The Advocado Press

The Center for Accessible Living is now the repository of the entire print inventory of the Advocado Press, Inc. Founded in 1981, the Advocado Press, Inc. published books and periodicals devoted to disability rights and the disability experience. It is best-known for publishing The Disability Rag (also known as Ragged Edge) magazine, a well-known and ground-breaking disability rights periodical, for over 25 years. It also produced a number of books about the disability rights movement. 

The Disability Rag, or simply The Rag, published a wide range of articles and opinion pieces from individuals with disabilities. It was considered one of the most important publications of the disability rights movement. As it became a national periodical of the disability movement, it addressed the disability community’s concerns about both personal and public issues.

 

When ADAPT started a national activist effort to change public transit policy, The Rag provided continuing coverage of the activists and the issue. The coverage was collected and published as To Ride the Public’s Buses: The Fight that Built A Movement, the Advocado Press’s first “Disability Rag Reader.” The Rag served as a national forum as activists, leading thinkers and scholars of disability rights submitted articles and reacted to items and reader letters published in the magazine. It became an important outlet for creative expressions of disability culture, including essays, fiction, poetry and artwork reflecting the experience of disability.

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A list of the hardcopy books available at CAL can be found below. The Advocado Press has some of its titles available for download at http://www.advocadopress.org/. CAL is proud and pleased to help maintain the legacy of this publishing house that was so vital to the disability rights movement.

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The following titles from the Advocado Press are available for review or reading at the Center:

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• Agenda for Real Life by Sarah E. Eastes

• Anesthesia by Kenny Fries

• Bus Rights: Facts – The Disability Rag

• Byline of Hope – Cultural Newspaper and Magazine writings of Helen Keller edited by Beth A. Haller, Ph.D.  

• Disability Awareness: Do it Right by Mary Johnson

• The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the pages of the first 15 years of the Disability Rag edited by Barrett Shaw

• Representing Disability in an Ablest World by Beth Haller, Ph.D.

• Safely Home: A Profile of a Futures Planning Group compiled by Betty Atherton and Julie Shaw Cole, edited by Julie Shaw Cole

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Limited copies of the following titles are available upon request. Single books can be picked up at the Center or can be shipped at the expense of the requester:

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• Getting Life by Julie Shaw Cole

• “To Ride the Public Buses”: The Fight That Built the Movement, A Disability Rag Reader edited by Mary Johnson and Barrett Shaw 

• Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against Disability Rights by Mary Johnson 

• Reporting on Disability: Approaches and Issues by Mary Johnson and Susan Eskins