VANITY AND
SMALL PRESS

There are a lot of reasons for a book, just as there is for any work of art. The author wants to communicate; the publisher, however, usually has other motives. For some, money is not it. Some do it for the love of creating a beautiful thing.

Book publishing is a big business and giant corporations control it. And, whenever this happens to anything, the focus becomes money. And as the song says: “… you can’t mix love with money. ’Cause if you do, it’s gonna hurt somebody.” It has currently reached the point where it is hurting nearly everyone.

At the end of the Second World War, war and depression having scattered the energy of book publishing, there was a truly creative couple decades in literature. Small presses made an impact. Henry Miller and Frank Harris with Obelisk; James Joyce with Shakespeare and Company; and Ernest Hemingway with Three Mountains, opened the doors in the twenties and thirties. The war was over and literature was ready to go to the stars. And the fifties and sixties started to answer.

Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs “howled” their “angel-headed hipster” ideas into the public consciousness. A whole new idea about literature, a whole new way to put words together, and get it all across. It found its voice through small presses, and was a major force in the art before a “major” publisher deigned to publish any of it.

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, some Frenchmen (and women) also decided that literature needed some new ideas and forms. Michel Butor, Alaine Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Serrault, Robert Pinget and others started pushing the envelope. The “major” publishers in America disregarded them until 1985 when one of their number, Claude Simon, won the Nobel Prize.

Literature, in America, is currently stuck in a rut that started about 1970 and it just gets deeper. Getting a book published isn’t a matter of ability, or creativity, it’s a matter of politics and suede shoe salesmen. And the books show it. Most of the production of the major publishers in literature, isn’t. It’s hack-written retreads by connected people, sold by agents who chose their clients as if they were functional illiterates. Ask a major publisher to publish a book, the answer you’ll get is that you need to find a good enough suede shoe salesman. Major publishers have lost the author-publisher connection, the most vital connection in all of the art of literature.

To heighten the idiocy, books get “edited” before they get published. If the book is literature it is analogous to a painting, the publisher is the gallery. Now tell me, what you think Picasso might have said if a gallery owner told him he wouldn’t exhibit his painting until the gallery’s assistants touched it up a bit.

I ran into something recently that showed me the state of literature in America. A client of mine wanted to find, as he put it: “A self-published songbook by James D. Macdonald, it was done in 1975.” Now I know James D. Macdonald as a laughably bad sci-fiwriter whose books, when I get them in a lot, are part of my yearly donation to the VNSA book drive here in Arizona. In any case, looking for a copy led me to his campaign against Publish America.

Seems James has a mad on for this publisher who will actually publish your book asking nothing from you. Yes they’re looking for you to buck the sales machines of the major publishers, but as far as I can see, little else. However, James is on a tear. He has a dictum: “Money follows the writer.” Well, maybe if he is an ad copywriter. I’ve made more money selling the work of Percy Shelley, John Keats, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, Iris Owens (Harriet Daimler), and a hundred other noteworthy authors than they ever made from it. If you write for money, you’re a hack, a prostitute, and we’d all be better off if you used your talents elsewhere.

And then there’s his “literary hoax” Atlanta Nights. Chapters written by (marginally) published writers, writing badly (which comes naturally I suspect). He said that Publish America accepted it. Of course they did. This is what a bunch of writers did in 1969 with Lyle Stuart: Penelope Ashe. Naked Came the Stranger. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1969; a best seller and it’ll set you back a pretty penny as a collectible; I got five hundred for a double fine copy. About the best way to describe this “hoax” is in the words of Salvador Dali: “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” This idiot is so fixated on ripping off other people’s work that he hasn’t any of his own. Try one of his books. The planets and characters have their names changed, great sci-fi. Hell, I never found his self-published book, but if it showed literary talent I guess I feel sorry for him. He lost the vision and chose to be a hack writer and hit man for the corporate establishment. If he has no talent, then I guess he’s doing the best he can. If he does, he must feel the pain of his hypocrisy, and I wouldn’t wish that on any artist.

Thank God I’m a bookseller. I know that literature is alive and well. It’s alive in the author who goes to a vanity press, or self-publishes his work. It’s alive in small publishers, whose object is beauty, literary beauty. So what I really want you to do is to read the below as an essay. These are the books that were published out of love for the art, the gambles, the hopes, the dreams, the things that make it all worthwhile. And I guess I want it to be taken seriously because I really need someone, somewhere, somehow, to scramble every idea I ever held about what a book is, and I need it bad.

Literature doesn’t depend on the publisher, only the writer. A book is a book, and it being published by a major publisher, a vanity press, a small press or by the author is an irrelevancy to a book collector. About the only conclusion to be drawn in today’s world is that if it is published by a major publisher, chances are it isn’t really all that good, and that’s a shame. However, the path to publication has become so politicized that better work cannot slip through the net anymore and the only literature of any worth is coming out of small and vanity presses. As such they are the premier target of opportunity for the book collector.