Small Presses

I have been asked to comment on the changes and challenges facing literary publishers in the coming decades. I do so reluctantly, for speculation is a mug’s game. Those who engage in it are usually peddling either gloom and doom or futuristic fantasies full of new technological gadgetry. I peddle neither. Moreover, I’m hardly what you’d call an industry insider. I’ve only ever held one job in publishing, and it’s one which I invented for myself. And for all intents and purposes, I’ve parked myself in a backwater town far from the centre of the publishing world and spent the last decade editing, designing, printing and marketing literary books – that is, minding my own business. Still, like Thoreau in Concord, my localized experience has developed into a sort of native intelligence, broadened more by wide reading than by extensive travel or professional association.

All I have to offer is what I can see from where I’m standing; perhaps the sightlines are as good or better from these outskirts.

Publishing is in essence as old as speaking, and only slightly younger than thinking. When you boil it right down, thinking is the marrow in the bones of publishing; it is the essence of the endeavour, what gets the publisher out of bed in the morning and into his boots. Publishing, though often otherwise employed, is at heart the servant of ideas.

While writing ideas down is old, book publishing as we now know it didn’t become a cultural force in the west until the early sixteenth century, when the printing press and moveable type took Europe by storm. No doubt the scribes on whom the spread of literature and knowledge had previously depended were unimpressed by these technological advances and loathed the new publishing industry it fostered.

Fuelled by the Humanist principles of the Renaissance and by various waves of rebellion and reformation, printing, publishing and reading spread far and wide. Of course, the established powers sometimes felt they spread a little too far, and a little too wide. Understanding the potential printing and publishing held, Church and State quickly asserted themselves – sometime as patrons, sometimes as clients, and always sanctioners, protectors, persecutors and censors. So from the beginning, book publishers have had to play a sort of cat and mouse game with those in power, currying favour to attract patronage or altering their publishing program in an effort to keep their heads off the ends of pikes.

Traditionally, the first post-scribal publisher might be argued to be Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg’s invention of an adjustable mould for casting moveable type places him among the most influential inventors in human history. I find it instructive, however, that the founding father of Western printing lost his business to his creditors even before his first book was off the press. Literary publishers will be relieved to know that under-capitalization, crippling debt and the constant threat of financial ruin are merely part of our proud heritage. Publishers have had a precarious relationship with commerce from the very beginning.

Printers and publishers have also always been, for better or for worse, agitators for and beneficiaries of technological change. While the desire for faster and cheaper production methods has sometimes overshadowed the value of quality workmanship, it is wrong to assume that technological change has always had a corrosive effect on the quality of books. Twentieth-century presses such as Nonesuch and Penguin demonstrated how mechanization could incorporate traditional design and production values to produce inexpensive books of distinction. There was something incredibly democratic about these early mass-produced and affordably-priced Penguins that the museum pieces produced by the fine-press movement seemed to miss utterly. A beautiful book that no one can afford to read can make only a limited contribution to the culture, but a well-constructed, mass-produced object might well revolutionize a nation.

In more recent times, the advent of the personal computer has made the basic tools of digital typefounding and book design available to almost anyone curious enough to learn how the trick is done. That same desktop computer is an awesome tool in the hands of small literary publishers, providing them the ability to move text files, images, proofs, galleys, press releases, promotional material, purchase orders, invoices or payments around the world in the blink of an eye without ever leaving their desks – and that’s just scratching the surface of the tool’s potential. At any rate, publishers have had a longstanding relationship with technological change and there’s no reason to expect that to stop.

In summary, if you look at literary publishing 400 years ago and you look at Canadian literary publishing today, in essence not much has changed. The ideas are still what drive us; we still hold an uncomfortable relationship with our patrons (now primarily government agencies like the Canada Council for the Arts); our ranks are still populated by a strange mix of idealists and opportunists; we are still undercapitalized, forever dancing on the razor’s edge of solvency; and we are still benefiting from and struggling with the ever-changing technologies of the trade, striving to express a half millennium of tradition through new tools.

Does anyone really expect that the next 25 years will be any different?

When I’m not making books, I spend a lot of time rambling in the woods near my home. One of the things that strikes me when I’m out there is how temporary it all is, relatively speaking. After all, the arrangement of my present landscape is a mere 10,000 years old, shaped by the repeated advances and retreats of mile-high sheets of ice. All these years later, I can read the story of the land on the land as I travel over it, discerning where rivers dithered and changed direction, or scrambling up rocks moved miles and dropped, well, erratically. Heraclitus wasn’t kidding when he said that you can’t step in the same river twice. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you realize that the very terra firma is actually in a sort of constant state of becoming and unbecoming.

This may help to put our questions about the future of literary publishing, a small corner of human endeavour, into context. In fact, to discuss the history of publishing in Canada at all is to discuss a past so recent as to be almost indiscernible from the present. Nothing about it has roots deep enough to merit being called established. The future is simply not distant enough from the beginning to allow significant differentiation between a history and a forecast.

When I’m in a dour mood, I think of the Canadian publishing scene as little more than a weed seeded by chance and nurtured by patriotism, sprung up between glaciations of broader global change. I see no reason why we should think that our cultural landscape might not be utterly reshaped as suddenly as it has appeared, and no reason why it shouldn’t be. (There just isn’t room for sentimentality if you set your watch by deep time.) I can’t help but think that the present turbulence in the Canadian publishing industry – to call it a “decline” would falsely imply that we’d actually gained a summit – is simply the normal state of perpetual change that will continue to take place no matter how many royal commissions on culture we hold, industry organizations we establish, awards we endow or grants we dole out to writers or publishers. Change is simply the way this works.

Aldo Leopold once wrote that “to build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.” And so it is that institutions and programs are established not when we have vision for change, but rather when our imagination fails. In the publishing sector, a considerable amount of infrastructure has been thrown up in support of an official Canadian culture that has, for the most part, failed to materialize. Looming like the false-fronted main street of a boom town, this apparatus of culture bears about as much relation to a functioning culture as a flower box does to a functioning wilderness. The more self-laudatory the granting agencies become about their success, the more those Giller and Griffin Prize socialites titter in their embarrassing displays of self-celebration, the more hollow the charade becomes. Do these pronouncements and displays convince anyone of anything, or are they simply roads to nowhere?

Out on the land, contemplating deep time can send you one of two ways. It can overwhelm you, make you passively fatalistic, convinced of your own insignificance, of the insignificance of action, and of the inevitability of massive, catastrophic change – a line of thinking which branches off in many unfortunate directions. On the other hand, it can evoke a sort of reverence and wonder, a sort of deep regard for the place where you are standing and the moment you have to stand in it. I believe that this deep regard is at the very heart of literature, and that literature is at the very heart of “what the country really needs.”

Perhaps you were hoping that this essay would mount a direct attack on the predatory practices of Big Retail and multinational commerce, bemoan the consolidation of global media, threats to copyright law or the slow collapse of the retail book trade, or rail against the proliferation of technological gadgets like the hand-held digital devices which some believe threaten to make the printed book obsolete. Sorry to disappoint. While there is no question that the book trade is in for massive change, if the past is any indicator, publishers will adapt. Despite it all, in twenty-five years, I expect to be publishing books in much the same fashion I am publishing them today, employing a mix of technology, skill and knowledge of my craft to present new texts to the public. Everything else is details.

That said, the more serious challenges in the days ahead will be the ones which will confront our society more generally, global challenges which will eclipse the mere inconveniences, hiccups and transitions facing the book trade specifically. In a sense, these global challenges are timeless, and are only lent new urgency now thanks to the past century of reckless overconsumption. Who would have imagined that one day we would need to moderate our use of earth, air, water and fuel in order to contend with the real possibility of their being finite? Who would have guessed that we would arrive at the point when the logic and logistics of local economy would have to be relearned? But relearn them we must.

We must also relearn what literature and publishing are for. Any fool knows that there are easier ways to make a dollar than by publishing literature, but while this economically impoverished branch of publishing has never fully been subsumed by rules of capitalism, a fog of complacency, a fuzziness of purpose and a sense of entitlement have certainly descended in recent decades, fostered in this country by the relative comforts of public subsidy. The results are evident in the poor quality of much of what gets published by the little presses and by the lacklustre way in which they publish it. “When we regain a sense of what poems are for,” writes Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, “we will renew the art (the technical means) of writing them. And so we will renew their ability to tell the truth.” The same holds true for literary publishing.

Standing in my printshop setting poems and essays into type or walking the land that surrounds my town, the significance of my life and work in this place is brought into sharp focus, and it is at once thrilling and humbling. As literary publishers, we are entrusted with centuries of thinking, thinking which, while old in human terms, is a mere youngster nestled fragilely in the context of deep time. If we honour this tradition of thinking and we honour this time and this place, paying them deep regard, and if our imaginations do not fail us so that we settle for roads when we ought to be out scouting the literary wilds – if we honour these responsibilities and pay them deep regard, then the literary press, however small, however plagued financially or oppressed politically, however befuddled by technological change, will continue to renew our society’s ability to tell the truth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.