Mayday Books has existed on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota since the early 1990s. It was an institution when I was in graduate school and I notice that it’s still going strong. It even has its own Wikipedia page, from which this photo is taken:

Wikipedia.

We stopped by recently. I like how it is still home to an old-school leftist sensibility concerned about the exploitation of workers, not just the more recent “woke,” CRT stuff. 

A flag for the collection: that of the Japanese Communist Party.

Another discovery: the poem The Story of Mouseland, available as a print. I didn’t get a photo of it, but I was pleased to discover that it has Canadian origins, and was famously narrated by Tommy Douglas, premier of Saskatchewan and important early member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which became the New Democratic Party of Canada. (Neither the CCF nor the NDP ever formed a government at the federal level, but their policy of single-payer universal healthcare, which Douglas introduced to Saskatchewan, was later implemented for the entire country.) A video of The Story of Mouseland, introduced by Douglas’s grandson Kiefer Sutherland, may be seen on YouTube; the text may be read at the NDP of Canada Wiki. In American terms, it is the sort of appeal that Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders made: that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major political parties, which are both owned by special interests, and for a government that cares about actual people you have to vote for the outsider.