
Auteur-Publishers
Small Press Practices as Avant-Garde Writing
Craig J. Saper(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Will be published approx. on 30. November 2025
Book
Hardback
184 pages
978-1-4744-5472-8 (ISBN)
Description
Auteur Publishers relocates authorial intention from the lone writer's vision to the publishers' arts and artisanal craft. Using the notion of auteurism, initially developed by Francois Truffaut to reframe authorship away from a script writer to a director's creative vision, this book looks at auteur-publishers working from the 1890s through to the present. These small independent book publishers acquired, designed and sometimes printed the books they published. Presses including William Morris with Way & Williams, Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Kathleen Tankersley Young's The Modern Editions Press and Dick Higgin's Something Else Press played crucial roles in modern art and literary movements. Motivated by their idiosyncratic literary and aesthetic values, they cultivated publishing practices and, in retrospect, provide a lineage for publishers today: presses like Information As Material; Punctum Books; Siglio; Sublunary and Roving Eye Press are a few examples of the hundreds of small presses continuing the small press tradition.
Reviews / Votes
Auteur-Publishers shows us that the editorial and production work of small press publishers is not peripheral to literature but constitutes authorship in its own right. By naming this practice "infrastructuralist poetics," Saper offers a compelling framework for understanding how design, typography, materiality, distribution and infrastructure have shaped avant-garde writing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the book's most illuminating aspects is its treatment of Dick Higgins, whose editorial and typographic experiments at Something Else Press exemplify the publisher's role in aesthetic production, not as a passive conduit for authorial expression but as an active force in shaping literary form. * Roger Rothman, Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History, Bucknell University *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
6 black and white images
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
435 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-5472-8 (9781474454728)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Craig Saper is Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has published widely on modernist and experimental arts and is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown (2016), Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto (2012), Networked Art (2001) and Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention (1997).Saper has also curated exhibits on experimental forms of publishing, and he re-started a small press as a form of conceptual publishing, Roving Eye Press.
Content
List of Figures
1. Opening a Small Press
2. Craft: Letterpress Rubric (Kelmscott in Chicago)
3. Concept: Mock-Up and Editions (Information As Material)
4. Experiment: Point and Type (Hours Press)
5. Object: Bound and Boxed (The Modern Editions Press)
6. Event: Intermedia and Dingbats (Something Else Press)
7. Process: Open Access and Means of Production (Punctum Books)
8. Endpapers
Appendix: A (Very) Few Examples of Small Press Publishers
Notes
Index
1. Opening a Small Press
2. Craft: Letterpress Rubric (Kelmscott in Chicago)
3. Concept: Mock-Up and Editions (Information As Material)
4. Experiment: Point and Type (Hours Press)
5. Object: Bound and Boxed (The Modern Editions Press)
6. Event: Intermedia and Dingbats (Something Else Press)
7. Process: Open Access and Means of Production (Punctum Books)
8. Endpapers
Appendix: A (Very) Few Examples of Small Press Publishers
Notes
Index