The Alternative Press Fair has come and gone this weekend, but it’s only added momentum to the larger Festival (much of which will now move down south to my [newly] native Peckham). Check out their list of events if you wanna get involved– I know I’ll definitely be taking them up on their Lino Print Workshop on Sat 4th June among other things.
Here’s what I bought and what I thought:
SELECTED PURCHASES:
via The Eel Zine
1. Splitting the Atom on Dalston Lane: The Birth of the Do-It-Yourself Punk Movement in March 1977 by Aaron Williamson (published by The Eel).
Performance poet Aaron Williamson completes the “punk diptych”and literally surveys the birthing ground of the DIY movement (map included). Where most histories of punk recall the Sex Pistols signing a contract worth 75,000 GBP, on the other side of town “the DIY-levellers the Desperate Bicycles, were detonating their sub-insurrectionary movement in Dalston for an outlay of just £12″. In the end, it’s the Desperate Bicycles whose aesthetic had more impact.
“No band– including the 1970′s legion of rebarbative ‘experimental/jazz’ collectives – had made the process of making a record both the conceptual purpose and the content of the work….The resulting vinul disc was as important a physical object as an instrumental one since it was the totem of an active rather than passive existence: ‘No more time for spectating/ tune it, count it/ let it blast/ cut it, press it/ distribute it/ Xerox music’s here at last’ they sang [in "Don't Back the Front"].”
I was told this quick & elegant history had almost totally sold out at the fair by the time I got to my copy– probably because it doubles as a manifesto and call-to-arms today just as much as it would have back in ’77.
2. The Book Bindery by Sarah Royal (published by Microcosm)
If you want to know how books are made, read this, and if you want to know about the catalogue of crazies who make books, read this too. Royal parses fact from fiction in the modern bindery: for instance, binderies still use type, but only for gilt- or blind- stamping binding, not within the actual text block. And the typical textblock? There’s a reason I’m sticking with that word and not ‘book’:
These books we make…are not books. They have nothing to do with art. They’re compendiums of company mergers and deal closures. Boring law stuff. Dollars and nonsense. It’s all garbage that rich people spend their days arranging….I made the job legit right away by bitching about it. ‘My brain isn’t stimulated enough.’ Well no shit, you fucker, it’s 10 bucks an hour to make copies. It’s a glorified Kinkos, except without the homeless interaction or cash register.
The zine has good details of the rest of a bindery’s operations and a handy glossary, but the real treat is Royal’s knack for peeling the shitty patina off even the most mind-numbing of gigs and getting to the god-honest hilarious personalities that lie beneath.
3. Everything Past Tense Publications Publishes, Ever This imprint is based near my neighborhood and from afar I admire them & consider them my idols, so awesome are their publications on local history. As their about section says: “Past Tense is a publishing project based in South London, exploring London radical history. Initially it began as the work of one person, uncovering the subversive, hidden and esoteric past around the Elephant and Castle and Southwark.” As the London Zine Symposium a few months ago I first picked up the range of Christopher Jones’s zines: Nine Things That Aren’t There, Southwark Knives, I Saw a Tiger Running Wild, and his book Subterranean Southwark, all of which are HIGHLY recommended. This time around they happened to have a selection that went even further back than the 19th century to my very own 15th-17th bracket of choice! Burning Women: The European Witch hunts, Enclosure, and the Rise of Capitalism is available on their website to download in pdf., and A Glorious Liberty: The Ideas of the Ranters which is also available here.
via Bristol Radical History Group
In other words, the DIY publishing scene has a lot to offer anyone interested in the history of the book, bibliography, and rare books as broadly as that term can be used, both in content (obviously the people who would be interested in making their own books in similar curiosities as even folks like me who catalogue pre-1640 books, they’re knowledgeable and talented at making shit), and in form (limited publication & distro).
The big publishing industry has its back to the wall and everybody is worried about what that means for the ‘book’, but these guys are not beholden to the very corporate contingencies of that publishing apocalypse.
What threatens big publishers and big book chains? At first it was the Tesco Literati. When supermarkets started selling the bestsellers super-cheaply and with buy 1 get 1 deals around the checkout lines, people stopped popping into Borders and Waterstones. It was a big hit. Second: E-publishing created a totally different, much easier and cheaper way of getting through the New York Times Bestsellers list.
But DIY publishing never worked within these channels of retail anyway, so as the proverbial cockroaches after the nuclear fallout, they’ll be fine.
That being said I think the alliance between distribution of DIY print and independent bookstores is the most important thing. Both instill in the other a kind of local colour, a singularity that you need to go into this bookstore to find this author. That sets the small bookstore apart from Waterstones Down. You can get the latest Cometbus more quickly at City Lights, because Aaron Cometbus is based in the Bay Area than anywhere else for instance. In the spirit of the Literary Tourist-Biblio team-up I mentioned in this week’s news update, I’d love to look into compiling a directory of which independently produced books, comics, zines are sold at which independent bookstores, and make it search-able by topic as well. At the moment, this is usually something left for publishers to do on their own, which isn’t hugely helpful to getting the word out.
One Final Note, a Positive One: The British Library had a stand at the Fair this past weekend, not to sell anything, but just to offer samples of their extensive holdings of Music, Anarchist, and even Football-related zines, as well as a leaflet describing the breadth of their collection and encouraging use of it. Andy Simmons of the Historical Print Department writes:
[T]here is another school of printd matter that have come to prominence in our lifetimes, which usually merges text with uncredited graphic illustration. The British Library of course embraces everything, or at least tries to. The main reason for such publications is the partnership of less-commercial subject matter and full editorial control. That means no shackles of market forces or censorship of any kind. This manner of media is elusive by the British Library still need to document it.
I think that rounds out what I’m trying to say here more nicely than I can.
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2. IN DIGITAL NEWS: Setting type and printing from an old-fashioned letter press? There’s an app for that. Single Stroke alphabets? Xerox has the patent for that. Although speaking of Apps, the British Library has released about 1,000 19th C books for iPad, and that’s only the start of it.
