Bas Moreel passed away on 1 January 2026. This is sad news, but given his age, it comes as no surprise (Bas reached the respectable age of 95). In the autumn of 1977, Bas helped establish the Amsterdam bookshop Het Fort van Sjakoo.
As a boy – he grew up in the Roman Catholic region near Nijmegen – he dreamed of becoming a priest (or was it his parents and Roman Catholic tradition that initially pushed him in that direction?) and went to seminary, but he did not feel at home there and did not feel “called” to the priesthood. Through a job as a teacher, he developed into a passionate anarchist and for years distributed anarchist material from abroad in the Netherlands. From his flat on Nobelweg in Wageningen, he ran the anarchist mail order business together with Jetty, his partner in those days. He distributed books and brochures from some thirty Dutch action groups/publishers and nearly sixty foreign anarchist publishers.
In an article about their distribution company in the extra magazine called Kleurenkatern which came with the weekly Vrij Nederland on 23 October 1976, Hans Ramaer wrote: “His distribution activities are not particularly lucrative, although sales are on the rise. This year, he hopes to achieve a turnover of 100,000 guilders (around € 45250), spread over 1,200 titles, including 200 Dutch-language publications. This means that he only sells a few copies of many foreign titles.” Bas said: ‘As much as I enjoy this work, I can’t earn more than a minimum income, because my profit margin is only ten to fifteen per cent. I knew that from the outset when I started in 1973.’
Bas supplied around 60 Dutch bookshops, 20 of which could be described as left-wing, and regularly travelled around the country with a suitcase full of books and brochures. “Of course, those left-wing bookshops are important outlets for distributing your literature, and I wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t there. [..] The policy at bookshops – including left-wing ones – [is] highly dependent on the person who does the purchasing and is therefore very inconsistent.”
An employee of the Athenaeum News Centre, a book- and magazineshop in the Amsterdam city centre, in the first half of the 1970s, who would briefly become a volunteer at the Fort twenty years later, recalls:
“When I worked at the Athenaeum News Centre in the early 1970s, he regularly visited me and we got to know each other. The News Centre thus became a very good customer for the pamphlets and brochures from the Netherlands and abroad that he came to offer and that I bought from him in large quantities. Bas was happy with me because at the time I was the only one at Athenaeum who understood and recognised the quality of the publications he came to offer. The shop benefited greatly from this, because those publications were also widely available in the blue wooden bins outside on the square. This was strikingly new at the time; it was a different era. Sales were very good. An icon, already very modest then and now gone forever.
In the interview in the weekly Vrij Nederland, Bas stated: “A broader approach could make the distribution of literature less dependent on the law of supply and demand. It would then become clearer where political literature should end up, what should be published and how, so that the distribution of left-wing publications would be less dependent on chance. On the other hand, we must be careful not to create a kind of ghetto. I would not like to see left-wing literature only being bought at left-wing bookshops and therefore eventually sold, because that literature needs to reach as wide an audience as possible. That is why general bookshops are just as irreplaceable as those specialising in politics.”
Now, fifty years later, circumstances have changed completely. General bookshops have not sold the literature that Bas distributed at the time for decades; they stopped doing so in the mid-1980s. Of the twenty left-wing bookshops that existed in 1976, not a single one remains in 2026. Fort van Sjakoo in Amsterdam, founded in 1977, started more than a year after the article appeared in Vrij Nederland, and years later two new bookshops were added: Rosa in Groningen (since the late 1980s) and the relative newcomer De Opstand in The Hague, which opened around 2015.
Bas also translated and published various pamphlets and booklets, including among others God and the State by Michael Bakunin. He was a polyglot, more or less fluent in English, French, German, Russian, Polish (and had a passive knowledge of practically all Slavic languages), Spanish and Italian, and even learned some Bengali during a longer stay in Bangladesh, if I am not mistaken. He taught himself many of these languages, an autodidact, so to speak.
Bas was also involved in the founding of the anarchist Boekhandel Het Fort van Sjakoo, a bookshop located on Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat since October 1977, which was initially set up mainly by activists from the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt movement. Bas supplied a considerable part of the initial stock on consignment and occasionally worked a shift in the bookshop in the early months, travelling from Wageningen, but never became a regular volunteer.
In 1979, Bas stopped distribution and people from Leeuwarden took over that task from him under the name Harpo Distribution. Later, Bas moved to Amsterdam and came to live just around the corner from the Fort. He regularly dropped in for a chat. Even after he had long since stopped his distribution business, he would bring in books that he had collected from related publishers or authors on his many trips abroad.
Bas was always full of stories and could tell them with a great sense of humour and self-deprecation. He knew anarchists all over the world, and they knew him. He corresponded with people from the movement in all kinds of countries. He even picked up the Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie from the Dutch-German border once, when the German state refused to let Stuart enter Germany because of his work for the Anarchist Black Cross prisoner support organisation, and Dutch customs also refused to let Stuart back into the Netherlands because they thought he didn’t have enough money in his pocket. Bas acted as his financial guarantor and Stuart was able to return to England after a short stopover in the Netherlands.
A colleague who worked at Fort in the 1990s recalls: ‘He sometimes grumbled that anarchists were always talking about helping people in need, but that in Bangladesh after the floods, it was Christian groups, not anarchist groups, that actually provided assistance.’
He had further points of criticism: “Once, in Appelscha (the anarchist campsite in the North of the Netherlands), during the evaluation at the end of the Whitsun Days (when yearly an anarchist gathering takes places on the campsite), he walked up to the microphone and uttered a very convincing “GODDAMN IT!”, in his indignation at the fact that a complaint had previously been made about the washing-up liquid used in the canteen, which might not have been vegan. Bas indicated that anarchists who wanted to judge other anarchists about washing-up liquid, instead of focusing on combating social injustices in the world, had their priorities wrong. Bas was a veganist himself; he didn’t use milk in his coffee but always carried a small tin of coconut “milk powder” with him, something that was still quite unknown in the Netherlands at the time and therefore difficult to obtain. I believe he got it from India. He also didn’t use butter on his bread but linseed oil, he once told me when he put some of that powder in his coffee and I asked him about it. But he didn’t look down on anyone who (like me) did use cow’s milk in their coffee.”
Another characteristic memory of hers is: ‘I also remember that we once had coffee together somewhere and he wanted to pay for both of us because he had more money than I did; but he insisted that I pay with his wallet, in order to counteract the notion that women did not need to have money of their own because the man always paid for the woman.’
Bas was away for months at a time, sometimes for more than a year. Travelling to and temporarily living or wandering around Bangladesh, the United States, Russia, Poland, and I am sure I am forgetting many other countries and places. Always curious about what people and groups were doing in life, but also what they thought politically and, above all, what they did in practice. In the US, he stayed with various urban groups of the Catholic Workers, a Christian anarchist direct action community. In his later years, he started many translation projects of books he found interesting, but he usually did not finish them because he lost interest or was greatly disturbed by something in the book he was translating, or thought he would not be able to find a publisher. During his Wanderjahre – when he travelled everywhere and nowhere – he wrote newsletters that he sent out by email, in which he recounted his adventures and reflected on the circumstances in the country where he was staying and the people he met.
He continued to visit the Fort until he was very old (around 93). The last time was about two and a half years ago (travelling all the way by train from Molenhoek, south of Nijmegen, where he had found a small house specially ment for elderly). In the basket of his walker, he brought small stacks of books from his modest collection as a donation to the Fort. He had a story to tell about each book he left behind. Until two years ago, he produced a kind of weekly newsletter with summaries in English of newspaper articles from Eastern Europe, to which he added his personal comments. Three years ago, shortly after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and fuelled by pro-Putin trolls or puppets in Moldova, he travelled to Amsterdam to buy a Moldovan dictionary at the Pegasus bookshop so that he could read Moldovan news online, summarise it in English and then share it with his friends and acquaintances on his mailing list. In May 2024, he moved to a nursing home in Wijchen. He could no longer manage on his own in his senior citizen’s home. On 1 January 2026, the book was closed for good and Bas breathed his last breath.
Bas was a remarkable personality, an adventurer, very curious about what motivated people and helped them through life, sometimes grumpy, often ready with a funny story. Always a good listener, although his hearing became increasingly impaired in later life due to deafness. He preferred not to use the telephone in his final years. The Fort owes him a great deal. We would like to express our posthumous public gratitude. Without him, the Fort would never have had such a flying start. But also: thank you for all the stories, Bas! We will miss your visits.
The volunteers of the Fort van Sjakoo
Link to PDF: Publisher and distributor Bas Moreel – The nerve centre of domestic and foreign publications on anarchism (article from the colour section of Vrij Nederland, 23‑10‑1976)