The book first appeared in 1988, two years after D.C. punk rockers Cynthia Connolly and Leslie Clague began to gather stories, images and flyers from people involved in the scene. It proved to be a hit — and they later reprinted it five times, until 2005, when Connolly announced the book’s sixth edition would be its last. Its original negatives were just too ancient to be reused, she said.

But today, Dischord Records announced that Banned In DC. is coming back. Its seventh edition will be available June 23.

This version will include a couple of significant changes, Connolly tells Bandwidth. Now when you open the book, you’ll see a big photo of The Zones’ Billy Albert, shot by Jem Cohen in 1979. At the end, Connolly has included a new eight-page afterword that explores the book’s origins.

From the afterword, here’s Connolly explaining how the book first took shape in 1986:

When I spoke to photographers on the phone, not all believed that I would create a book. Few books existed at this point about any punk scene, so why would DC be among the first? Many couldn’t understand why anyone would write a book about something that had happened within the last five years, and that was actually still underway. Some of the photographers who captured the DC punk scene grew so irritated by my repeated requests for them to search their negative archives that they gave us their negatives and told us to print whatever images we wanted.

Connolly and Clague collected roughly 600 images in one year.

Several years after Banned In DC saw its last edition, Connolly began to change her mind about keeping the book out of print. Several other projects had rekindled interest in D.C.’s 1980s punk scene, like the Corcoran’s 2013 exhibit “Pump Me Up” and Roger Gastman’s book by the same name, Scott Crawford and Jim Saah’s film Salad Days and James Schneider and Paul Bishow’s in-progress film Punk the Capital. “The Banned In D.C. book should exist,” Connolly says she thought. “It shouldn’t be something that’s out of print forever.”

Connolly tried to reprint the work in time for “Pump Me Up,” but the project proved to be a “bigger monster than you could ever imagine,” she says, and she didn’t make deadline. So she took her time reassembling the book digitally, piece by piece, laboring over each detail to get it right.

The publisher and artist sounds happy with the way the final product turned out. She says the new Banned In DC looks nearly identical to its earlier versions.

While Banned In DC has remained out of print, the D.C. Public Library has kept a couple of copies, and Connolly has held on to her own stash, too, just in case a friend wanted one. Previously she’d held off reprinting it, “thinking that surely everybody had their fill of this book,” she writes in her afterword.

But “over the years, people just wanted to still see the book,” Connolly says. “I was just realizing that it just needed to be done.”

The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.