San Francisco ? Ten years after it started, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair has become a popular rallying point for the far left, thanks to shared enemies like the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act.

What originally was a few radicals getting together to talk politics has become the focus of an entire weekend of dissident cultural events, from punk rock concerts to soccer games.

“The Bush era has been good for anarchist consumerism,” says Joey Cain, 50, a longtime supporter.

All 75 merchants’ tables were sold out in advance of Saturday’s fair in Golden Gate Park, making the fair one of the largest such events in North America, along with Montreal’s “Festival of Anarchy” each May. Vendors come from as far away as Europe to sell rare anarchist and other political books.

Enthusiasts see it as part of a tradition of dissident literature in the San Francisco Bay area, where Jack London, a professed socialist for much of his life, learned to write and City Lights Books owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl.”

“There is a literary underground in the city that keeps renewing itself,” said Adam Cornford, who heads the poetics program at the New College of California, a local progressive liberal arts school.

Tom Alder, a volunteer at Bound Together Bookstore, is shown at the store in San Francisco on Thursday. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the fair in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Many of the works sold at the fair were little more than self-published pamphlets, but these authors can only benefit as the nation turns harder to the right, organizers say. Many classics of underground literature started out as pamphlets, said Cornford.

“People will suddenly become famous because they get banned or clamped down on,” he said.