However, I have heard these death knells before: Punk is dead; Poetry is dead. All my favourite things, it seems, are mostly dead, and that doesn't change how lively they appear at the punk shows and poetry readings that I attend. Leaving punk and poetry aside for another day, another essay perhaps, and returning to publishing, I can't help but think that the idea of death is merely the recognition of change. Truly, we have set a course in publishing where we can never go back to the mass production of pulp romance that we have had in the past, and truly, the e-book in these circumstances are a superior technology to the old ways.
This technology, useful though it is, does not take into accounts the human desire for physical objects. We humans spend most of our lives amassing a wealth of objects through which we define ourselves. (My dear friend and fellow poet Kale Greenfield has a poem about this that has been published in a few zines and chapbooks this year called "The House, The Car, The Things" that captures this perfectly.) Books are very much a part of the need for aesthetic pleasure derived of objects, and it is very unlikely that any e-reader, no matter how fancy the cover or how high the quality of the screen, will be able to give me the same feeling that I get from the feel of a book.
So, where are we going exactly? What is the future of publishing?
My bet is on the divergence of the publishing industry into two paths: consumption and art. As I mentioned earlier, there are distinctly areas that benefit from the mass effectiveness of e-books. There is a whole market of people that read a book once and never pick it up again. Libraries benefit because there would never be such a thing as a lost book again. This is the place of consumption. It is entertainment and there is nothing wrong with it. The consumption path brought us Netflix, changing the way we consume T.V. and movies forever. This is the home of the e-book and it belongs there.
Moreover, it is the second path that I am most interested in: Art. Art is the place of the concept. It is the home of deep thought. This is where poetry lives and as a poet I know that this is the future of the printed word, in aesthetics and object glory. The path of publishing is bound to open up into the world of the fine press and the small press creating beautiful object that people will and already do covet. This path is much the same as the one charted in recent years by the music industry, where tapes and CD's have all but disappeared for digital copy, but people have come back to vinyl for its quality. Records are the art of the music industry, and the Handmade book is the future of book art.
With this in mind, I have decided to embark on the academic discovery of handmade books and letter presses as a summer project. This summer I will be writing poetry, compiling a manuscript and building a small press release of 50 copies from the ground up. This blog is a record of this project and a way of opening the discussion of the future of publishing. I will be talking about the editing process and what it means, about the nuts and bolts of printing using a letterpress, sourcing materials and the tedium of binding by hand. I want to explore also the concept of the codex, and how art books marry form and content to create something different.
