Iodine Recordings is thrilled to announce the release of its first standalone book! ‘Free Stickers with Every Order: A History of Hardcore Stickers’ is the first book dedicated entirely to the visual and cultural legacy of hardcore punk stickers. Fleeting, affordable, and deeply expressive, stickers helped define the DIY ethos of the scene.
The deluxe hard cover edition of the book, authored by Thomas Rackow, will arrive on April 17th. The first edition is limited to 1,000 copies and contains over 250 pages of visuals and in-depth interviews.
Spanning North America from the early 1980s to now, this deluxe hardcover volume presents a carefully curated archive of rare and often long-lost hardcore stickers, preserved from a medium never intended to survive. Stickers were cheap to produce and easy to distribute. They were powerful in their immediacy, functioning as both promotion and protest, identity and community. Pasted on lampposts, venue walls, record bins, and street signs, they carried the values of hardcore far beyond the shows themselves.
Collected over decades and contextualized through firsthand interviews, the book pairs full-color visual documentation with oral histories from key figures in the scene, including members of 7 Seconds, Quicksand, Earth Crisis, Have Heart, American Nightmare, Hot Water Music, Bane, Integrity, and Agnostic Front, among others.
Rather than aiming for encyclopedic completeness, ‘Free Stickers with Every Order’ follows a selective and thoughtful approach. Many sticker artifacts have been lost over time and cannot be recovered. The book stands as a focused time capsule of hardcore’s visual language, values, and community, told by those who were there.
Thomas Rackow is a longtime hardcore punk collector and documentarian whose work focuses on the visual culture of the DIY scene. He has spent decades preserving ephemeral materials — particularly stickers — that were never meant to last, assembling one of the most comprehensive archives of hardcore punk stickers in existence. ‘Free Stickers with Every Order’ is his first book.