Notes

Week 1: Poetry and Authorship: a brief history of DIY and Small Press publishing 

“DIY” (Do It Yourself) publishing has been key to literary innovation and history from the beginning of print culture. In many senses, publishing and the “public” emerge simultaneously, as publishing contributes to the formation of “public opinion.” Small presses have had a unique role to play in the formation of subcultures, cultures of dissent, and activating social margins in ways that can upend cultural and geographical hierarchies, such as between center and margin, nation and region, etc. (Modern democracies would be unimaginable without the small press.) This dynamic relation between center and margin gets played out within authorship as a dynamic tension between the public (publishers’ interest) and the proper (author’s interest) in publication. Authors make publishers as much as publishers make authors, even as their perspectives cannot and should not be identical. Authorship itself is a social relation more than an identity.

Roland Barthes went so far as to declare the “death of the author,” as romantic fetishization of authors faded behind new materialist and structuralist understandings of literature. Furthermore, authorship is a social relation embedded in the material culture of publication, that is to say, in a culture mediated by material and historical contingency. Michel Foucault answered Barthes by asking, anew, “What is an author?” An author, Foucault proposes, is a social “function,” the “author function,” one that, amongst other traits, is linked to “the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.” Foucault furthermore identifies a “transdiscursive” kind of author—an author (like Sigmund Freud) who is a “founder of discursivity.” Such authors are not just authors of their own works but produce “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.” Such a grand perspective on authorship tends to overlook the role of print culture in the emergence and formation of authors. Just as authors emerge from a “series of specific and complex [discursive] operations” (to cite Foucault) they also emerge from the material operations of print culture and, in particular, from the activities of the “small press publisher,” who in many cases might be the authors themselves.

Authors and publishers make books, objects (and commodities) made of natural and human-made materials, borne of technological processes, taking dimension in time and space and subject to entropy as well as to the dialectics of historical materialism, that is to say, to the temporally bound play between culture, matter, and society. (In this respect books share the cultural dimensions and fate of art objects.) Every time we want to know what a book is, we have to hold one in our hands, turn through it, and ask the question anew: what is a book? Which question also implies asking, what is an author? What is publication?

“Self-publishing” thus is a complex operation, one that can engage an apparatus, the “small press,” with a vastly more broad and socially-engaged range of concerns than those implied in the commercial operation known as a “vanity press.” We might, for instance, argue that successful self-publishing maintains awareness of important distinctions between author and publisher functions, even if the same “person” is involved on both ends.

Week 1 Lecture:

Practice (Video)
Practice (Slides)
Practice (PDF)

Theory (Video)
Theory (Slides)
Theory (PDF)

History (Video)
History (Slides)
History (PDF)

Notable Moments in Self-Publishing History: A Timeline

-> Self-publishing

Jane Austen (1811)

After an initial rejection and years of reworking her first novel, Jane Austen went the vanity publishing route and paid London-based Thomas Egerton to publish Sense and Sensibility.

Marcel Proust (1913)

“Perhaps I am as thick as two short planks, but I cannot understand how a man can take thirty pages to describe how he turns round in his bed before he finally falls asleep.” Novelist Marcel Proust didn’t let this rejection from a French publisher deter him and went on to pay for the publication of Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of his seven-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past).

Virginia (and Leonard) Woolf

Hogarth Press (1917-1946)

Hogarth went on to publish writers like Christopher Isherwood and Edwin Muir, as well as Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and “A Room of One’s Own.”

Dave Eggers

McSweeney’s

Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

William Blake (w/ James Parker and Joseph Johnson)

Walt Whitman (1855)

Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself and had it printed at a local print shop during their breaks from commercial jobs. A total of 795 copies were printed. No name is given as author; instead, facing the title page was an engraved portrait done by Samuel Hollyer, but 500 lines into the body of the text he calls himself “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” The inaugural volume of poetry was preceded by a prose preface of 827 lines.

On May 15, 1855, Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, Southern District of New Jersey, and received its copyright. The first edition was published in Brooklyn at the Fulton Street printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s, on July 4, 1855. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. The book did not include the author’s name, instead offering an engraving by Samuel Hollyer depicting the poet in work clothes and a jaunty hat, arms at his side. Early advertisements for the first edition appealed to “lovers of literary curiosities” as an oddity. Sales on the book were few but Whitman was not discouraged.

The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.” About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover. The only American library known to have purchased a copy of the first edition was in Philadelphia. The poems of the first edition, which were given titles in later issues, were “Song of Myself, “A Song For Occupations,” “To Think of Time,” “The Sleepers,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Faces,” “Song of the Answerer,” “Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States,” “A Boston Ballad,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,” “Who Learns My Lesson Complete?”, and “Great Are the Myths.”

The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. “Grass” was a term given by publishers to works of minor value and “leaves” is another name for the pages on which they were printed.

Whitman wrote anonymous reviews of his own book.

-> Modernists

Dada, Russian avant-garde

William Carlos Williams (Poems, 1909)

Pound, A Lume Spento

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas helped prepare the proofs of Three Lives. With its unconventional style, the book had difficulty finding a publisher. A friend of her brother Leo’s, writer Hutchins Hapgood, tried to help find one, though he was pessimistic of the book’s chances. Its first rejection came from Pitts Duffield of Duffield & Co., who recognized the book’s French influence, but passed on its “too literary” and realistic qualities, which he believed would find few contemporary readers. Literary agent Flora Holly and Stein’s friend Mabel Weeks were also unable to interest a publisher. After a year of rejections, another friend, Mary Bookstaver, found the vanity publisher Grafton Press of New York; Stein had the firm print Three Lives at her own expense for $660. Stein’s first published book, the 500 copies of its first printing left the presses July 30, 1909.

Week 2: A Short History of Print Culture: From Gutenberg to Areopagitica 

A Short History of Print Culture (slides / PDF)
Video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

This history highlights the material limitations and potentialities driving the evolution of print culture (the evolution of letter forms from script through northern Gothic Textura type mimicking script and the southern, Mediterranean developments of “humanist” type forms; the development of moveable type, i.e. Gutenberg’s “25 soldiers of lead that have conquered the world”; the dependence of paper on the availability and properties of papyrus, animal skin [vellum], and cotton). It covers the emergence of “book” formats in folio, quarto, and octavo folds, and the latter’s role in the convenience and popularity of the “pamphlet” format. (One book technology not covered here is that of binding; pamphlets were either distributed loose leaf or loosely stitched.) The social dynamics of print culture can be seen in print’s crucial role in the spread of literacy and the religious “reformations,” often linked to emergence of modern “individualism” and rational “enlightenment,” and/or to capitalism and the conquest of “New World” commodity frontiers, but highlighting, for our purposes, in the context of England’s 16th and 17th century “pamphlet wars,” the formation of a “public” and of “public opinion,” instrumental to the emergence (in England, at least) of parliamentary democracy. The age of pamphlets also emphasizes the oral and social dimensions of print culture, as we are asked to envisage the teeming milieu of hawkers, Mercury women and chapmen, and the innumerable booksellers, populating St. Paul’s yard in London. (We can think of pamphlets as the “Twitter-sphere” of 17th century society. At the same time, historical understanding urges us to think of important differences. What might some of these be?) The history of the “Stationer’s Company (evolved from stationers [scriveners] responsible for recording the loans of the exemplar manuscripts and checking that they had been copied correctly) as an arm of governmental attempts to control the press highlights the emergence of the democratic principle of a “free press.” Throughout, the “small press” is seen as driving, expanding, and complicating the social dimensions of print culture.

Notes:

Background of print books—papyrus, codex (from caudex, tree trunk), vellum (animal skin), wax tablets.

Destruction of Library of Alexandria in first half millennium AD.

Spread of book production/ print culture through Arab empire (into Europe via Cordoba).

10th century Grand Vizier of Persia: 117,00 handwritten scrolls on 400 camels taught to walk in alphabetic order (vs. just 500 books in Paris).

Medieval scriptoria

Evolution of manuscript letter forms from Trajan’s Column (AD 114) through uncial and half-uncial script (fore-runners of lower case hand, cf Book of Kells) to Charlemagne’s attempted reformation (Carolingian script) to regional scripts like blackletter Textura (disparaged by Renaissance humanists as “Gothic”).

Emergence of stationers (scriveners) responsible for recording the loans of the exemplar manuscripts and checking that they had been copied correctly.

Challenge of church monopoly with 12th C emergence of secular scriptoria. Universities’ growing demand for books: emergence of paper.

A craft that originated in China (discovery of Cai Lun in AD 104) and coming through Catalonia (1238), Fabriano in Italy (1276) and Nuremberg (1389).

Required sustainable supply of rags, so mills had to be close to large population centers.

Demand for books increasing. Printing on raised and inked surfaces (letterpress printing—supreme over other methods of printing well into 20th Century) from woodcut blocks until mid-15th century.

An expensive undertaking.

Sell and produce model: books available and affordable only to clerics, wealthy merchants, aristocracy. Often bound together in omnibus volumes.

Humanist individualism, Renaissance education, importance of visual arts. Institution of banking. Two driving forces of commerce and passion for knowledge: invention of printing from movable type.

Gutenberg: wine press technology + jewellery techniques reduced manuscript production time and costs by 90%

Modification of the screw press, adaptation of the techniques of puchcutting, brass mold-making, metal-casting.

Gutenberg’s key innovation was the adjustable mold (video): two fitting parts that could be adjusted to fit the matrix of each letter, overcoming the problem of the necessity of a mold for each letter. (Gutenberg cast at least 300 characters in order to provide slight variations of letterform throughout his Bible.) Thick, oil-based ink (soot-blackened, though cf. “urban legend” about copy printed with mushroom-based ink). Inclusion of antimony as part of the metal alloy (mostly lead with some tin), producing a sharp letter cast without shrinkage.

A system of mass production —> single most important factor in the spread of knowledge and the move toward universal literacy in the West: “soldiers of lead that have conquered the world.”

By 1600 printers were able to produce over 1200 printed sheets a day. Produce and sell (or sell-through) model.

(“With his 25 [or 26] soldiers of lead has conquered the world.” Just 25 would be the accurate quotation, since distinct “j” letterform came later.)

42-line Bible, completed in about 1455. Typeface based on Textura, the formal script of Northern Germany.

Early documentation states that a total of 200 copies were scheduled to be printed on rag cotton linen paper, and 30 copies on velum animal skin. It is not known exactly how many copies were actually printed. (Some say 180 copies.)

Most Gutenberg Bibles contained 1,286 pages bound in two volumes, yet almost no two are exactly alike.

Today, only 22 copies are known to exist, of which 7 are on velum.  If an entire Gutenberg Bible should become available on the world market, it would likely fetch an estimated 100 million dollars!

Political violence and destruction in Mainz (Gutenberg’s hometown and home of movable type printing) hastened spread of printing across Europe, as printers became itinerant and were forced to look for new markets. —> Italy, in particular Venice (cf. Aldo Manutius humanist printing and first “pocket books” and Rome.

Printers stopped imitating manuscripts and developed new formats and styles. Continuing evolution of letterforms from Gutenberg’s blackletter to humanist Roman type. Role of Italian humanist printers.

In Britain printing was first introduced by translator, editor and publisher William Caxton (1421-1491). Caxton occupied post of Governor of English Wool Merchants in Bruges, Belgium, and studied craft of printing in Germany, printing his first book in English in Bruges in 1475 (Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye). Returned to England in 1476 and set up a printing press at the Abbey Precinct, Westminster “by the sign of the Red Pale.” Printed first book in England in 1477 (The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers). Had published 73 books in English by the time he died: cf. Le Morte d’Arthur (Sir Thomas Malory).

Books arrived at a time of historical and cultural flux, including a changing “English” language. Books helped England emerge from its isolation. First step in exponential growth in importance of English language throughout the world.

Mass-produced books that spread ideas not in line with Rome’s policies eventually became a grave challenge to its authority.

Important role of Reformation in spread of literacy, in feedback with invention of printing.

Growth of literacy from 16th to 19th century. Mass book sales only truly became a reality in 19thC explosion of literacy (introduction of “literature” to working-class Britain).

Early English trade. Caxton popularized Chaucer. After Caxton’s death, his assistant Wynkyn de Worde  moved their printing establishment to Fleet Street, beginning long tradition of print trade int he area around St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Anglophone legal publishing began with John Lettou (also set up in London in 1482) and his partner William de Machlinia publishing England’s first law book, Tenores novelli.

Richard III (reigned 1483-1485) promoted the trade by exempting books, publishing skills and printing paraphernelia from the anti-alien trade statute.

Authorial rights first recorded in Europe in 1486 (Senate of Venice granting rights in perpetuity to Antonio Sabellico for his Decades Rerum Venetiarum). By contrast, power in the English book trade was firmly vested in the printer and bookseller, not the author. (A nearly unique circumstance in the world history of publishing.) English authors had to wait nearly 250 years before their rights were recognized in English law.

1533-1694: The Age of Control

Henry VIII reversed Richard III’s trade examption for books, bringing end to early trade era. Instituted system of Privy Council oversight of books throughout England. Royal Charter granted to University of Cambridge (1534) and to University of Oxford (1586)

Stationer’s Company (scrivener’s guild) finally granted sweeping Royal Charter over commercial printing throughout England, by Queen Mary, concerned with creating robust Roman Catholic controls over printed materials. Industrial privileges and trade-wide monopoly (“rights in copy”) guarded jealously for 150 years.

“In effect, Mary provided the Stationers with a sixteenth-century royal edict to print money.”

Company’s control over printing ran from 1557 to 1694.

Embedded in UK’s publishing traditions and practices—the idea that publishers have the final say, not the original authors of literary works, which differs from most continental traditions.

Conservatism of books (= money) vs. radicalism of pamphlets.

But Guthrie exaggerates the hold of Stationers over printing. Cf. Raymond’s history of emerging pamphlet culture. Stationers’ Company’s monopolistic printing powers were challenged by the Long Parliament in the early 1640s (Civil War, Star Chamber abolished). Execution of King Charles I, Protestant sectarian movements, “wild, chaotic pamphleteering,” explosion of private of self-publishing onto the scene.

Milton’s 1644 pamphlet (“speech”) against pre-publication licensing, Areopagitica.

Licensing Act of 1662 (post-Cromwell) returned all its prior publishing status, power, and functions to the Stationers’ Company. But Jacobeans swept from power in 1688. John Locke and other liberals solicited support for printing and other reforms from the new Dutch-born King, William of Orange. In 1694, the English Parliament refused to renew the Licensing Act. Rise of the Publisher . . . 1719 establishment of registration process for copyright for published works. Dramatic 1774 House of Lords ruling in Donaldson vs. Becket, supporting statutory superiority in published works. Common law rights remained for unpublished manuscripts. Ruling cemented statute control over copyright law, ending pre-publication licensing and direct control of Stationer’s Company.

Ballads and Broadsides at the British Library

MARY ANN CAWS ON MANIFESTOS (NOTES)

manus (hand) + festus (joyous, but also related to fendere, as in offendere?)

a public declaration, explaining motives for actions announced as forthcoming

“incandescent” action writing

has a madness about it

always opposed to something

often the event is exactly its own announcement: what it announces is itself

LOOK! it says. NOW! HERE!

often noisy in its appearance

like a typographical alarm or implicit rebel yell

bigness

makes an art of excess, an act of démesure

coincidence of form and function: demonstrates or makes a manifestation, a manif

we-speak

both a personal accounting & a prescription/ directive for future acts

elimination of all adjectives and useless words

intense speed

clean as a whistle and as piercing

immodest and forceful

always in overdose and overdrive

high on its own presence

epitaph for what has gone, declaring nowness and newness

energy and potential for energizing

gets you right in your smugness

proclaims what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change

againstness

one time only moment

building the space: strong central image

mixes a bit of terror, runaway emotion and charisma with a lot of common sense

manifesto-speak

stands alone

aphoristic declaration

initial shock of an unusual form

dialogue mode

binarism

present tense

rapid enumeration of elements in list or bullet form

graphic manifestos/ arresting visual poetics

draws audience into belief of speaker

an exhortation to a whole way of thinking and being

threshold is important in setting the manifesto apart from the “real” world

a poem in heightened prose

brief forcefulness

gnomic utterances

rhetorical question

it has to grab us

context dependent

poem-manifesto, painting-manifesto, aphorism-manifesto, essay-manifesto, meta-manifesto

Week 3: Little Magazines and Modernism 

Little Magazines and Modernism (slides / PDF)
Video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

1 Title slide. 

2 The readings and lecture this week, skipping ahead a couple of centuries from Week 2, focus on the emergence of poetic modernism, and the crucial role played by small presses and “little magazines,” in the need to “say something sharply,” as a case study for how small press culture drives and is driven by a resistance to the commercial imperatives of mass print (made possible in part by the development of wood-based paper in the 19th century). The role of little magazines in international modernism also reveals a more complex relation between so-called “regional” and “international” literatures. Ezra Pound’s essay on “Small Magazines” underscores the extent to which the modernist projects of Pound and his peers (such as “Imagism”) would not have been possible without little magazines, nor does he fail (of course) to spotlight the leading role poets played in the development of this print culture.

Relations between “margin” and “mainstream,” “minor” and “major,” “small” and “large,” or “regional” and “national,” have always been complex, but were made more so in the “modernist” period, and at the heart of this development we find, once again, situated between regional and international cultures, small press publishing and its “little magazines.” 

. . . little magazines are non-commercial enterprises founded by individuals or small groups intent upon publishing the experimental works or radical opinions of untried, unpopular, or under-represented writers.

Whatever the format, scope, or preferred topics of conversation, little magazines tend to share two features: a vexed relationship to a larger, mainstream public and an equally vexed relationship to money

For further definitions of little magazines, see T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Literary Review,” New Criterion 4 (1926)

3 But first, to get closer to how little magazines shaped not just content and theme but the ways in which modernist works are read, let’s look at an example from the end of the modernist period, an excerpt from perhaps the most famous poem by one of its greatest poets, a writer whose career spanned both the beginning and the end of modernism (as well as revolutions, two World Wars, unprecedented technological developments, and social changes we are still getting to grips with today), W.B. Yeats.

4 Jerome McGann’s reading (from the chapter “Modernism and the Renaissance of Printing” in his book Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism) of William Butler Yeats’s famous stanza from his late poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” emphasizes not only Yeats’s nostalgia for a lost era of “fine print” but also his canny exploitation of small press culture to forge a national identity for Irish modernism, situated between regional and international cultures, in his publishing choices and endeavors (issuing his work through a 3-fold model of fine press, periodical and mass print publication). On his deathbed, Yeats renders homage to the humble, material origins of his trade, bound up with complexities of class relation (at the end of the day, the “man of letters” lies down with the ragpicker who made his career possible):

“Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

– – Stanza III of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” by William Butler Yeats

To get a sense of how this poem, in its ‘career retrospective’, looks across a sea change in publishing to an earlier era, we need a bit of publishing history context.

5 Yeats’s poem invokes the “old rags” sold out of the “rag and bone shop” to stationers and paper merchants, who (as Jerome McGann notes) would reprocess them to make paper—an obsolete economy of production by the time Yeats published his poem (1939).

6 By 1844 Friedrich Gottlob Keller and Charles Fenerty invented a machine which extracted the fibres from wood (exactly as with rags) and made paper from it. Charles Fenerty also bleached the pulp so that the paper was white. This started a new era for paper making. By the end of the 19th-century almost all printers in the western world were using wood instead of rags to make paper.

7 Paper costs fell from 20% of a book’s cost in 1740 to 7% by 1910. The 19th C invention of the steam-powered press also greatly increased the speed of the printing process. Where a printer circa 1600 using a hand-operated Gutenberg press could produce a maximum of 240 pages in one hour, by the early 1800s a steam-powered press could turn out 2,400 in that same hour. 8 In 1847 an American inventor named Richard March Hoe patented the rotary, or web press, which fed a continuous sheet of paper around a cylinder. This method of printing, still in use today, increased the number of pages printed to as many as 1,000,000 per day.

9 The invention of hot metal or mechanical typesetting, a method that injects lines of molten type metal into a mold, resulting in slugs used to press ink onto paper, while the typecasting machine is controlled by a keyboard or by a paper tape, reduced labour since type sorts did not need to be slotted into position manually, and each casting created crisp new type for each printing job. In the case of Linotype machines, each line was cast as a robust continuous block (hence “line o’type”) which was useful for rapid newspaper printing.

10 [Image of Linotype machine.]

When Yeats was a young poet, small presses might have worked with the rapidly obsolescing “letter press” technology, printing periodicals and collections in small shops on cotton-based paper. Meanwhile, the publishing industry had already moved on to large-scale trade and academic publishing on web presses and wood-based paper.

11 By signaling back to older, even obsolete printing methods — as in the case of Yeats’s poem, both in the work’s themes but also through the methods by which it is published via small presses — modernist authors, according to McGann, brought “bibliographic code” and paratextual features (such as typography, layout, and book design) into their signifying practices, as a way to separate their productions from “older” as well as from “mainstream” print culture, using bibliographic models and forbears to fashion new artistic effects. McGann in fact points to the development of what he calls “bibliographic code” as a key feature of poetic modernism–going so far as to assert that this “code” can be detected even within the textual (grammatical, sonic, literary) innovations of a writer like Gertrude Stein, who did not have access to or did not participate so directly in small press publishing.

One example of “bibliographic code” at work can be seen in the design choices of Yeats’s Cuala Press, which looks back to two different 1890s publishing forbears: to the medievalist aesthetics 12 and socialist values of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press in its retro ‘woodcut’ frontispiece designs, but also, 13 in its use of Caslon typefaces for the text, to the cosmopolitan and even ‘decadent’ aesthetics of the 14 Bodley Head Press and The Yellowbook (which Bodley Head published) with its “crisp aura of contemporaneity.”   

15 [Another page from Yeats’s Last Poems, showing the dual aesthetic. Note the ‘illuminated’ initial capital A and other decorative features.]

At the end of the modernist period (1949) W.B. Yeats, in one of his final poems 16, thus looks back to the dawn of modernism, to the Aestheticist and Decadent movements of the 1890s and their various forms of radicalism: including the Arts & Crafts Movement, with its socialist values and 17 ‘medievalist design and typography (part of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ movement), forged through textile designer 18 William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (19-20), alongside the more conventional typography and “art nouveau” design (21) of The Yellowbook, published by John Lane’s Bodley Head press (22-23), which through Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations (24) brought queer values into the mainstream and, in publications like Salome (25-28), promoted Oscar Wilde’s radical, “art for art’s sake” aestheticism. The “Celtic Twilight” Irish Literary Renaissance, of which Yeats was a paragon and which lent its name to the title of Yeats’s third poetry collection, The Celtic Twilight, published in 1893, was also a part of this pre-modern period.

29 The Yellow Book was a fashionable magazine which ran from 1894–97, taking its name from the notorious covering into which controversial French novels were placed at the time. It is, in fact, a ‘yellow book’ which corrupts Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. When Wilde was arrested in 1895, there were rumors he had been carrying a yellow-bound book. Though this was actually Pierre Louÿs’s French novel Aphrodite, a confused crowd thought it was a copy of this magazine, and gathered to throw stones at the publishers’s offices.

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-yellow-book

That Yeats’s 1939 Cuala Press publication is able to combine elements from both these1890s  movements in its typography and design speaks to the complexity of modernist identity as forged through the little magazines in the intervening decades.

30 For instance, we would see similar dynamics at work in the US between the cover aesthetics of a 1912 issue of Poetry magazine (note the Morris-esque medievalism) and the more mainstream publication The Dial (with its slightly lyrical modernist font), which ran from 1840 to 1929 but, for all its conservatism, 31 did publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (Nov. 1922 issue).

Other developments in technology and commerce in the publishing trade were afoot in this period.

32 Slide of penny press.]

The function of the newspaper had shifted dramatically in the 1830s; where previously newspapers had simply listed commercial news, they then began to operate as vehicles for editors’ opinions. The new form primarily responsible for this shift was the penny press.

The penny press was cheap, hawked on street corners for a penny in single issues, in contrast to the six-penny subscription services mailed solely to people’s homes. And unlike earlier publications that were tied to specific parties, the penny press was politically independent.

33 [Slide of railroad networks.]

In the United States, the mass industrialization of printing coincided with the dramatic expansion of the railroads.

It was in this period of print media that the sponsorship of advertisers began to not only address individuals’ wants and needs but to actually construct those desires. We’ll return to this role of the press toward the end of term, in the readings for and lecture on Print Activism. But for now I mention these developments as context for the explosion 34 of periodical publications (the ‘big magazines’) and the commercialism of these publications that Ezra Pound decries in his essay on “small magazines” that you were asked to read for this week.

35-37 With these contexts I’ve tried to sketch what Suzanne W. Churchill calls the “mediamorphosis” that transformed the literary landscape in the twentieth century, fueled by technological advances in printing and paper production, the growth of the modern advertising industry, rising literacy rates, and more efficient transportation systems. Thousands of periodicals emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, and as the market expanded, it also diversified.  (Churchill)

38-41 Contrast with this the titles one could find on the magazine rack of the Washington Square Bookshop in NYC in the 1920s [Broom]:

“It was a very selective rack. One could not find the big-circulation magazines . . . Most of the fifteen or so magazines carried by the Washington Square had no circulation whatever in [mainstream America]. In what a high-pitched anticipatory mood we ducked into this book shop once or twice a week to see what was new on its magazine rack. Here were the publications of the new movements in American art and thought and literature. Here were the reviews that were stimulating the young. Here were the magazines we wanted to write for.”

Gorham Munson [contributor to Broom], quoted in Churchill & McKible

42 Ezra Pound

“The significance of the small magazine has, obviously, nothing to do with format. The significance of any work of art or literature is a root significance that goes down into its original motivation.

43-48 Hence the sameness in impression given by successive numbers of these bright and snappy periodicals. I mean to say that each of these publications expresses, fundamentally, one idea and one only. The thinking man can learn from them one thing only; when he has learned that, he thirsts for further and more diversified knowledge.

. . . these things ultimately leave a vacuum. They leave a need for intellectual communication unconditioned by considerations as to whether a given idea or a given trend in art will “git ads” from the leading corset companies.

The work of writers who have emerged in or via such magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines. The commercial magazines have been content and are still more than content to take derivative products ten or twenty years after the germ has appeared in the free magazines. There is nothing new about this. Work is acceptable to the public when its underlying ideas have been accepted. The heavier the ‘overhead’ in a publishing business the less that business can afford to deal in experiment. This purely sordid and eminently practical consideration will obviously affect all magazines save those that are either subsidized (as chemical research is subsidized) or else very cheaply produced (as the penniless inventor produces in his barn or his attic). Literature evolves via a mixture of these two methods.”

49 Further social, cultural, political, and technological context, to the modernist transformation of literary landscapes, might include urbanization, nationalism, World Expos, revolution, World War, the rise of finance and petro-capitalism, displacement and migration, advances in communication technology (telegraph and wireless telegraphy), and a growing internationalism (of cultural elites and/or international labor movements, amongst other demographics, often positioned at the margins of their ‘home’ cultures): increasingly, intellectuals were motivated to identify, be informed and inspired by, cultural formations that transcended national, geographical and linguistic borders. A new kind of “binding force,” in Ezra Pound’s terms, began to make itself felt:

50 “Where there is not the binding force of some kind of agreement, however vague or unanalyzed, between three or four writers, it seems improbable that the need of a periodical really exists. Everyone concerned would probably be happier publishing individual volumes.”

Little magazines draw attention not only to the “binding force” that drew disparate modernist writers and artists to collaborate, but also to the heterogeneity of their efforts, goals, and ideals. Little magazines acted as social forums for writers of different genders, races, and nationalities.

The Exile

51 . . . the office of The Liberator, a leftist little magazine, provided a place for Mike Gold, a budding Communist from the Jewish streets of the Lower East Side, to overhear 52 the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a wildly eccentric German immigrant, recite her Dadaist poetry to Claude McKay, a Jamaican sonneteer with connections to radical political organizations in England and a growing prominence in the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. 53 Despite their differences, figures such as [James] Joyce, [Emma] Goldman, [Mike] Gold, Freytag-Loringhoven, and McKay identifed themselves as modernists, both to each other and to the public, by writing for and reading little magazines.

Alfred Kreymbourg: “This nowhere had at last assumed a recognizable shape and sentience and one was able to say something sharply relating to a person and his place.”

54 The ability to “say something sharply” may indeed be one of the distinguishing features not only of modernist little magazines, but also of modernism in general.

Little magazines provide a record of the large-scale conversation that became modernism, an odd and absorbing concourse that cannot be reduced to a single movement or coherent set of principles.

55-58 Manifestos: as a moment of very public “throat-clearing,” manifestos and their “-isms” (though often written by individuals) are a primary genre for the articulation and development of group formations (“we”-speak) and of building conditions for the reception (and locating and “schooling” the audience) of literary, artistic, and political revolutions, usually associated with the modernist “futurist moment.” They are the epitome of “saying something sharply.” The different kinds of rhetoric, genre moves, and format taken up by what what Mary Ann Caws calls “the manifesto style” remain an inspiration to small press publishers to this day. Like pamphlets, manifestos are a seemingly ephemeral format with a potentially large voice and broad-reaching and long-lasting impact.

59 Churchill’s and McKible’s histories detail how little magazines facilitated, through their “ability to say something sharply,” the emergence of “minority” literatures such as writing by women (in the female editorship of the Little Review) and writers of color (in 60 The Crisis, the official print organ of the NAACP: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), as well as fostering the development of a strong “proletarian” literary front (as with 61 the graphically innovative socialist magazine The Masses). Gender, color, and class lines run through small press print culture.

62 W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis opened doors to African American poets in 1910; 63 Max Eastman launched the Masses in 1911, creating a forum hospitable to radical leftist poets. Little magazines cropped up in reaction to the societies’ elitism, some aiming to restore poetry’s popular appeal.

64 In January 1912, Harold Monro launched the Poetry Review from London, and in October 1912, 65 Harriet Monroe issued 66 Poetry from Chicago.

At the same time as magazines like The Crisis printed poetry embedded in its social context, as Bartholomew Brinkman demonstrates in his reading of Ezra Pound’s “In A Station of the Metro” 67 (published in the 1912 issue of Poetry), an “avant-garde” little magazine such as Poetry could play a role in developing a de-historicized, conservative, “art for art’s sake” aesthetics, by printing poems on their own 68, framed and decontextualized in the field of the white page.

[Reading of “In a Station of the Metro”]

In her editorial “The Motive of the Magazine,” Harriet Monroe asserts that every art requires “an entrenched place” in order to flourish; whereas painting, sculpture, and music are housed in “great palaces,” a magazine gives “poetry her own place.”

Imagism enters the world via the little magazine.

Such poems, brought into the world by little magazines in the 1910s, contributed to the transformation of poetry into a harder edged, more incisive form of expression, better suited to the experiences, demands, and devastating losses of modernity.

69 In The Dial, Nov 1922 issue (same one that published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land)

A poem by Mina Loy, 70

“Brancusi’s Golden Bird” reflects the international sensibility 71 of modernism, as well as its rapid dissemination through magazines. Published adjacent to a photograph of Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture 72, [Mina Loy’s] poem also evinces the influence of the visual arts on modernist poetry. Loy depicts Golden Bird as the perfect fusion of word and image, sound and sight, male and female: “the absolute act / of art” (507).

[Read from “The absolute act of art . . .” to end]

Meanwhile, free verse, which had been the hallmark of modernist poetry in the predominantly white little magazines of the 1910s, did not catch on in African American periodicals until the 1920s.

73 Langston Hughes’s debut poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the Vol 22, no. 22 issue of The Crisis, June, 1921 74, sounds a significant new note in modernist poetry. 75

[Play recording of poem.]

76 In contrast to Poetry, magazines like The Crisis or The Masses would print poetry alongside other genres, as well as alongside more journalistic content, in ways that emphasized historical context. Additionally, for a “little magazine,” The Crisis had a print run that rivaled mass publications.

Two aspects of little magazine edginess, aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although this was often the case prior to the 1930s.

77 Periodicals ranging from Vogue and Vanity Fair to the Duluth News Tribune reported on the antics of the little magazines, often ridiculing or parodying their contents. But in doing so, they made the strange new forms more familiar to popular audiences, helping modernist poets like Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, and Ezra Pound to become household names.

[Note progression of styles, eventually incorporating modernist aesthetics.]

Churchill & McKible: there was a great deal of overlap and cross-fertilization between the various spheres of modern print culture, as both mass-market and non-commercial magazines borrowed each other’s tactics to engage in the same project of creating a modern literary world.

Churchill: Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker assert “the need to view magazines and the variety of tendencies comprising ideas of the modern as a lively congress of opinion and exchange, rather than a flat segmented map or set of inflexible hierarchies”

Reflecting recent trends in modernist periodical studies, [a focus on material print culture] redirects the focus from individual geniuses to multifaceted dialogues and negotiations, highlighting the interplay between avant-garde and commercial spheres.

Eric B. White, in his discussion of “Transatlantic Avant-Gardes,” proposes the term “localism” as an alternative to “regionalist,” since small press culture, in its movement between regional international modernism, often upended simple oppositions between “region” and “nation.” Thus intersectional readings of the gender, color, class, and geographic lines that run through poetic modernism and its small press culture show how little magazines facilitated, negotiated and transacted the complex formation we call “modernism.”

Once again: relations between “margin” and “mainstream,” “minor” and “major,” “small” and “large,” or “regional” and “national,” have always been complex, but were made more so in the “modernist” period, and at the heart of this development we find small press publishing and its “little magazines.”

Strikingly, women, who were a visible and vocal presence in modernist poetry of the 1910s and 1920s, play a less prominent role beginning in the 1930s, suggesting that feminist politics are superseded by geopolitical and economic crises.

78 Eliot’s stamp is palpable [even] in the Feb.-Mar. 1934 issue of the Communist-leaning Partisan Review, 79 in Alfred Hayes’s “In a Coffee Pot,” 80 a poem about the plight of unemployed laborers in the Depression.

[Read a bit: note echoes of Eliot’s “Prufrock,” as well, perhaps, of Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”]

81 But despite the urgency of the political crises, modernist poetry in the 1930s is more muted, cynical, and resigned, less assured that poetry can achieve meaning and order in a chaotic world.

82 F. R. Leavis edited the long-running, canon-making Scrutiny (1932–53) from Cambridge University, at a time when I. A. Richards was introducing the methods of “practical criticism” to the educational establishment. Much of the work of Scrutiny, in fact, involved shaping a modernist poetry canon in which Eliot reigned supreme, and “difficulty” and “impersonality” were the watchwords. In the US, the Kenyon Review performed a similar function. Founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom – who two decades before had been one of the so-called Fugitives (a group of poets and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee) – the Kenyon Review picked up where Cleanth Brooks’s Southern Review (1935–42) left off, helping to institute New Criticism and forge a canon of modernist poetry around men such as Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Stevens, and Auden. In the next decades, the diverse field of modernist poetry would be winnowed to a select canon.

83 Already, writers such as the Objectivists were forging an alternative to this conservative trend in modernist poetry, and their legacy would erupt amidst some of 84 the “Beat” writers and poets of the “Mimeograph revolution” and the San Francisco Renaissance, which we’ll cover next week.

85 To understand how little magazines functioned in and for the time, we might leap three quarters of a century forward to the weblog, emerging at the dawn of the internet:

The interactive format [of the blog] allows readers to post comments, introducing a dialogic element to the form, not unlike the social networking little magazines provided modernist poets. The social dimensions of the new digital genres are perhaps even more pronounced in the tweet 86, a message of up to 140 characters posted to the social networking service Twitter, which distributes the message to any number of subscribers, who can [respond and] forward it to their followers. Especially prized is the ability to condense wit and wisdom into the compressed form. 87 In this way, the “tweet” can be seen as a distant cousin of that concentrated modernist poetic form, the Imagist poem. 88

Churchill: as Eric Bulson argues, “little magazines functioned 89 as . . . a place in which writers, readers, critics, and translators could imagine themselves belonging to a global community” (267).  Little magazines – and the broader print cultural boom of which they were a vital part – made modernist poetry possible.

90 [Modernist Journals Project]

Bodley Head

Grahame Greene and the Bodley Head

The Bodley Head Press and women’s poetry of the 1890s

Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde

Aubrey Beardsley’s Salomé

A resource for researching little magazines: The Little Magazine Project

Week 4: The Mimeograph Revolution (1960-1980) 

Mimeo Revolution (slides / PDF)
Video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 [to be posted by 25/10])

As with moveable type and cotton paper in the 15th-16th century, or with offset lithography and wood pulp-based papers in the 19th century, technological innovation, in this case the development of the mimeograph machine, facilitated a small press revolution in the middle of the 20th century, often referred to as the “Mimeo Revolution.” The mimeo machine actually was developed toward the end of the 19th century, and was used primarily as a technology for printing office communications, but was taken up by poetic and political renegades at mid-century (when mimeo machines were “retro” and cheap enough for individuals to acquire), in the era of mass paperback publishing, as a way to seize the means of literary production and distribution. John McMillan’s account of the role of the mimeograph machine in the history of the influential 1960s SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) organization, in the publication of its Discussion Bulletin, and in the rise of the New Left and of 1960s underground presses and alternative media that he argues followed in its wake, demonstrates that the “mimeo revolution” was far from exclusively literary. (That said, examining archived issues of the Discussion Bulletin show how poetry and artwork featured more prominently than one might expect.) Once again, we see how central this gesture, of seizing the means of production and distribution, is to small press culture, and thus it should come as no accident that small presses–and those of the “Mimeo Revolution” are no exception–have been a primary medium for radical (i.e. “revolutionary”) politics and aesthetics.

Small Press Publishing, Week 4: The Mimeo Revolution

Rothenberg’s “Pre-Face.”

Mainstream and margin

seizing/ inventing means of production [seizing yesterday’s means of production]

Autonomy

poetry as language of those at the margins: another language, in a struggle with the center of the culture and with a language that we no longer choose to bear, a counter-language

Precedents: Blake, Whitman, Dickinson (fascicles)

ED’s “Letter to World”

WWI

“the futurist moment” (Perloff): poet-&-artist driven publications

‘golden age’ of little magazines & presses

Gertrude Stein (Three Lives self-published — Cezanne portrait)

WWII: holocaust, cold war, McCarthyism, literary conservatism (‘new criticism’) and reactionary climate

Second great awakening of twentieth-century poetry (in US, Europe, Latin America, & in much of ‘post-colonial’ world)

New American Poetry

Groupings: Black Mountain [College],  San Francisco Renaissance, Beat Generation, New York Poets

Black Mountain College, Origin, Jargon Society (North Carolina)

Critical grounding through publication of theoretical writings (Origin)

Two American centers: New York & San Francisco

SF a ‘refuge city’ & NYC where a ‘counter poetics’ flourished (in large part thanks to cheap rent) in resistance to the mainstream: existing ‘only in the creases of contemporary society, and off leavings like cockroaches . . .’

A time favorable for producing works on the cheap, either printing abroad (thanks to strong dollar, cf. Creeley) or utilizing new & inexpensive means of production: photo-offset, mimeo, ditto & (later) Xerox and photocopying.

Creeley: Divers Press

The emergence of a ‘vortex’ (Pound): a place of cultural intersections & fusions

Part of wave of liberations and resistances (feminism, Black Arts, gay rights, disability rights) that marked the 1960s & 70s.

Life in the creases

“Inventing own communities and audiences (typically indistinguishable), with a small press or little magazine often serving as the nucleus of both.”

Duncan: “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” : “a place of first permission”

“In a very real sense, almost anyone could become a publisher.”

Cost of mimeographed magazine or booklet = price of few reams of paper and a handful of stencils.

Collating, stapling, and mailing parties sped up production & helped galvanize literary group.

Independent bookstores (cf. City Lights Books)

Ginsberg’s “Howl” & 1955 ‘Six Gallery’ reading.

But also magazine like Evergreen Review with financial backing and distribution of a large publishing house that published equally subversive material.

New York School: crossovers between the arts

Mailing lists (Semina, The Floating Bear)

Quick way to get new work out (‘hot off the griddle’)

Cutting edge of new explorations in and through language: “language” writing (Mayer & Coolidge)

A network of instant response (cf. delay between date of Midwinter Day’s composition and book publication — work could circulate more quickly in magazines and pamphlets)

By 1980 this vortex dissipates: post-Vietnam, OPEC oil-crisis, rise of Thatcherism & Reagonomics (end of cheap rent), culture wars, new dependency on institutional and governmental support, Arts Councils and NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). A new gloss of professionalism, but also threat of denial of patronage.

Takeaway: “the lesson of the works presented here is the reminder of what is possible where the makers of the works seek out the means to maintain & fortify their independence.” Have the new technologies and platforms of the internet opened new possibilities?

From a Secret Location

‘Mimeo revolution’: unprecedented outpouring of poetry books and magazines 1960-80.

Non-commercial

Abundance and speed

Conscientious objection: Everson’s The Untide, newsletter & press (out of Waldport, OR C.O. camp).

Homosexuality: Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society” (ejected from Kenyon Review)

Berkeley Renaissance: Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, a group influenced by study of medieval and Renaissance culture: “a spiritual and artistic brotherhood out of shared homosexual experience, occultism, and the reading of modern literature.”

Spicer: marginal poets, collection box in bar

Uncompromising

No copyright

Floating Bear (NYC) / Leroy Jones (Yugen) / Censorship & Arrests (also McClure, for The Beard)

Snyder: activism, ecological small presses (“Four Changes”)

Poetry conferences (Duncan recording — earlier — at Berkeley Poetry Conference (1965)

Other examples: NY School 2nd generation, “language,” women’s writing & queer writing, Hambone

Workshop: Profiling a Small Press

About: masthead (mission) and history

What’s it’s focus

Editorial policy

single editor or group/ hierarchy or collective/ permanent or rotating panel

solicited only/ reading periods/ prizes and competitions / themed CFW

return period

Genres

Fiction/ Nonfiction/ Poetry/ Essays/ Criticism/ Reviews/ Editorials/ Interviews/ Visual or sound arts/ Intermedia/ Hybrid/ Unclassifiable

Publications and authors (including scope: regional/ national/ international)

Associated periodical or magazine (how regular?)

Funding model

nonprofit/ arts council/ subscription and sales (including limited editions) / patronage/ submission fees/ crowdsourced

Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo, Patreon.com, In4Art

Print runs and distribution

POD/ small to medium run digital/ offset; international model like Lightning Source?

hard copy/ electronic

Editing: composition and layout

Production values

fine print/ mass market “look”/ minimalist/ visual/ disposable/ recycled/ zine

Publicity (promotion) and reviews

Prizes (pro/ anti)

Website

Editorial focus and clarity (selective or all-welcome)

Quality of work

Project and community (self-publishing/ community-based/ border-crossing)

Diversity

Ethics and social values

Social media presence

Festivals, book fairs and events

Network

Examples

Ugly Ducking Press

Valley Press

Resources

http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/publishers/poetrybook/

http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/

http://writingtipsoasis.com/book-publishers-in-the-west-midlands/

http://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/

https://www.ribbonfish.co.uk/blog/6-exciting-independent-uk-publishers/

https://www.pw.org/small_presses

https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2012/10/six-best-independent-publishers-outside-london

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/poetry-pamphlets

Patronage

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/fashion/what-is-a-patron.html?_r=0

Model Profile

Quite a bit more detailed than what I’m asking you to do, but gives a sense of the range of considerations, what physical aspects of publications to attend to and how to use illustrations, etc. 

http://jacketmagazine.com/38/jwd02-schlesinger.shtml

Week 5: Riot Grrrls 

Zines (Slides / PDF)
Video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Science Fiction fanzines of 30s
The Comet: Science Correspondents Club of Chicago 1930-33
Later involvement with Star Trek: letter writing campaign to prolong the show
Dissolving boundaries between amateurs and professionals
Creating community
(Marginal status of genre fiction.)
Rise of copy shops in 70s
Punk music DIY
Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen”
Punk, Sniffin’ Glue 1967-77
Riot Grrrls, early 90s
Bikini Kill (“Double Dare Ya“), Heavens to Betsy, Bratmobile, L7, and Sleater-Kinney
Tobi Vail
Jigsaw, Snarla, Bust, Bitch
Riot Grrrl Press
zine stores
distros
Broken Pencils
Factsheet Five

Zine culture: disillusion about protest culture, crack in the wall
Alternative culture and marketing machine
Still, offering up an alternative
Against commercialism and consumption
Trading, gift economy
Folded, stapled, from 10-40 pages
Average circulation of 250
Outlet for unfettered expression
Decentralizing: from out of way places
Decidedly amateur
Out of love and rage
Media for the misbegotten

Script for video lecture (courtesy of Tom Crompton):

ZINE PRESENTATION NOTES

EARLY YEARS

• The first zine (The Comet) the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago. The Comet – zines were originally called fanzines, alluding to the fans who made them.
• Eventually, fanzine was just shortened to zine, and the range of topics widened to include practically anything – KEY – they were noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines
• ZINES AS MODELS FOR FOSTERING AND CELEBRATING LIKE-MINDEDNESS AND COMMUNITY. DEDICATED TO ‘EVERYDAY CONCERNS’ AS OPPOSED TO/IN REACTION TO THOSE GIVEN AIR TIME IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
• In 1968, Star Trek was reportedly going to be canceled after two seasons, but after a letter-writing campaign—partly organized through fanzines—the show was put back on the air for another year.
• ZINES ALSO HAD AN INVESTMENT IN DIRECT ACTION FROM THE START (ALTHOUGH THIS TOOK ON DIFFERENT FORMS AS TIME WENT ON. THEY WEREN’T JUST ‘LITERATURE’ BUT WAYS OF ORGANIZING PEOPLE. THEIR PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION WERE GEARED TOWARDS THIS END).

60’s Context

• AT THE SAME TIME, there was BOTH a GROWING YOUTH CULTURE/POP/MAINSTREAM and a VIBRANT MAINSTREAM ANTI ESTABLISHMENT POLITICAL CULTURE HAPPENING.
• MASS MOBILISATIONS OF LIBERAL POLITICAL CAUSES (CIVIL RIGHTS etc) which were accompanied by PAMPHLETS, READING AND OTHER KINDS OF LITERARY CULTURE. THINK ABOUT GRAFFITI, ETC – THE MAINSTREAM/PUBLIC (CITY) SPACE AS A KIND OF BATTLE GROUND AT THIS TIME.
• GUY DEBORD SUMMARISES AN OPPOSITION TO THIS NEW ‘PSEUDOWORLD’, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR RADICAL ALTERNATIVES TO BE CANNIBALIZED BY IT. – 1 In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. 2 The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living.
• I THINK WE COULD SEE THE WAY ZINES MORPHED IN THE 70’s AND BEYOND AS A BLENDING OF CONCERNS WITH ‘discussing the intricacies and nuances of a cultural genre’ TAKEN UP IN FANZINES AND A CONCERN WITH ‘SMASHING’ OR SUBVERTING THE MAINSTREAM TAKEN FROM SOME OF THE POLITICAL MOVEMENTS AND ITS LITERATURE IN THE 60’s.
• THINKING ABOUT SOME OF THE PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF ZINES (NO ISBN, NO ARCHIVE, DISPERSED AS OPPOSED TO CENTRALISED, DONE UNDERCOVER/USING ‘BORROWED’ MACHINERY AS OPPOSED TO PRIVATE PRESS) WE MIGHT THINK ABOUT SOME OF THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS/INSPIRATIONS FOR THEIR PRODUCTION.

PUNK SLIDES

• THIS COMBINATION (OF SUBCULTURAL INTERESTS, AND POLITICAL REBELLION) MANIFESTS AS A NEW KIND OF ‘media for the misbegotten’, AND A GROWING ALLEGIANCE WITH THE ‘DOWNWARDLY MOBILE’ – ZINES AGAINST ‘THE GOOD LIFE’ AS POPULARISED IN MAINSTREAM CULTURE.
• FOR CONTEXT – we might think about a broader WANING/FAILURE OF THE ‘MASS LIBERAL POLITICS’ OF THE 1960’s and SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, a POST INDUSTRIAL SLOW DOWN to which these movements didn’t have adequate answers) – The 1973 oil crisis began in October 1973 when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries proclaimed an oil embargo. The embargo was targeted at nations perceived as supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War + newly industrializing nations meant shifts in labour base). THE RESULT WAS MASS URBAN UNEMPLOYMENT, AND THE DEGRADATION OF CITIES, NO LONGER UTOPIAN IN THE SAME WAY – NO FUTURE, THE OLD HORIZONS BEGAN TO CRUMBLE – a generational split, an oppositional youth culture.
• We might think about how this relates to punk’s approach to national symbols, assumed collectivity (nuclear family etc). In terms of print we might think about a renewed emphasis on ‘direct’ action (in your face approach, doing it yourself, no longer relying on mass action) but also devolvement and growingly specific punk scenes – ‘the intricacies of a genre.
  
• In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the main hub of zine culture became the punk scene in London, LA, and New York. Compared to the earlier sci-fi zines, punk zines had a grungier, DIY aesthetic that reflected the subjects being covered – NEW FORMS AND AESTHETICS FOR A NEWLY CREATED KIND OF YOUTH.
• Also important to consider how zines embodies a lot of punk’s DIY emphasis, and the erosion between audience and performer. What forms/aesthetics would emphasise this and make it seem more possible – embodying an opposition to mastery? When thinking about NO FUTURE (and this amateurism) we cam think about ZINES as linked to communities constantly forced to/or trying to ‘work themselves’ and their views on life out – trying to find a position, constantly open (whether by choice or necessity) to change and adaptation.
• The initial punk scene was extremely diverse, drawing in males, females, transgendered individuals, straights, and homosexuals. Numerous bands contained women members and all-female bands abounded. Craig Lee, who played guitar in the female-fronted band The Bags, wrote in his Hardcore California: “In Los Angeles circa 1977, female bass players were almost a requirement, and it seemed that it was often the women who dominated and controlled the Punk scene. This equality of the sexes was just another breakdown of traditional rock and roll stereotypes that the early scene was perpetuating” – treading new ground. 

RIOT GRRRL

• PUNK BECAME BOTH 1) CANNIBALIZED BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA (were the Sex Pistols always this anyway? An attempt to capture/give popular form to youth discontent by McClaren) and 2) EXTREMELY MASCULINE in a lot of its manifestation.
• In response we get a new flourishing of zine culture – as an alternative to the male-driven punk world of the past, Riot grrrl encouraged young girls and women to start their own band, make their own zine, and get their voices heard.
• By 1993, an estimated 40,000 zines were being published in North America alone, many of them devoted to Riot grrrl music and politics.
• CRUCIAL – 749 out of 1142 zines originated from outside major cities in the US Compare this to PUNK at its height in the 70s/80s as extremely city based. A new kind of decentralisation and opposition happening again – TAKING UP PUNKS IMPETUS TO SELF-REPRESENT AND WORK OUT NEW INTRACICIES/IDENTITES/STORIES NOT GIVEN AIR TIME IN TRADITIONAL FORMS – think about Normal Illinois and Sarah Kennedy.
• Riot Grrrl can also be seen as a ‘reaction’ to the ‘fun’ feminism of the 90s (Spice Girls, women’s magazines, popular representations of women and the nuclear family, where male forms of rebellion had become outmoded). Potential intersections/links to ‘Third Wave’ and the emphasis on individuality, self-reliance and intersectionality. Riot Grrrl as the ‘weeds’ in the concrete which tried to ‘pave over’ (Debord) this fractious reality.
• “[s]ubcultures represent ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media” – or multiple noises which refuse to be reduced, whilst also wanting to link up with other kinds of noise.
• AS SUCH – riot grrrl was more than just a musical genre, it was a feminist movement—though it was often difficult to pin down the specifics of that movement. As Max Kessler wrote inPaper,“Whatever riot grrrl became—a political movement, an avant-garde, or an ethos—it began as a zine.” Riot grrrl spread from its epicenter in Olympia, Washington to across the country and other parts of the world.
• WAYS THIS HAPPENED – The flyer for the convention lists hand son workshops on “everything from self defense, to how to run a soundboard, to how to lay out a zine” – emphasis on practicality, and doing (see chord poster AS POTENTIAL PRECEDENT FOR THIS).
• A NEW EDGE – WOMEN (OR GRRRLS, AS A REBELLION OR WORKING OUT A NEW CATEGORY OF WOMAN, IN A BREAK AGAIN FROM THEIR ANTECEDENTS) DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES NOW, IN DETACHMENT FROM A MASCULINE PUNK CULTURE – INTRICACIES. 
• GROWING OFFICE-WORK/SERVICE ECONOMY (+SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES) AS HOT BEDS FOR THESE KINDS OF PUBLICATION – XEROX MACHINES, SPARE TIME IN YOUTH ETC. COULD BE THOUGHT ABOUT AS A PRE-INTERNET PHENOMENON, YOU MIGHT SEE HINTS OF A KIND OF ‘FORUM’ CULTURE HERE). STUFF YOU COULDN’T/WASN’T ENABLING ITSELF (BLACKOUTS) TO BE SURFABLE ON THE INTERNET – EMPHASIS ON SAFETY IN POTENTIALLY CLAUSTROPHOBIC SMALL TOWNS.
• AS A RESULT YOU GET LOCAL AND NATIONAL GIGLISTINGS, ORGANISING MEETINGS TO MAKE MAGAZINES, LOCALIZED. “It’s a good way to act out behaviors that are wrongly deemed ‘inappropriate.’ This is a refutation of censorship and body fascism.
• IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER –Riot grrrl as a DC continued to hold weekly meetings and produce zines – think about the role of communing – workshopping – as opposed to simply literary production. Riot grrrl as a record of communing as opposed to being just literature?)
• EXAMPLE: The first Solidarity Festival was in the middle of the 90’s.  That’s when anarcho punks and Riot grrrls worked together with Shareef Abdullah, who was in the original Black Panther Party and later on in The New Panther Vanguard Movement.  Many groups worked together in solidarity to make this small fest happen. The fest showcased punk rockers, feminists, animal rights activists, anarchists, and Black Panther Party members. It was as if there was an intimate indoor political rally. The bands played, there were speakers, poetry reading, workshops, vegan food, and an array of organizations at tables. Most people would leave having armfuls of zines and leaflets. Most fests were in the Orange County and Los Angeles area. For some of the fests we worked with Shareef Abdullah. Some of the events were Voices Against Oppression, All Power to the People at Koos Cafe, International Women’s Day at Panther Headquarters, etc. These event ideas were inspired by the original Black Panther Party from the late 1960s, when they started the Rainbow Coalition and also the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s who worked with the sisters from the Panthers.
• HOW MIGHT YOU REVIVIFY OLD POLITICAL MOVEMENTS WHERE YOU ARE IN A NEW TERRAIN? WHAT SCENE CAN YOU EMBED IN IN THIS WAY. HOW CAN THIS GIVE STRENGTH IN WHAT YOUR ZINE IS TRYING TO ‘WORK OUT’ – A DIFFERENT BANK OF IMAGES/TRADITION TO THE MAINSTREAM TO DRAW ON. WHAT WOULD YOUR ZINES RELATION TO RIOT GRRRL BE, HOW WOULD IT REFERENCE ITS PAST.

Week 7: Critical Printing & Digital Cultures

Video (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Digital Cultures

forms of authority
digital supports/ platforms
continuous, uninterrupted, permeating dimension
“new agencies that manage our presence, our communication, and our perception and representation of others”
new forms of authenticity in the virtual

blogging (replacing “home pages” and MySpace)
challenges journalism, instrument of dissent in repressive regimes

model of the city
Émile Benveniste
simplified opposition between Greek and Latin models
civis/civitas, polís/politès
“one is civil of an other civil before being civil of a specific city”
a relationship of reciprocity and independence
status of reciprocity rather than membership in an abstract and determining entity
civis=fellow citizen
network is a decentralized environment/ absence of overdetermined center
puts into relief the fluid and reciprocal relations
blogspace—flexible public sphere, gatherings constituted by intersecting domains
defined by set of commonly shared interests and an ever-growing number of pointers and links
spread of news and structure of rumor
creating new reality/ modifying perception of event
[Clinton “pizza gate”]
interdependence of the technological and the discursive
in the constitution and formation of the production, distribution and reception of both identities and knowledge

tags, folksonomies
new forms of authority
shift from hierarchical organization and presentation of information to more semantic and “ontological” model founded on proliferation of categories and tags
tag as independent form of reading
shifts meaning and significance of digital object and its status within the meaning-producing hierarchy from its content to an associated description that is exterior
open up public space for new methodology for valorizing information and its transformation into new knowledge
a second order of authorship
tagging dimension: expansion of digital literacy
detailed description of blogs
aggregators fundamentally change relations between author, publisher, and reader
allowing immediate access to the editorial work of the author
and successive layers of modification
authorship both strengthened and weakened by aggregation

citizen journalism
participatory publishing
Comments and TrackBacks
spam

Open Source model

press agencies and news organizations under pressure to compete with online independent journalists and sources

social media as sites of breaking news

growing political use against oppressive regimes and ensuing censorship

Iran

generation of politicians who are bloggers (or Tweeters)

Relational Roman model
a multiplicity and a diversity of Romes
new spheres of influence, new public spheres

spatial dimension of blogging model
Greek city as site of authochthony
digital equivalent its dissolution

agora/ foyer commun/ méson
civic time

digital cities decentralized
social networking hub

actives like tagging and commenting become participatory, lure participation — passive to active
micro-communities
virtually socializing and socially alienating
digital activism

digital city has its own violence: cyberbullying
virtual public sphere (city?) vs private public sphere
internet privacy

Web 2.0 (2004)
Wikipedia

Mobility
convergence
multi-platforming
nomadic communication

mobile privatisation (iPods)
private mobilisation of work cultures
deconstructing work/ leisure, public/private binaries
erosion of work/life balance

indiscrete media
fan cross-platform engagement
co-marketing
fans as magnets for building viewership

user-generated content (UGC)
happy-slapping
narcissism
surveillance
self-identity
New Media forms of presentation, replacing media representations
people routinely producing and consuming images of themselves
digital avatars
micro-worlds of the self (but cf. Cloud)

university transitional spaces and Facebook
Profile and anti-Profile pictures
cameras at gigs

“public privacy” in which self is constantly and narcissistically performed, auto-objectified, for an imagined audience

critical as well as celebratory readings
status

Week 8: History and Theory of Letters: Typography 

TYPOGRAPHY LECTURE

Video (Part 1/ Part 2 / Part 3)
(slides/ PDF)

Olson “The Blow is Creation”

the Blow is Creation

& the Twist    the Nasturtium

is any one of Ourselves

And the Place of it All?

    Mother     Earth     Alone

— Charles Olson

Type: Gr tuptein, to strike [cf definition screenshot]

“Topos . . . The other two words are tropos and typos. Obviously the latter is very easy, it’s “type,” and is “typology,” and is “typification,” and is, in a sense, that standing condition of—I mean standing, really, in the very literal sense of substantive or object or manifest or solid or material. We get our word “type,” which interests me, I suppose, as a writer, from it. If any of you have ever seen a piece of movable type, at the bottom is the letter and the block is above. So that in order, really, to imagine a printer doing it, he’s under your words in order to make the letters of them, which always delights me, literally, as a problem of creation. In fact, literally, I would go so far, if you will excuse my Americanism, to think that you write that way, that you write as though you were underneath the letters. And I take that a hell of a lot larger: that is, I would think that the hoof-print of the Creator is on the bottom of Creation, in exactly that same sense.”

Olson on type (Beloit Poetry and Truth talk, 1968)

Style, from pen

Typography between script and typology (“idealized writing”)

tension between mechanical and organic (cf. IBM ad)

“Typography is just that: idealized writing. Writers themselves now rarely have the calligraphic skill of earlier scribes, but they evoke countless versions of ideal script by their varying voices and literary styles. To these blind and often invisible visions, the typographer must respond in visible terms.”

“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages they must occupy, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.”

Tension between information and image

A performance or interpretation

Letters have historical, cultural, political associations

History of letters

Evolution of letterforms

Sumerian Cuneiform

Egyptian pictographic

From ideogram to symbol (rebus)

Phoenician system

Greek system (added letters to represent vowels)

Trajan’s Column

(minus letters J, U, W — J not introduced until 17th century)

Quadrata/ square capitals

Majuscules

Used to express authority

Basic structural proportions

Full forms of O and D

narrower forms of E and S

classical proportions, geometrical relationships

Drawn and cut in stone

written with a flat brush, held at an angle like a broadnib pen

then carved into the stone with mallet and chisel

modest aperture, a modulated stroke, lively but full and formal serifs

vs handwritten form: drawn in wax or on papyrus

Serifs: result of scribe drawing out letters with a brush

Square capitals for monumental inscriptions

vs informal handwritten version: rustic

More condensed forms appear 2nd – 4th centuries AD

Literary manuscripts such as Virgil’s Aeneid written in rustics

uncial evolves in 4th century—more rounded forms

using a broad pen creating broad, vertical stroke contrasting with thin, horizontal stroke [modulation]

Religious works: half-uncial — minuscule form

Merovingian (France)

Beneventian (Italy)

Visigothic (Spain)

Insular (Ireland and England)

Book of Kells (Latin version of gospels, approx 800 AD)

http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/#folder_id=14&pidtopage=MS58_007v&entry_point=1

Charlemagne (742-814)

new standard for manuscript writing throughout the Empire

based on Insular half-uncial and Merovingian hand:

Carolingian minuscule

scriptoria (5th century fall of Rome — 12th century)

secular scriptoria from end of monastic age (universities)

return of regional scripts: Gothic, blackletter (Textura)

“Gothic” (synonym for barbaric) disparaging term used by Renaissance humanists of Italy

Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century.[1] It continued to be used for the Danish language until 1875,[2] and was used for the German language until the 20th century.

Carolingian minuscule was the direct ancestor of blackletter. Blackletter developed from Carolingian as an increasingly literate 12th-century Europe required new books in many different subjects. New universities were founded, each producing books for business, law, grammar, history, and other pursuits, not solely religious works for which earlier scripts typically had been used.

These books needed to be produced quickly to keep up with demand. Carolingian, though legible, was time-consuming and labour-intensive to produce. Its large size consumed a lot of manuscript space in a time when writing materials were very costly.

Textualis, also known as textura or Gothic bookhand, was the most calligraphic form of blackletter, and today is the form most associated with “Gothic”. Johannes Gutenberg carved a textualis typeface

Textualis was most widely used in France, the Low Countries, England, and Germany. Some characteristics of the script are:

tall, narrow letters, as compared to their Carolingian counterparts.

letters formed by sharp, straight, angular lines, unlike the typically round Carolingian; as a result, there is a high degree of “breaking”, i.e. lines that do not necessarily connect with each other, especially in curved letters.

ascenders (in letters such as b, d, h) are vertical and often end in sharp finials

etc.

Papermaking (Cai Lun AD 104)

mills established in Europe in 13th and 14th centuries

Bì Shēng (990–1051 AD) was a Chinese artisan ad inventor of the world’s first movable type technology. Bi Sheng’s system was made of Chinese porcelain and was invented between 1041 and 1048 during the medieval Song dynasty.

Ceramic/ baked clay

Wooden movable type

bronze movable type printing in China no later than the 12th century

In 1234 the first books known to have been printed in metallic type set were published in Goryeo Dynasty Korea.

While these books have not survived, the oldest book in the world printed in metallic movable types is Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377.[25] The Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. displays examples of this metal type.[26] Commenting on the invention of metallic types by Koreans, French scholar Henri-Jean Martin described this as “[extremely similar] to Gutenberg’s”

Gutenberg (1394-1468)

First book printed between 1440-1450

42 line Bible completed about 1455

printed in Textura

adjustable mold (and matrix): modification of screw press, originally used to crush fruit, and adaptation of techniques of punch-cutting, brass mold-making, and metal-casting

addition of antimony

cast 300 characters to provide slight variations of letterform

Resources

[note on difference between typeface and font]

Incunabula period (from 1440s up to 1500s)

Caxton introduced printing to Britain (1466)

Humanist typography

Vatican scribes favored 15th century Chancery script

aesthetic philosophy of Italian Renaissance

Nicholas Jenson, Frenchman in Venice, cut Roman typeface (1470)

23 letters (J, U and W not yet in use)

renowned for comfortable fit of letters as words and beautiful proportions of letterforms themselves

William Morris (1934-1896) modeled his Golden Type on Jenson’s type

20th century typographer Bruce Rogers  designed Centaur, released by Monotype in 1929

Aldus Manutius

Latin and Greek texts, from 1493

Aldine Press

Pocketbooks: for which Francesco Griffo cut typeface based on humanist script that was current: Italics. Lowercase only, more condensed than Roman.

First pocketbook (Virgil, 1501) ran to two editions of 3,000 each

Old-faces

Claude Garamond

16th century: Golden Age of French book arts

cut companion Italic alphabet with Italic capitals that would partner roman fonts

Christopher Plantin (15602-70s)

English printers dependent on type from Netherlands (due to Privy Council’s control of number of printing presses)

William Caslon (1692-1766)

father of British typography: English Baroque

eliminated need for imported Dutch types

Declaration of Independence set in Caslon

Caslon italic ampersand

Bringhurst: “His type has long possessed the semilegendary, unexciting status of the pipe and slippers, good used car and favorite chair.”

Transition

Louis XIV France

scientific study of letterforms by committee

grid of 2,304 small squares to determine proportions of each letter

final letters engraved on series of copper plates

calligraphic flow no longer evident

mathematics rather than craft

rationalization of type body sizes

Philippe Grandjean de Fouchy and Jean Alexandre

Romain de Roi (1702, 21 sizes of roman and italics)

Pierre Simon Fournier

point system of comparative type body sizes (1737)

Manuel Typographique (1764)

John Baskerville

printing press 1750

edition of Virgil 1757

printed bibles and prayerbooks for Cambridge UP

type was sold to Beaumarchais (friend of Benjamin Franklin)

Bringhurst: “epitome of Neoclassicism and eighteenth-century rationalism in type—a face far more popular in Republican France and the American colonies than in eighteenth-century England where it was made.”

Modern letterform

Didot point system

cool elegance of neoclassical age

Giambattista Bodoni

brought Modern typeface to peak of perfection in late 18th century

Bringhurst: “typography’s arch-romantic”

Display type

Robert Thorne ((1754-1830): Fat-face

increasing thickness of stems to enormous degree,

while maintaining thin strokes and thin, unbracketed serifs:

fierce blackletter of enormous power.

extremely popular with advertisers

Slab-serifs

Vincent Figgins

“Antique” face (1815)

Possibly Britain’s first truly original contribution to the art of type design

“Egyptian” slab letterform

New slab-serifs

Rockwell, Memphis, Futura

Old-style types

William Morris

Cheltenham Old Style (most popular American typeface of its time)

Modern romans at close of 19th century: Century Schoolbook (1924)

20th century

Linotype machine

Monotype typesetting system

“hot metal” type

Adoption of point system: pica

Sans-serif type

Franklin Gothic (1905,

Morris Fuller Benton)

revitalized gothic

pantographic punchcutting device

Bringhurst: “cultural souvenir of some of the bleakest days of the Industrial Revolution.”

title font for THE SUN

Futura (1927, Paul Renner)

first geometric sans-serif to symbolize the aesthetics of early Modernism

form derives from function

ornament and decoration to be stripped away

Edward Johnston (1917, geometric sans-serif for London Transport)

“New Typography”

meeting theoretical requirements of the avant-garde

sans-serif identity strictly attached to commercial applications, with no connotations of bookishness

most sans-serifs were display faces

BUT

Times New Roman (1932, Stanley Morison)

serif typeface with crisp, clean neutrality

that had recommended it to the general printing industry

large x-height and rather narrow, which makes it very economic on space

sturdy letterforms designed to withstand the rigors of letterpress newspaper presses

Perpetua (1926), Gill Sans (Eric Gill, 1928)

humanist sans-serif

firmly modeled on classic roman proportions

Helvetica (1956, as Neue Haas Grotesk, Max Miedinger, renamed Helvetica in 1961, the Latin word for Swiss)

late 19th-century “Grotesques”

preferred by Swiss Modernists as clear, open, legible, without historical or social connotations

[argument for serifs as text font re legibility]

Arial, distributed by Microsoft, is an unauthorized Helvetica clone (also default typeface for Mac OS)

neutrality

Swiss International Style

Univers (1961, Adrian Frutiger)

Palatino (1950, Hermann Zapf)

chunky, sturdy type

Optima (1958, Zapf sans-serif)

developed from impromptu sketches Zapf made of inscriptions

observed at 4th century arch of Constantine in Rome

and inlaid on the floor of Santa Croce in Florence

a sans-serif that has achieved a balance between

the drawn sans-serif forms of the machine age

and the pen-written serif forms of the Renaissance

delicate sans-serif with a strong desire to be a serif type

best suited to situations in which Grotesques are too utlitarian and serif forms too bookish

TYPOLOGY OF TYPOGRAPHY (classifying typefaces)

The Renaissance Roman Letter

The Renaissance Italic Letter

The Mannerist Letter

began practice of using roman and italic in the same book and even on the same page

addition of sloped roman capitals

The Baroque Letter

The Rococo Letter

The Neoclassical Letter

The Romantic Letter

The Realist Letter

Geometric Modernism

The Expressionist Letter

Elegiac Postmodernism

Geometric Postmodernism

CHOOSING AND COMBINING TYPE

Historical Considerations

pp. 98-102

RHYTHM

Horizontal Motion

evenness of color:

design of type

spacing between letters

spacing between words

spacing between lines

(all interdependent)

setting justified, ragged (setting word space)

measure

letterspacing

kerning

Vertical Motion

leading

blocks & paragraphs

hyphenation and pagination

orphans

Scale and font sets

openings, titles, headings, subheads

tables and lists

Common newspaper fonts

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/140-the-10-most-popular-newspaper-typefaces

THE SUN

Franklin Gothic Heavy Italic

Daily Mirror

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/sep/23/daily-mirror-national-newspapers

Interstate Font

Week 9: Print Activism 

PRINT ACTIVISM

Video (Part 1/ Part 2 / Part 3)
(slides/ PDF)

William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, abolitionist Boston weekly (1830s)

abolitionist press: aggressive pamphlet campaign by the American Anti-Slavery Society

daring to raise issues outside of the accepted national conversation

De Tocqueville on the “necessary relation” between voluntary association and print culture: print culture critical to the success of voluntary associations, not by converting individuals to a cause but by connecting those already inclined to it: “newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers.”   (James L. Baughman)

protest print culture: distinctive, radical, and sometimes unruly ideas; publishers with limited resources; uncertain distribution; a niche outside the mainstream. (Danky)

suffragette press

Marianne Moore in Little Magazines during WW!

Communist Party pamphlets

Muscle mags and gay politics

Wall calendar art (1968 SNCC Wall Calendar)

Amazon Quarterly

Zines

what counts as activism? Activism typically describes activities such as marching, demonstrating, protesting, and other events that involve a physical, bodily activity. Can “printing” or “publishing” truly be added to this list of activist practices?

When ideas are formalized on the page, they possess a power that the purely auditory does not. (James P. Danky)

Visual protest: paintings, cartoons, street banners, graffiti, bumper stickers

Print, as protest, does more when the visual and the textual are combined

exponential expansion of print technologies and means for distribution beginning in late 19th C and continuing into 20th C

concurrent large influx of immigrants joining ranks of industrial labor =

one of the most radical periods in American history

“Print activism”: print media’s role in social and political activism throughout the long twentieth century.

“Arab Spring”/ Occupy (Web 2.0 and social media): print is no longer the central medium for eliciting, enjoining, and imploring engagement with various activist causes.

print activism can now be periodized as a twentieth-century phenomenon?

the function of the newspaper shifted dramatically in the 1830s; where previously newspapers had simply listed commercial news, they now began to operate as vehicles for editors’ opinions. The new form primarily responsible for this shift was the penny press

The penny press was cheap, hawked on street corners for a penny in single issues, in contrast to the six-penny subscription services mailed solely to people’s homes. And unlike earlier publications that were tied to specific parties, the penny press was politically independent.

In printing, the invention of the steam-powered press greatly increased the speed of the printing process. Where a printer circa 1600 using a hand-operated Gutenberg press could produce a maximum of 240 pages in one hour, by the early 1800s a steam-powered press could turn out 2,400 in that same hour. In 1847 an American inventor named Richard March Hoe patented the rotary, or web press, which fed a continuous sheet of paper around a cylinder. This method of printing, still in use today, increased the number of pages printed to as many as 1,000,000 per day.

In the United States, the mass industrialization of printing coincided with the dramatic expansion of the railroads

it was in this period of print media that the sponsorship of advertisers began to not only address individuals’ wants and needs but to actually construct those desires

Until the 1830s, a newspaper provided a service to political parties and men of commerce; with the penny press a newspaper sold a product to a general readership and sold the readership to advertisers. The product sold to readers was “news …” (Michael Schudson)

publishers were now delivering an audience to advertisers.

As the costs associated with publication declined, print became a viable form of communication for a broad range of groups, and the radical press expanded as well. Motivated less by profit and more by the desire to spread a message

Throughout the nineteenth century pamphlets had been used, often by religious groups, to distribute sermons and other ideological professions, but their print runs were small and their distribution limited.

As laborite culture and activity increased alongside industrial production, union publications—both official organs as well as others more generally aimed at socialist, communist, and other labor-related groups—served to increase membership and raise awareness among non-members.

The large influx of immigrant populations created markets for both newspapers and literature, often in the native languages of these new Americans.

the so-called “little magazines” spread avant-garde literary culture far beyond what would have been possible through book publication alone, engendering its own cultural milieu

such publications contributed to the formation of alternate and counter public spheres whose members imagined themselves as part of larger collectives (Habermas)

Habermas specifically identifies the shift in newspaper usage outlined above as a critical element in the rise of the public sphere.7 Similarly, Benedict Anderson identifies the central role of print in assembling groups of discreet individuals into what he terms “imagined communities”

The coming together of capitalism and print led to a massive increase of public participation in the formation of public opinion and the identifications of individuals as members of collectivities

but the commodification of news media ultimately led journalism to “abandon its polemical position and take advantage of the earning possibilities of a commercial undertaking.”

Whereas for Habermas the corporatization of the media has led to the inability of mass media to truly communicate public opinion, for Anderson the rise of print contributed to the death of linguistic diversity, and this fatality, alongside the interactions between print and capitalism, led to the rise of nationalisms.

Print activism prospered within the proliferation of mass media and subsequently declined as mass media became, in the latter portion of the twentieth century, increasingly univocal due to the monopolization of public media by a limited number of multinational corporations. Once this shift had occurred, the Internet and other forms of social media overtook print as the most efficient and democratically promising form of communication for countercultural and antiestablishment individuals and collectives.

Habermas relies on American pragmatists including Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, identifying in pragmatism the potential within liberal democracy for emancipation through communicative action.

In addition to the American pragmatists, the contemporaneous German philosopher Rudolf Eucken developed a theory of “activism”—in fact, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Eucken as the first person to coin the term, defining his philosophy as “the theory or belief that truth is arrived at through action or active striving after the spiritual life.”

The word “activist” first appears in American print in The New York Times in 1915.12 Writing of pro-war agitators in Sweden who were attempting to push that nation to enter war on the side of Germany

By the 1920s the term “activism” had come into regular usage in the press, and was most often associated with far left groups including socialists, communists, and anarchists. This association was also possible because these groups had often debated the appropriate form of “activity” to attain their ends. Such debates often centered on the idea of “direct action.”

one of the earliest appearances of the phrase “direct action” in print is in American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre’s paper on the topic. De Cleyre cites the popular understanding of the term as designating “forcible attacks on life and property” fueled by the media in its reporting on anarchists. In distinction from this use, de Cleyre defines direct action as instances where any individual “who ever thought he had a right to assert, … went boldly and asserted it, himself or jointly with others that shared his convictions.”16 De Cleyre includes strikes and boycotts, and further identifies examples from American history, including the actions of John Brown, the secessionists, Quakers, and others. Direct action is typically counterposed to political action, whereby electoral means achieve representation that will lead to desired results.

“It is merely another name,” wrote William Mellor in 1920, “when employed by the workers, for the strike; when used by the employers, for the lockout.”

The usage of the term “activism” in the New York Times, for example, begins as we have seen in 1915 but peaks in the 1960s in reporting on the civil rights, anti-war, and other countercultural movements of that era.

magazines in the very center of the mainstream consumer society—Good Housekeeping and the Ladies’ Home Journal—could advance a particular cause within the space of their pages

Print culture is itself a commodity, one that is imbricated in the increasing commodification of life and culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Print activists therefore always negotiated their communicative strategies within this commodified medium.

is it possible to assess the efficacy of print activism? Even in cases where we can see the overall success of a movement, it would be difficult to evaluate the role that any one strategy versus another contributed to such success.

the important contributions made by print activism to the broad array of social and political causes pursued by Americans throughout the twentieth century

activists relied on print to amplify their voices, but moreover, the technological apparatuses of twentieth-century print culture not only fostered, but set the stage for the modern culture of activism that we see spreading to all points on the political spectrum throughout the century in the United States.

*

Italian anarchist woodcuts (Carlo Abaté: Cronaca Sovversiva, created by Italian anarchist stone-workers in Vermont)

Spanish anarchist newspapers

Pamphlets bringing class into discussions of race

Angelo Herndon & CPUSA around the Resolution on the Negro Question and Black Nation Thesis

You Cannot Kill the Working Class (1937)

They Shall Not Die! (1932)

On the Chain Gang (1932, International Pamphlet series)

The Negroes in a Soviet America (1935, Workers Library Publishers)

Scottsboro Nine hearings 1931-37

Elizabeth Lawson and Sasha Small

By the Pinch and the Pound: Vegetarian Cookbooks

Comics (Dr. Fredric Wertham’s condemnation in Seduction of the Innocent, 1954, characterizing comic books as dangerous trash)

The Ally and the GI Underground Press

the “circuit of communication” — the feedback loop between author, distributor, and reader, and then back to the author.

Satire: Underground Press’s wildly obscene, libelous representations of President Nixon to subvert the carefully managed public personae that helped him maintain a decades-long political career.

(The Realist, the Berkeley Barb)

Off/ On our Backs: the Feminist Press in the “Sex Wars” of the 1980s 

Week 10: Printing and Distribution  

BRIDGING THE DIGITAL-ANALOG DIVIDE

Video lecture (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Coda)

Here is a link to the short video on offset printing that was inadvertently left off the recording at the end of Part 2–apologies!

“How a Book Is Made: Ink, Paper and a 200,000-Pound Printer”
(NY Times, 20 February 2022)

There are neither notes nor slides to these video lectures, but I am happy to clarify anything in correspondence. In addition to the links under the Assignment for this week, here are some of the resources cited and shown in the video lecture:

SPD Books

A “desktop publishing” operation selling direct from website:
Face Press (Ian Heames)

ISBN Agency (UK) / Nielsen Book
ISBN Agency (USA) / Bowker
ISSN applications (UK) British Library
ISSN applications (USA) Library of Congress

Letterpress Collective (Bristol)
More on the Letterpress Collective
London Centre for Book Arts

How Offset Printing Works (video)
How offset printing works, with a bit of history (text)

Desktop publishing software:

QuarkXPress
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Creative Cloud Student Pricing
Scribus

Offset and short to medium run digital printers (recommended by small press publishers):

UK /
CPI Books
Cloc Book Print
usfor design and print
Imprint Digital
Swallowtail
Tallinn Book Printers (Estonia)
Earthbound Press

USA /
Thomson-Shore / Sheridan
McNaughton & Gunn

Short run digital printing:

Short Run Press
Biddles
Books Factory
Impress

Self-publishing/ direct print/ POD services:

KDP (Amazon)
Reedsy
BookBaby
IngramSpark
Lightning Source
Blurb
Lulu

Many UK Small Press publishers work with Lightning Source

FINAL PROJECT WORKSHOP

Here is a worksheet (the one used in our final workshop) to help with the critique, development, and refinement of your final project. It is meant for partner work but can work nearly as well if you apply it to your own project.