<No.5>

Photo of Ava reading.

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in finding a book published by a small, independent press that’s been out of print for a decade. The discovery feels almost illicit, like you’ve stumbled onto something hidden to the wider world. Which, of course, you have.

Independent publishing has always operated in a sort of different timezone than its counterparts. Mainstream publishers come to live and die by the launch: the review window, the chart position, the first-month returns, whereas small presses live on and often pieces make their mark in subtle yet enduring ways.

This is what might be called the ‘afterlife of media’: the continued circulation of work long after the industry has stopped paying attention. It happens through second-hand bookshops and reading groups, through PDFs shared on forums, through the kind of passionate word-of-mouth recommendation that no marketing budget can manufacture. Independent publishers, often by necessity rather than philosophy, build catalogues that stay available. Rights revert, archives are maintained.

What’s striking is how much of this depends on readers behaving like participants rather than simply consumers. The communities that form around small and independent presses, and they do form, reliably, tend to take on a custodial role. They reissue, come up with both innovative and simple ways of digitalisation, and they share pieces in the community. In the case of small, independent publishers, often the readership does a lot of the work to ensure that there is an afterlife for the media published.

Photo taken at The London Book Fair.

NYRB Classics is perhaps the clearest illustration of this. When editor Edwin Frank was freelancing in the late 1990s, he discovered that much of the great literature he admired had simply gone out of print and so built an imprint around rescuing it. The NYRB editions of John Williams’s Stoner and Renata Adler’s Speedboat became as talked-about upon republication as anything else on the market. The readership, crucially, drives this: title suggestions come from agents, booksellers, and readers who simply write in. The community does the curating.

Commercial and larger-scale publishing remains successful at making noise, but what it is less good at is ensuring that the media produced has an afterlife. Of course, I am not referring to classics; I am referring to the thousands of titles that big publishing conglomerates put out annually. Independent publishing, almost by accident, has solved this problem. Not necessarily by using giant marketing campaigns, but by forging genuine communities that nurture the media published.