better. There was too much work for anyone to want to keep doing it every fortnight. So we split into two production groups, one more or less run from the basement of 24 Norwood Rd, the other I think had a more roving quality. A few of us had regular jobs, such as treasurer or assembling the Events column. The Collective met every six weeks or so. We had a general policy to print everything apart from.... On spot decisions were made by whoever was doing the work (“power at the point of production” was one of our unprinted mottos), occasionally leading to -say- the typist commenting inline and once to the printer blanking out half a page. Sunday morning was the distribution party, with a variable collection of hungover people gathered round tables at Acorn (swept clear of books) to collate and fold. Recent conversations about techniques for spinning a block of printer paper! Address labels were printed by Acorn's home-built micro computer; the addresses themselves lived on cassette tapes. Finally bundles of Rags were taken by car to the homes of 50?? distributors who'd deliver to readers, by foot or by bike. The Rag also available from a dozen or so outlets around town. Money always a problem. Until almost the end of the Rag's existence we never sold a single copy! We met printing costs via collecting tins at outlets, standing orders from the dedicated, and a string of jumble sales and benefit gigs. One of which raised something line 29p largely thanks to 20p picked up off the floor afterwards. 
If money was really short then so was the next issue, and somehow the message mysteriously got across. At some point we started to accept a few paid adverts too; but small ads and listings were always free. Looking back on it: What was the Rag? It was a community paper, an open channel of communication, evidence of anarchist influence and organisation here in Reading, a record of our lives, our struggles under Thatcher and her cronies, what we ate, where we lived and how much rent we paid to live there, what bands we danced to. If you ever need to know who or what an A1 vegetable, a Pagan Against Nukes, Diogenes, Vernon Paxford, Paradise, Veggy Dining, Citizen Cain, a Greenham Food Van, or the Conspiracy were: there was only ever one place left to find out and Red Rag is still it.