Wooden Shoe Books & Records is a 501c3 non-profit organization and collectively-run anarchist bookstore. We carry thousands of book titles as well as music, pamphlets, 'zines, t-shirts, buttons, patches and more. We frequently table at political events and punk rock shows. We have continued to sponsor our own events and have brought in such speakers as Howard Zinn in October, 1998 and Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance:The CIA, The Contras, and The Crack Cocaine Explosion, in June, 1999.

We officially opened in our current location on November 15,1997 and is less than a block away from South Street...Philly's busiest commercial area. The original Wooden Shoe Books and Records was located in the basement of 112 South 20th Street in Philadelphia for nearly 21 years. Established in December, 1976, the Wooden Shoe began as a council communist bookstore. Its name was derived from the early period of the Industrial Revolution, when French workers who were forced to spend agonizingly long hours at work took to jamming their wooden shoes, or sabots (which is the root of the word "sabotage"), in the gears of machines to stop production.