Editions + Incompleteness + Fragments
Is part of a book still a book—does a piece of it still carry some utility?
Sometime in the next few days I will find the time to sew together 5–10 more copies of my first proper zine: Points or (paraphrasing Robin Kinross) some typographic things to “know and have to hand.”
It’s a small object, made up of 4 little gathers—the outside pieces are a blue reading list and a yellow set of visual excerpts, inside each of which is a smaller cream colored booklet. The whole thing is sewn together with a three hole pamphlet stitch that begins in one booklet and runs through the other (this two-signature-pamphlet is my favorite binding, as it hides the thread on the spine but is still easy the construct and allows for twice the content the original would hold). I timed it once, and each book takes no more than 2 minutes to sew.
The first version was laser printed in my apartment, as were probably the second and third—at some point I switched to a two color risograph edition—along the way I made small edits and corrected errors, made additions, etc. I have probably printed about 300 copies of this since its first iteration in ~2018.
The issue though, is that in my haste to run out to catch my first train on this trip, all I was able to grab of this book, were the unbound pages of each signature, unsorted, from many different editions of it. I’m almost certain I grabbed a different number of each section. So as I am sewing them all together—out of time from each other, I am wondering:
How do all these little books exist together and as individuals?
Does the shuffling of them change the nature of the text?
Could any of them circulate meaningfully on their own?
And then further out of this example:
What is the relationship between excerpt and fragment?
Does the thing which is missing, in its absence, also contribute to the context of the thing that remains?
When I find a book that is “flawed”—with a page flipped or a chapter removed, or when I find one torn half of a paperback—it actually holds a somewhat greater identity and meaning for me—I wonder if this is so for other people?
Publishing as More of a Motion than an Act
In my publishing practice I’m often skirting around anything that could really be considered an “edition”—there aren’t really clear boundaries on the provenance of my little booklets. This is for a number of reasons:
I’m frequently publishing unfinished/incomplete works—usually because I believe the partial thing might still have value, or some deadline or request has compelled me to put a very short run out as it is.
The Risograph Maintenance Tutorial I’m working on is in its “2nd draft edition.” It’s approaching a book, but the thing it is now is still useful for me to hand out in the workshops I teach, so I’ve made this half-thing more broadly available too—if it has use for some friends, perhaps it has use for others too?
One of the more unifying aspects of the things I put out is my proclivity for a disclaimer. Nearly every little book of mine has a blurb saying “please forgive me, this thing is not done, would you like to help write it with me?” often right on the front cover. Pardon my publishing.
Even when something is “finished” (i.e. “has reached the line I marked in my mind previously”) I’m already planning how it might be expanded/modified/appended in a future version (that line, previously marked, has shifted). And subsequent printings will include some of these additional bits and pieces. Amelia refers to this as iterative publishing: intentionally allowing a thing to develop through each act of its publication.
There’s a whole tiny philosophy I subscribe to in publishing—it’s a perversion of the old idea of “a painting is never finished, it is only ever abandoned”—making something public is a counterpoint to this abandonment—it gives something a certain freedom to wander instead, and to come back to you changed. By invoking this public of readers—of which you, the author, are a part—you’ve set forth a small catalyst, which, through the alteration it enacts on the people who encounter it—will color the whole ecosystem slightly anew, and feed back into your ideas and work down the road.
I’m really addicted to the facsimile: reproducing something as it once was, and adapting the new form it lives in to the form it once held rather than reworking it to fit a new context. I think of the altered-reprints I make as containing facsimiles of their past selves.
Many projects are already composed of multiple paired pieces. Little chapbooks that pair with each other, nested objects, new containers which reframe the text within—all not quite an individual thing, so much as they are small snapshots of connection in a community of artifacts.
All anthologies behave in this stitched way, but so do many texts that from the outside appear more unified.
Many projects I’m working on are so big that if I waited to publish the thing in full it would be decades from now—so I must release some piece of it or it might die with me.
There’s also a long and lovely history of publishing parts of something while working on a larger collection—the one I always go back to is the publishing of the OED first as fascicles, while the larger text was compiled—and that this text, even 70+ years in the making, was already obsolete upon its publication—it made itself obsolete, by exposing that there was ever more to be done.
Logistically, I can only print or bind so many copies of a project at once—so if they do well and circulate, I will need to reprint sooner rather than later. And while I like keeping meticulous records, living in small apartments and jumping between studios means that most of the books, besides being half finished, are only half bound. And even of those, I don’t know how many I have on hand; or where they might be. So I end up constantly printing things old and new.
I will say, from what I’ve seen in the larger world of printing books, the definitions of the idea of publishing certainly seem to get muddier the farther you are from the commercial publishing industry. In that space of release dates, peer review, strict citation, etc. publishing sharpens to a moment, where books and authors have a before and after. Not so, in our shoddy little paradise of zines and artists books—here publishing is more often a sort of an irregular stumble towards other people—perhaps out of necessity. If we can’t afford to play the game with the rules prescribed, we must make up our own using the pieces available to us.
And I like all this! I like publishing as just one part of the process of thinking in community.
Publishing the act is something we do almost as a byproduct of publishing the practice.
The limits and compromises of small publishing force us to blur the lines of “to publish,” and there’s fun to be had in the soft edges found here.
It makes sense that we would confuse publishing as finite. Publishing is caught up in the “thing” or “object” of the work that is published—and the thing with things is that they carry with them an implication of something concrete. They exist, and at one point did not (and at another point yet to come, may not again), and these extremities imply discrete turning points, at which not-being turned into being. It’s that before and after again. It makes publishing feel like an action instead of a motion.
Labor is definitely a part of this too. The industry intentionally abstracts the labor of the books—because it’s easier to pick up and own a thing-book rather than a collection-of-the-labor-of-many-people-book. But as anyone who has collated, folded, and stapled a run of zines knows, the making is very much a process, and no book is devoid of the fingerprints of its makers.
I wanted to include a quote from Artist Publishers Reflect on Book Waste by Temporary Services here, but I don’t have my copy on me. It was something about how commercial publishing operates through the disguising of its waste by hiding everything about how the book is made—and that one of the possibilities of small press is to do the opposite, and to illuminate that process. I’ll replace this with the actual quote when I find it.
One/Many Text in One/Many Formats
This brings to mind an old section of a lecture I thought I would share, for an angle on these ideas from a past self. I generally use this as a part of an early thing I like to do in publishing workshops: disassemble the idea of “what a book is.”
The basic goal is to question the relationship between the text and the object, and to acknowledge that neither is static.
Books have both form (the physical and visual reality of the object) and content (the textual or narrative embedded within) — how do these two components relate (and are they so different)?1
From the outside, we tend to think of a book like Orwell’s 1984 as a concrete and somewhat fixed text. It is, afterall, one of many touchstones in the canon of Western Literature. But if we look at it more from the inside it becomes quite fluid.
After introducing this example, my question for the class is generally: which of these is the “real” 1984? And then: does such a thing exist? Our goal is conversation around how the boundaries of ideas, and how they are transferred, and the forms they may take, are never quite a fixed point. And expanding from this—all of this sort of ecosystem of a text is also the text, and all these instances and experiences are interdependent and actively growing.
Current Happenings
I’m unexpectedly, in New York City! About to go help some friends with some repairs. Already did some work with Small Editions removing a stuck drum from an RP3700 and replacing some parts so that it won’t stick again, and I’m headed to Secret Riso Club next!
I just got finished with some short stints at Studio Two Three in Richmond VA (which involved a lot of great conversation about maintaining systems in community art spaces which I am very excited to share) and The Soapbox in Philadelphia PA (where conversation turned again around how spaces like these might continue to exist, in changing roles, in the context of the dissolution of UArts and the downfall of other institutions). And I had a great visit with Ipsy Bipsy in DC, who I haven’t seen since the old riso chats Amelia used to run!
This is a (slightly modified) excerpt from a lecture I do called “The Space of Books,” although I’ve used it in multiple other places since then.
Thanks, Robert. I like what you said about publishing incomplete things. I currently have about 10 different incomplete things that aren't really moving anywhere. But if I just sent them out into the world they may come back complete (or at least changed). Thanks for the encouragement!
Great read, this made me revisit my version of Points!