Click here for the module Reading List.
MEETING TIMES (T1 2024-25)
Lecture: 1hr weekly, Time and location TBA (also posted online: see links in NOTES), Workshop: 2hrs weekly, Time and location TBA
Assessment Deadlines
(Please see below under the assignments for the relevant weeks for assessment details.)
T1
Week 5 FRIDAY — profile of a small press
Week 7 FRIDAY — 1 x 2,000 word midterm essay
T2
Week 4 FRIDAY — small press publishing project
Reading and Publishing (Writing and Editing) Assignments
WEEK 1: Introduction: What is an author? What is a book? What is publication?
PRIMARY READING
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library”
Keith A. Smith, “BookAsPhysicalObject”
Richard A. Guthrie, “A History of Books” in Publishing: Principles & Practice
(available as an e-book through the Library).
SECONDARY READING
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”
Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, “BookAsMachine”
Anne Waldman, “My Life A Book”
WEEK 2: A Short History of Print Culture: from Gutenberg to Areopagitica / Manifesto Workshop
PRIMARY READING
Be sure to have read Richard A. Guthrie, “A History of Books” (from Week 1, see above)
Typography Pocket Essentials (excerpt)
(Ilex, 2014)
Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (excerpts): “Prologue: Changing Experiences 1588, 1642, 1688,” “What is a Pamphlet?,” “‘Stitchers, Binders, Stationers, Hawkers’: printing practices and the book trade,” and from “Printing Revolutions 1641-60” (section on Milton’s Areopagitica, pp. 262-275).
(Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Please read around in this selection of manifestos, from Mary Ann Caws, Manifestos: A Century of Isms. You don’t need to read them all, but read enough to get a sense of the genre, and its range, and read in Caws’s preface, “The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,” for some understanding of the historical context: Oscar Wilde, “Preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’” (1891); Stanislaw Przybyszewski, “Primitivists to the Nations of the World and to Poland” (1920); Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cubism Differs” (1913); Blaise Cendrars, “The ABCs of Cinema” (1917-1921); Raoul Hausmann, “Manifesto of PREsentism” (1920); “Futurist Synthesis of the War” (1914); Valentine de Saint-Point, “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913); Franz Marc, “Aphorisms” (1922-1912), “Der Blaue Reiter” (1912); “Dada Excites Everything” (1921); Francis Picabia, “Is an Imbecile, an Idiot, a Pickpocket!” (1921); Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Modernism” (1914-1919); Mina Loy, “The Artist and the Public” (1917); Mina Loy, “Auto-Facial-Construction” (1919); R. Aldington and others, “Our Vortex” (1914); Wyndham Lewis, “Bless England” (1914-1915); Kurt Schwitters, “Cow Manifesto” (1922); “Declaration of January 27, 1925” (Surrealists); Antonin Artaud, “All Writing is Pigshit” (1965); Salvador Dali, “Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind” (1927); Isidore Isou, “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry” (1942); Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto” (1914); John Cage, “Bang Fist” (1937); Tom Phillips, “The Postcard Vision” (1971).
(University of Nebraska, 2001)
“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism“: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the manifesto in the autumn of 1908 and it first appeared as a preface to a volume of his poems, published in Milan in January 1909. It was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell’Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909, then in French as Manifeste du futurisme (Manifesto of Futurism) in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909
Here is Charles Bernstein’s performance of the manifesto at the Museum of Modern Art / New York n the one hundredth anniversary of its publication (February 20, 2009).
SECONDARY READING
For a concise summary of Areopagitica (optional), you can read this short entry from the Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook (Marshall Grossman).
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
This BBC page charting the course of Christianity in Britain (see the sections on The Reformation and on The English Civil War) might help clarify the often confusing religious background to some of the 16th-17th Century pamphlet controversies.
WRITING SUGGESTION
1) As your first (or maybe second or third) blog post, on your new weblog, draft a manifesto regarding something you feel strongly about, enough to want to address loudly, something that makes you feel a little crazy. Be inventive and borrow from stylistic and formal tricks you’ve noted in the sample manifestos.
2) Locate an unusual book object to share with the workshop. If you can’t find something offline, then find something (documented, represented, reviewed) online.
WEEK 3: Little Magazines and Modernism / Pamphlet Workshop
PRIMARY READING
Ezra Pound, “Small Magazines,” Sections I, II, and VII, pp. 689-692, 701-702.
Suzanne W. Churchill, “Little Magazines,” A Companion to Modernist Poetry, edited by David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald, pp. 172-183
,
Bartholomew Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Form, and Modern Poetic Genre” (excerpts), Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print, pp. 71-81, 98-104
(available on Reading List, as e-book)
Jerome McGann, “Modernism and the Renaissance of Printing” (excerpt), Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, p. 3-25
SECONDARY READING
Eric B. White,“ Prologue,” Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, pp. 1-14 (available on Reading List, as e-book)
Jayne Marek, “Making Their Ways: Women Editors of ‘Little’ Magazines,” Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines & Literary History, pp. 1-22
(available on Reading List, as e-book)
Donal Harris, “Printing the Color Line in Crisis,” On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines, pp. 1-23
(available on Reading List, as e-book)
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1) Please type up and post to your blog your brief description/ review of a book (drafted in last week’s workshop); include images of the book, if you were able to photograph it.
2) Please post a manifesto to your blog, modeled after one of the manifestos read for last week. Feel free to be inventive with typography (font choice and formatting) and with page layout. (Suggestion: when done, “print” your manifesto as a PDF, then “save as” a JPEG, so you can post the image to your blog.)
Here is an exercise if you are stuck in the drafting phase: “translate” (or transcribe) the model manifesto into “quiet” (non-manifesto) language. Play with, edit and modify the language, then translate the text (or something else you have written) back into “LOUD” (manifesto) language. Play freely with the typography and layout.
3) Locate a digital copy (MS Word or other editable version) of a text (something you have written yourself or a found text or a published or unpublished text by another author–prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, a text in any genre–that you would like to make an edition of) to use for this week’s pamphlet workshop. It should be about four pages long. If there are images you would like to use with the text, locate those as image files.
4) Send me the link to your blog if you haven’t yet done so, so I can add it to the blogroll.
Week 4: The Mimeograph Revolution (1960-1980) / Reviewing Workshop
PRIMARY READING
Greta Weber, “How an Obsolete Copy Machine Started a Revolution,” National Geographic
Jerome Rothenberg, “Pre-Face,” From a Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980
Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, “A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution,” From a Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (read at least pp. 13-31, and whatever interests you beyond that)
John McMillan, excerpts (“A Note on Sources,” “Introduction,” “‘Our Founder, the Mimeograph Machine’: Print Culture in Students for a Democratic Society”) from Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America
SECONDARY READING
Karl Young, “At the Corner of Euclid Avenue, and Blvd. St. Germain: d.a.levy’s Parables of Local Necessity and Universal Decentralism,” d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution
Linda Russo, “The ‘F’ Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals,” The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry In Our Time, ed. Edward Foster. Talisman, A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics #23-26 (2002)
WRITING/ PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
1) If you did not finish your pamphlet in workshop, and if you can, try to finish it, using whatever equipment you have access to. If you did complete a pamphlet in workshop, perhaps you would like to make edits and corrections, print out and assemble an improved version. (If you do not have access to the right equipment, then we can give a bit of time in the workshop next week to printing out your pamphlets. Make sure you have the file ready to go–email it to me before the workshop.)
Some instructional videos (if you found yourself lost/ confused in last week’s workshop):
Imposing Printer Spreads: An Overview (13 min)
A Word on Word (4 min)
Bookfold Imposition (25 min)
Imposing Printer Spreads Manually (19 min)
Scribus Pamphlet Design
2) Research small presses in the Midlands–or, if you do not find something of interest in the Midlands–small presses in the UK or elsewhere. [Alternatively: if you plan to attend the Small Publishers Fair in London on 28 or 29 October–see assignments for Week 5–then you can choose a publisher exhibiting at the fair and research their press in situ, including possibly interviewing the publisher, and pick up one of their publications. See the list of small publishers participating on the fair website.] Draw up a list of five candidate presses for a profile. Locate to share with the workshop enough materials from one of these presses (online documentation, their catalog and reviews of their publications, perhaps a hard copy, if you can find one, of one of their publications) for a profile of the press. Try to find a press with a local commitment and an international perspective. Note that a commercial catalog or publication that is primarily advertisements for local businesses won’t be suitable for this assignment. I may have shown you some presses in workshop or lecture last week, but I want you to do this initial search on your own. I will bring a list of small presses to add to our findings. The profile is not due until Week 5.
Please see NOTES for Week 4 (under Workshop: Profiling a Small Press) for a list of aspects of a small press to consider (which I will cover during our profiling workshop) as well as links to lists of small presses.
Week 5: Riot Grrrls / Zine workshop
PRIMARY READING
Zines
Chloe Arnold, “A Brief History of Zines,” Mental Floss (online, November 19, 2016)
Stephen Duncombe, “Zines,” “Do Zines Still Matter?” Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, pp. 6-21
Julie Bartel, From A to Zine : Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library, “Welcome to the World of Zines,” “Electronic Zine Culture: E-Zines, Blogs, and More,” pp. 1-9, 117-121 [E-resource]
Kevin Dunn and May Summer-Farnsworth, “ “We ARE the Revolution”: Riot Grrrl Press, Girl Empowerment, and DIY Self-Publishing,” Women’s Studies, 41 (2012):136–157
SECONDARY READING
Frank Farmer, After the Public Turn : Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, “Zines and Those Who Make Them: Introducing the Citizen Bricoleur,” pp. 29-55 [E-resource]
Alison Piepmeier and Andi Zeisler, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, “Introduction,” “Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community,” pp. 1-17, 57-86 [E-resource]
Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, “The Bitch Interview,” The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, eds. Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz, pp. 70-82.
Stacy Thompson, “The Riot Grrrl Scene,” Punk Productions: Unfinished Business, pp. 58-70 [E-resource]
WRITING/ PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
1) If at all possible, attend the Small Publishers Fair in London on Friday or Saturday (28 or 29 October), taking place at Conway Hall in Bloomsbury. I will be attending the fair on one or both days and will be happy to introduce you to some of the publishers I know. Attendance is not required but strongly recommended: students who have managed to attend the fair get loads of inspiration for their final projects. It’s also a great place to find original gifts for friends and family or items for your own small press collection. Many of the titles are reasonably priced and you are spared the postage involved in ordering books over the internet. There is nothing quite like it in the UK for small press publishing. Try to plan to spend at least a couple of hours at the fair, as there is a lot to look at! In workshop I will give more information about the fair and how (where and when) to meet up. As noted below, you can make the visit dovetail with your small press review assignment.
2) Please complete and submit your 1,000 word profile of a small press (via Tabula) by noon on Friday (4 November). For guidelines on what to consider when profiling a small press (I don’t expect you to cover all of these aspects in 1,000 words) see the NOTES for Week 4. (You do not need to cover *all*of these facets of a small press in your profile, but you should consider all, or as many of the facets as you can, before you decide what to write about.) Though this is not a profile of a single publication (as I hope this week’s workshops and lectures have made clear, a press is more than its publications), it will be helpful for the profile if you can examine a physical copy of one of the press’s publications. (Again, attending the Small Publishers Fair in London will simplify the process of locating physical copies. As you are allowed to handle and photograph items at the fair, you can even review titles without purchasing them.) Also try to include an image or two as part of your profile. Here are three sample (“first class”) profiles from a prior cohort (student numbers removed): Sample 1, Sample 2, Sample 3. Please don’t copy these! There is no one “right” way to do the profile. As for documentation, I do not care so much which scholarly citation method you use (MLA or otherwise), so long as you cite your sources clearly and consistently–a bibliography is good.
3) Think up an idea and a name for a zine. It can be ephemeral, off the top of your head, a one off issue or something you might continue for a period of time. Locate some print outs of materials (both textual and visual–you might include the manifesto you wrote) to cut out and paste into a mock-up of your zine.
Week 7: Critical Printing & Digital Cultures / Chapbook workshop
PRIMARY READING
Milad Doueihi, “Blogging the City” (excerpt), Digital Cultures, pp. 52-70
[Sorry about the scan! Line at top of third page of excerpt reads, “digital habits and customs, taking advantage of digital tools and technologies,” and line at top of fourth page reads, “of the city as a foundation of the political, and, for starters at least, an essay”]
Matt Hills, “Participatory Culture: Mobility, Interactivity, and Identity,” and “Case Study: social networking and self-identity,” excerpt from Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, eds. Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, pp. 107-121
[Another faulty scan! Line at top of second page reads, “somewhat amorphous. Given that some information and communication technology”; line at top of eighth page reads, “recruited, digital culture tends to hail consumers of its media content as co-marketers”; and line at top of twelfth page reads, “infantile omnipotence under maternal protection and the adult space of civil”. Apologies once again!]
Simon Cutts, Some Forms of Availability: Critical Passages on The Book and Publication (excerpts): “Some Forms of Availability,” “The Process of the Book,” “Critical Publication,” “Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press,” “Public Art in A Critical Space,” “Introduction to Words & Pictures No. 7, 1996,” “An Anthology of Small Poems,”“Some Coracle Ephemera,” pp. 10-13, 56-69, 77-79, 87, 91, 93-94, 112-127.
SECONDARY READING
Ross Hair, “Coracle’s Unpainted Landscapes,” “Coda: Certain Trees,” Avant-folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present, pp. 201-248. [E-resource]
WRITING/ PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
1) Please complete and submit (via Tabula) by noon on Friday your 2,000 word midterm essay on a topic in the history and theory of print culture.
2) Have ready on your laptop or computer a digital copy (MS Word or other editable version) of a text (something you have written yourself or a found text or a published text by another author–prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, a text in any genre) that you would like to make an edition of. It should be at least four pages long, though could be up to twelve pages long. If there are images you would like to use with the text, have those files in a folder with the text. (You might also post these materials to your blog, as a convenient place to keep them.) In our workshop we will start setting up your chapbooks and troubleshoot the process.
3) Post to your blog a provisional idea for your final project. It can be very sketchy, but do spend at least a half hour reviewing examples we have covered so far this term and note down some ideas. Have a look at Erica Van Horn’s list of things to think about when making a book. (See also “Some questions to ask, as you brainstorm this project,” with the guidelines for the final project spelled out below, under the Assignments for Week 10. Don’t worry about the written profile for now.) Don’t default to a pamphlet or zine (though if you choose to do a pamphlet or zine in the end that is fine): consider some of the concerns, principles and ideas covered in Simon Cutts’s Some Forms of Availability: Critical Passages on The Book and Publication (set reading for this week) and examples from what I showed you in workshop, or in Ross Hair’s “Coracle’s Unpainted Landscapes” (secondary reading for this week)–accordion folds, boustrophedon, unusual book objects. (I will bring my small press collection to workshop again for our last on-campus session in Week 9.) If you are an Intermediate (2nd year) student imagine a group project you can do with 1 or more other workshop members. We will briefly workshop your provisional project ideas and 2nd year students will break away to brainstorm, compare ideas and (provisionally) set up their groups.
Midterm Essay Guidelines
This is a 7-8 page (2000 word) “report” in the history and theory of small press print culture, focused on an area of your interest.
Rather than writing it chronologically, however (“first this happened, and then this happened”), please structure your report around a theoretical question that has emerged for you in the history of small press publishing, drawn from the lecture notes and from the reading you have done for this module so far.
For instance, you might want to focus on one of the following questions (adapted to suit your topic):
— The tensions between publishing and authorship.
— The ambiguous definition of a “book.”
— What distinguishes self-publishing from “vanity” publishing (exploring the complex operation that “self-publishing” actually entails).
— The dialectics (between form and content, as when print “revolutionaries” use outdated technology) in the role material innovations have played in print culture.
— The tensions between government control and print dissemination in the social dynamics of print culture.
— The role of small presses in the formation of a “public” and of “public opinion” (and by extension of democracies).
— The oral and social dimensions of small press print culture.
— The ways that small press culture drives and is driven by a resistance to the commercial imperatives of mass print.
— The tension between region and nation in international modernism.
— The emergence of “bibliographic code” as a key feature of modernism through the work of little magazines.
— How modernist small presses do “intersectional” cultural work in upending simplistic oppositions between “margin” and “mainstream,” “minor” and “major,” “small” and “large,” or “regional” and “national” cultures.
— The role of the “manifesto” in small press culture.
— The central “revolutionary” role for small press culture in seizing the means of production and distribution.
— The ways small press culture has fostered a “life in the creases” (cf. Rothenberg).
— The role the Mimeo Revolution played in the critical grounding of literary innovation through publication of theoretical writings.
— The role of small presses, and the dialogue they facilitated, in the emergence of the New Left.
— The reproduction of hegemonic structures such as patriarchy even within revolutionary formations (the sexism running through the Mimeo Revolution, for instance) and whether a properly feminist and queer publishing scene emerges from the small press revolution of ‘zine culture.
— Questions about the symbiosis between pop culture and small press publishing (whether through fanzines or through DIY punk culture).
— Questions about the role of small press publishing in the context of emerging digital cultures.
You may consider several of these questions as background to your investigations but please use ONE of them (or a theoretical question of your own devising–feel free to write me for feedback on your question), adapted to your topic, to focus your report. You can phrase this as a question at the head of the essay, or a “thesis statement,” or otherwise use it to organize your materials. Feel free to be creative.
Also be sure to illustrate your essay with quotations and with the kind of careful description of print objects you have already practiced with your Small Press review/ profile.
Please adhere to MLA style, in citation and convention of mechanics, with in-text parenthetical citation and a list of Works Cited. (Do your best in applying these conventions to the citation of small press publications; it is not always obvious how to cite unusual small press publications, and I will not be deducting points for “incorrect” citation, but please do your best to be consistent.) And don’t forget an informative TITLE that focuses your reader’s attention from the start. Please do not include your name anywhere on the essay, just your student number.
Examples of midterm essays written for this module over recent years:
2017-18
Brazilian Printing Press
British Caribbean Printing press
French surrealism and ties to Dadaism, looking at magazines
Mimeo revolution, San Francisco Renaissance (Spicer and Persky)
Reversion to hard copy in time of digital (throwback publishing)
Children’s books
Fanzines (Star Trek)
Second wave feminist response to New Left (SDS)
Small press improving equality—Black Lives Matter—small press in civil rights
Small magazines and African American literature in The Crisis
2018-19
The role of libelles in influencing public perception of Marie-Antoinette
Self-Publishing vs Vanity Publishing: distinctions, criticism and modernisation
‘How did Ezra Pound influence Harriet Monroe and Poetry, A Magazine of Verse
The influence of German publishers on the emergence of the Gay Rights Movement
The role the Underground Press in the US during the latter stages of the Vietnam war
How has small press publishing shaped poetry written by women avant-garde poets?
William Blake and Kenneth Patchen: Illuminated Printing
The Role of Manifestos in Establishing the Négritude Movement
The Publications of Fluxus
The Physical Revolution of the Riot Grrrl Zines
2019-20
Dadaist and punk approaches to the manifesto
Critically assessing the feminist legacy of Riot grrrl
The role of small press publishing in the UK miners’ strike (1984-85)
How zines embody the values of punk subcultures
“Politics, Print Culture, and Pornography: How the Libelles of the Late 18th Century
Contributed to the Downfall of the Monarchy in the French Revolution”
Underground publishing culture in Nazi-occupied Europe
How small press publications enable the formation of queer community
“‘Ink, Sweat and Typos’: Shakespeare in Print”
Feminism, ‘zines and women on the silver screen
Week 8: History and Theory of Letters: Typography / Typesetting workshop
PRIMARY READING
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (skim where the going gets too technical for you, i.e. read for general principles: pp. 8-74, 95-105, 111-112, 143-146, 160, 163-166, 178)
Typography Pocket Essentials (excerpts, pp. 26-47, 50-57, 60-67, 70-85)
(Ilex, 2014)
SECONDARY READING / VIEWING
Robert Bringhurst, “Historical Interlude,” The Elements of Typographic Style (pp. 119-141, link above)
Johanna Drucker, “Letterpress Language”
Have a look at Drucker’s artists’ books, with special attention to “From A to Z,” “Though Light on the Alphabet,” and “The Word Made Flesh.” (Click on the book image, then on the “Image” link above the enlarged image of the cover, for a zoomable view of all the pages.)
Helvetica (pay per view, here’s a clip)
IBM Plex (short video)
WRITING/ PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
1) By now you should be publishing posts on your blog. Try to publish one blog post per week (at least) for the rest of the year. If you have a publishing-related blog, you might (as already suggested) begin to explore and ruminate ideas for your final project.
2) Revise your chapbook text (to fix anything you noticed awry in the first rough edition) and bring a copy of the file to workshop (on a laptop) so we can experiment with font and typeface choices, as part of our typography workshop. Also design a cover for your chapbook and bring that as a separate file (A4 landscape format). I will have the printer and various papers on hand (along with guillotine, long reach stapler, thread and needle, and bone folder) so you can print out, troubleshoot and assemble your chapbook. You also might bring your current curriculum vitae, and/or business card text, for practice with typesetting.
3) If you want to bring a very rough, handmade “mockup” of your final project idea(s), a 3-dimensional paper sketch, or an idea to play around with, using the materials have on hand, this would be the week for that. If you are still looking for inspiration, I will bring my small press collection to workshop again for you to explore.
Week 9: Print Activism: Region, Globe and Network / Editorial workshop (Teams)
PRIMARY READING
Rachel Schreiber, “Introduction,” Modern Print Activism in the United States.
Alastair Johnston, Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography (excerpts, as below):
“‘Wild Wind, which art moving everywhere’,”
“Psychedelic Times,” “Contemporary Arts,” pp. 7-13;
“Let’s Go Bowling!” pp. 25-27;
“Activism,” “The ‘ZI’ Style,” pp. 53-62;
“Patty Hearst Ident-i-Kit, 1974,” “Gary Snyder Brand Pine Nuts, 1975,” pp. 99-101;
“It’s Mountain Grown!” pp. 119-121;
“Dade County Bible, 1977,” pp. 128-130;
“More Activism,” pp. 132-133;
“Back to the Front,” pp. 144-147;
“The Blackbirds Turn White,” “Caxton’s Menu Appendix, 1979,” pp. 152-156.
SECONDARY READING
Laura J. Miller and Emilie Hardman, “By the Pinch and by the Pound: Less and More Protest in American Vegetarian Cookbooks from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,” Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865, eds. James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen & James P. Danky
Elizabeth Groeneveld, “Crafting Public Cultures in Feminist Periodicals,” Modern Print Activism in the United States, ed. Rachel Schreiber.
PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
1) Locate some material to practice editing in workshop. It is more helpful if this writing is not your own. The best thing to do might be to ask a friend, if they are willing, to send you a draft of an essay or other piece of writing they are working on. You need to come to workshop with some material to “edit”: you can post it up on your blog as a convenient place to keep it.
2) Think of a small (or large) bit of print activism you might like to try, either now (on campus) or over the holidays at home. Post some notes on this to your blog.
3) Additionally, please progress your development (through sketches and short descriptions–posted to your blog) of your final project. Though the project should take a physical form and may take an entirely visual form, it should include or otherwise be accompanied by 2,000 words of writing (see syllabus). I will go over the guidelines for that writing and for the small press project more generally in workshop this week and next. The more time you have spent thinking about your final project by this point, the more you’ll get out of these workshops. We will continue to workshop your small press projects in breakout rooms (on Teams).
Week 10: Hybrid Formats: Bridging the Digital-Analog Divide / Distribution workshop
READING
Small Press Distribution (in Publishers Weekly)
Interview with Small Press Distribution Operations Director Brent Cunningham.
On using distribution services.
Some harsh truths.
How-to videos:
Shearsman Press interview.
Digital Publishing Platforms.
Reviewing the small press scene (Silliman’s blog)
Running the small press numbers (Silliman’s blog)
PUBLISHING ASSIGNMENTS
Make a mock up, if you can, of your small press publishing project to share (via camera, on Teams): it can be a very rough, handmade “model” of your project. A 3-dimensional sketch. (Detailed contents can be determined later.) Take a picture or video of it and post to your blog. Also have ready one document containing some of the writing that will go into your “write up” of the final project (that you will post to Tabula). Think of this as a version of the “small press review” you wrote at the start of term, but this time profiling your final project. You also could post this to your blog. This will be our final workshop for sharing ideas, workshopping latest drafts of final projects, going over the final project guidelines one more time, discussing distribution, working out logistics. To get the most of it, come prepared!
SMALL PRESS PUBLISHING PROJECT: GUIDELINES
Final assessment component (due Friday of Week 4 in Term 2, 3 Feb 2022): small press publishing project that includes a profile of the project (similar to the “small press profile” submitted toward the start of term and that might include excerpts from editorial writing included in the project, such as an editor’s note or introduction, manifesto, jacket blurb, blog entry) accounting for 60% of the module mark.
NOTE: Intermediate Year students will submit group small press publishing projects, while Finalists will submit individual small press publishing projects. In both cases, whether submitting a group or individual project for summative assessment, each student must submit with the assessment their own 2,000 word profile of the project.
It is a requirement of the project (with rare exceptions—please consult me) that it be in edition of 15 copies at least—one for each member of the workshop, plus one or two for archival purposes, and one or two to give away. Group projects should add extra copies to the edition number for each member of the group—so a 2-person group project should produce an edition of 20, groups of more than 3 an edition of at least 25. Your choice of edition number will influence your thinking from the start, as it puts some constraints on the scale of the project, its format and materials, etc.
What you upload to Tabula by noon of Friday in Week 4 of Term 2 (3 Feb 2022) should include the 2,000 word profile including some two-dimensional representation of the project (photograph or something else, e.g. drawings, a two-dimensional, print out “kit”). Please upload your final assessment as a PDF file, to ensure formatting is preserved. Hard copies are due in the Department of English office (there will be a box for you to place them in) by the end of Week 5 of Term 2. I will be on hand in my office at various points over the first five weeks of Term 2 to make available use of my small press materials and tools and to help with the assembly of your projects.
Some questions to ask, as you brainstorm this project:
What is the content and concept of your project? What is its background and what are its aims? These questions will determine the degree of investment in the material nature of the project: if your focus is editorial, a stapled ‘zine or pamphlet may be all that is required. However (and consequently) greater pressure will be put on the contents, context and distribution of the project. If your focus is artistic, then your conceptualization, realization and materials will need more attention. Ideally, you will develop a project that strikes a balance between these various concerns—though obviously good reason can be given for going to one or the other extreme.
What makes small press publishing necessary for this project? i.e. why couldn’t it flourish in a mainstream format (including present-day social media)? What sort of resistances does it activate?
How will the project look in three dimensions? Will it be folded, stapled, sewn, bound, unbound, or some combination of these? How do you imagine the project unfolding in the “fourth” dimension of time? If the printed aspects of the project exist strictly in two dimensions (such as the bumper sticker or postcard format) then you need to think about the variety of three (and “four”)-dimensional environments you imagine the project activating.
Do you want to do something hand-printed; manually drawn, assembled and photocopied; or digitally printed?
What are the typographic dimensions of the project and what sort of historical periods and aesthetic and political movements do you intend to associate through your typographical choices? Do you intend to obtain a rare or licensed typeface or work from the typefaces commonly available with various digital word-processing platforms? Are you interested in designing aspects of your own typeface? What typefaces do you personally gravitate to? Have you located a working “font set” that pleases you?
What is the two-dimensional unit (sheet size) from which you will be producing the three-dimensional object?
What are the materials of this sheet: office copier paper, found or otherwise sourced specialty papers, handmade paper? Or some other, non-traditional surface?
How do you intend to publicize and distribute the project? As it is (necessarily) a small run, how will you document (or repackage) the project for digital consumption (cf. our final, Week 10 workshop on “hybrid formats”). Such questions also encompass the dimensions and representation of the project that must be “uploaded” on Tabula.
For further brainstorming advice, see this handout from Erica Van Horn, posted under RESOURCES on the Small Press Publishing site.
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.
The written profile: Your 2,000 word profile will want to include (at a minimum) some reflection on the conceptualization of and historical context for the project (which could take the form of an Editor’s Note or Introduction); some conceptual, political, and/or artistic rationale for the project (which could take the form of a Manifesto); some (very brief) review of precedents and existing models for the project (which could take the form of a Review); some brief description of the project (which could take the form of a Blog entry, a Jacket Blurb or brief text for promoting the project in a variety of–most likely online, social media-based, though could also be print-based– formats). You also need to include a brief statement on your plan for publicizing and distributing the project (this plan may be as modest or as ambitious as you wish). Depending on its aims and scope, the project might have extensions like business cards, posters, flyers, bumper stickers. Part of the 2,000 word writing component could include the text that extends into these formats. As suggested, you might think of this text as a kind of small press profile like the one you submitted toward the start of term, this time focused on your own project.
The reflection on the conceptualization of and historical context for the project (e.g. Editor’s Note or Introduction and Manifesto) should include consideration of some of the kinds of questions you have reflected on in your midterm essay: e.g. What is an author? What is a book? What is publication? I’d like you to do some thinking about how your project fits into (or doesn’t fit into) the broad history of publication we have considered this term, from manuscripts and Incunabula to pamphlets, broadsides, little magazines, mimeographed and photocopied ’zines, 20th century small press productions, artists’ books, various forms of print activism, and beyond. You don’t need to systematically address all of this history, just those points you find most relevant to your project. Your way of writing about them, however, should indicate some awareness of the broader history. If you have been keeping a blog or other social media presence during the course of his module, then this is where you can include some reflection on how the module has influenced that publishing and how it might relate to your final project.
Note: You may be developing a project with little or no text on or in the published object—or, for various perfectly acceptable reasons, you may not want the profile material included in the project. That is perfectly fine! The text of your published project can be distinct from the writing component as detailed above, and need not be constrained by (or beholden to) word count. Just be sure to upload a document (via Tabula) by the deadline that includes a writing component adhering to the above guidelines and two-dimensional representation (most likely images) of the project.
Materials: Unfortunately, we do not have funding for more than basic materials. However, I have a limited supply of paper—office paper and card stock—that I am willing to share. I will be on hand at various points over the first four weeks of Term 2, to make such materials available, along with long reach stapler, guillotine, needle and thread, bone folder, access to photocopier, etc. and to assist in the printing and assemblage of your edition. I strongly recommend that you source any bespoke materials required for your project (beyond the above basics) over the holidays.
Small Press Publishing 