This project has bittersweet roots.

First, a celebration of process. As metaphor or fact, process reveals something fundamental about what it means to be human.

The other, a funny contradiction that makes publishing an oddly appropriate symbol for a current state of affairs: how so many progressive politicians, activists, &c end up signing book deals with the publishing arms of corporations, when in another context, in another arena, the two would be at each other’s throats . . . 

But as things stand, the publisher or imprint is dissociated from the corporation: a system where cause and effect are alienated from each other, roots foreign to their leaves. This is not to say that any single individual shouldn’t have signed some contract or work with whichever publisher but more that there is something missing in the public discourse to reveal the whole, illuminating who is publishing books, what they publish and why, what is the current value of publication, and (beyond the individuals in the field) what is the value of having one publisher over another.

Here, I am talking less about money + quantities and more about methods + community, or the identity of publishers across media.

—Nicholas Grosso

New York
March 2019