The Past: The Occasion of the Future
In June 2021, Maria Silvia Marini interviewed Nicholas Grosso for Passaporto Nansen, an Italian literary journal. Below is the English translation of the interview.
We interviewed Nicholas Grosso, Cuban Italian American, born and raised in New York, currently enrolled at Oxford Brookes University as a PhD student with the project Blueprints: Investigating how principles of architecture and infrastructure inform the construction of publishers’ identities in the digital age, founder of the publishing project Literaturhaus, author of Rhapsody in letters, as well as editor, translator, and artisan of books.
Literally, a life for books.
How did the Literaturhaus project start?
An early idea for Literaturhaus started at the old literary website Bookslut.com. We had the idea of founding a place devoted to artists in exile with a community center, library, and performance space attached — something along the lines of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. But as that idea failed to materialize, my own interests turned towards publishing and how it functioned in close association with community, particularly in learning about Aldo Manuzio and the creation of Aldine Press. With that, I figured the best way to learn about it was to do it.
In recent years, the publishing world has changed radically, and this change has brought with it dramatic transformations. In your PhD project you try to build an alternative solution starting from this point of view. Galileo argued that "behind every problem hides a possibility": an opportunity, then, something similar to the occasion. How can these critical transformations be an opportunity?
There are definitely lots of opportunities in this moment, possibilities to envision and create a more robust, sustaining creative sphere. The costs of entry (the price to produce or make (in my case) books available to audiences) are lower than ever. One can start an online literary magazine or become an ebook publisher for the costs of access to an internet ready device and an internet connection. There are also cheaper print options and the ability to print books in more limited quantities with digital files, whereas only a few decades ago the cost to print less than a couple thousand copies was prohibitive to most.
At the same time, these possibilities should not hide the risks and downsides that also exist. With the possibility of printing cheaper editions of books, there is parallel trend that devalues the craft of book production, from design and papersourcing to typesetting and binding — making it more difficult for such artisans to make a living from their craft. There is a similar devaluing of editing, I see this especially in newspapers that have sought new models with subscription rates dropping and people reading more and more news from the newspaper’s website or secondhand through social media posts.
This low cost to entry also means a changing of gatekeepers, those who decide what is accessible, what is promoted, and what is generally available. Where once publishers (and when I speak about publishers I am also talking about movie studios, television networks, along with traditional literary publishers, and other similar institutions) controlled a majority (if not all) content that was available to the general public through their staff, individuals hired to curate and develop content; today platforms like Amazon, Apple, and YouTube make nearly every book, video, podcast, and piece of bellybutton lint available to an audience, if they can find it. And unless the user of these platforms knows exactly what they are looking for, what they see is determined by algorithms (algorithms that I think are lacking in transparency in how they function). There have been reports in the US about how Facebook had tailored its algorithm to keep users on its website for as long as possible, which led to the boosting of increasingly sensational material with little regard for the veracity or quality of the content.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, is now one for itself” — I would update that to say: “Today, humankind is an object of contemplation for algorithms and the various forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.”
There is an opportunity with new technologies and the agitation of the status quo to make creative spaces more connected to their communities and audiences, but it also comes with its share of risks that should be considered every step of the way. I guess my point is: let’s not exchange one exploitative system for another, where a handful of multinational corporations reap huge profits off user activity and we call it fair because any single post has the potential to pass before 1 billion pairs of eyes.
Your work includes the translation of Italian authors, for example The Manifestos of Aldo Palazzeschi (Bordighera Press). How important is, in a hyper-connected world like ours, raising awareness about foreign literature, and more generally about foreign intellectual production? Is it more important now than, for instance, 40 years ago?
Translation is fundamental. For a long time, books in translation were isolated, confined to small, specialized niches in the United States. Even today, translation is a very small percentage of the total books published. There is the Three Percent project out of the University of Rochester, and its name comes from the percentage of books in translation published every year in the US, much fewer than across most of Europe where according to a 2020 report (shared via European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations) the percentages were typically between 10-20%, including 12% in Germany, 18% in France, and 19% in Spain and Sweden.
Translation is a good way to think about the relationship between connection and hyper-connectivity. Like I mentioned about the potential of being able to reach 1 billion pairs of eyes on social media platforms, what does that mean if the reader is unaware of the context or meaning of the message? Translation is the thoughtful process of attempting to capture the meaning of a text and articulate it in a different context, whereas connections made through most social media platforms often dissociates the message from its context, making it a challenge to understand its nuances (even when reading posts from people writing in the same language).
Ultimately, I think sharing information is a critical part of being human and underlies our ability to thrive on this planet. With all of the urgent crossroads around us, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis, what greater advocate could there be for the ability to share information in a transparent, thoughtful way? This is as true for literature as it is for other forms of intellectual production, though some are more pressing.
Quoting Ulises Carrión’s manifesto (The New Art of Making Books: "A book is a sequence of spaces") you compare books to spaces that interact with readers, referring explicitly to the principles of architecture. What role do these principles play in your project?
I am just at the beginning of my research, looking into the history of publishing and form, as well as developments in architectural theory and its relation to sociocultural issues, but the idea was also partly inspired by Roberto Calasso and his The Art of the Publisher, where he describes form as a critical part of publishing. And I have to also include the architectural research practice, dpr-barcelona, which has described “books as spaces of encounter” in their Parasitic Reading Room.
From these points, I think architecture offers and has the potential to illuminate much within the field of publishing because of the ways it captures two sides of form: the physical design of a structure and how the structure fits into and interacts with its context.
There is a great series of questions from Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he asks: “Does television give a new meaning to ‘judgment’ or to ‘understanding’? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper’s ‘public’ different from television’s ‘public’? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?”
In your project the concept of "community" occurs very often. How important is the "community" in the construction of an editorial subject, and how is this concept developed within it?
Different from many other art forms, publishing is in dialogue with community, it is the bridge between readers and writers. It facilitates connections, which is a starting point for community.
The true publisher answers one of those questions at the heart of community: what binds people together? How does this text fit in the broader context? Their publications share and elevate visions of the human experience, of the world, attempting to fill a gap, something missing from the cultural landscape. The publisher curates a selection of publications that shape a particular perception of human life.
You also create handcrafted volumes in the tradition of Italian artisans. Our magazine, Passaporto Nansen, by choice, is published in paper edition too. Do you think that the “physicality” of books is still important, or that it will disappear in favor of digital? Is paper really just a fetish, as many people think, a Proustian madeleine, a nostalgic echo of the past, or at most a beautiful artistic object to collect? How do you imagine the future of publishing?
I recently interviewed the UK publisher Ornan Rotem of Sylph Editions and he said that now is the time of the beautiful book. With accessibility to internet publishing and cheap print alternatives readily available, one must now go out of their way to produce an artisanal book, and when I say artisanal I mean the publisher is actively making decisions about the book’s typeface, layout, design, paper, binding, and other design and form related elements.
Many motivations may guide such decisions, nostalgia among them because each medium comes loaded with all kinds of symbolism. But depending on the mission of an individual publisher, the reading experience can be shaped and truly curated through these decisions: from the weightiness and feel of the paper to the cover design.
I don’t think this amounts to aesthetics only or nostalgia. Sewed signatures makes for a more durable, long-lasting book than glued spines, which dry out over a few years. Where an ebook is more easily accessible to a much wider audience and millions of books can be stored on a single thumb drive that can be tucked into a person’s pocket. An ebook relies on electricity. The microchip is a comparatively temperamental technology that relies on supported operating systems. Imagine having your library on floppy disks, a technology that was in regular use 20-40 years ago. It would be exceedingly difficult to access your floppy disk library in a convenient way today, whereas books printed 40 years ago are still accessible with relative ease.
All to say, each medium provides its set of advantages and disadvantages. An important question for the publisher is to consider what the medium communicates and their mission. The future of publishing will reflect the future of humanity, and there is potential abound to create a more nurturing, equitable, exuberant creative space.