Total Book Control

[Jules Siegel]

At 03:30 PM 04/29/97 -0400, "davemarc" <davemarc at panix.com> wrote:
>I think Nin, Blake, and Wyndham Lewis might have had total creative control
& input at one point or another.

[snip list of possible others]

Did they set it in type and design it? Was it published by a publisher who
paid them to create it and then paid to print it and promote it?

I do book art, too. It's not the same thing. It also doesn't sell for $11.95
a copy in B. Dalton.

>And a minor point:  Jules wrote "I not only wrote the text...."  I haven't
seen the final edition of Lineland, but my understanding is that Jules
didn't write the text.  He wrote most of it. Maybe ten percent came from
other foax on the p-list and then there's the matter of an intro by Dale.

Valid, but very minor. I decided what went in, not Dale. He asked me if he
could write an introduction and I enthusiastically agreed.

This can be the subject of much theoretical discussion, but I think that
anyone on the list who's actually had a book published will understand what
I'm saying. I have been in the publishing field since childhood. I do not
personally know of any other author who has been given 100% control over
every aspect of a book. Maybe F. W. Goudy, come to think of it, and some
other typographers such as Bruce Rogers. I've seen works of theirs that
looked totally integrated but never thought until this exact moment that
they might have had the same kind of control. It would be really interesting
to know.

At 03:06 PM 04/29/97 -0400, <traveler at afn.org> wrote:

>> [2] It was produced entirely online, except for Dale's brief  [...] 

>I think every junior writing teacher/grad student in the English department
at the Univ. of Florida here in Gainesville is trying to do something of the
sort these days. 

Trying? We're not talking about trying here, but doing it and getting it
published.

>> [3] I not only wrote the text, but I also set it in type and designed the
book in every aspect, from cover illustration to the back cover copy. Dale
gave me 100% creative control.

>This actually strikes me as very old-fashioned...i.e., the sort of thing
that would have been done in the 17th/18th century, when a man could have
read widely in most of the learned fields of the day, built his own printing
press, and written and printed his own collection of works on philosophy,
natural history, religion, etc.

Maybe it is in the sense that you describe. The difference is that am a
professional writer and a professional graphic designer and the book has
been published by a professional publisher. The last item is most
significant. Dale is not a big publisher but he is not me, either. He paid
me to create the book and he is paying to print it and publicize it. Don't
dismiss that until you've gotten a few of your own books published.

>It is of course becoming a reality again with "desktop publishing."
However, the very existence of that term indicates that "Lineland" is not
the first (post-)modern book thus produced.  Actually, I used to have a
supervisor at work who was a Pentecostal preacher...she wrote, typeset,
printed, and published her own books on conducting exorcisms and other forms
of "spiritual warfare" 

Repeat previous remark. Also, it is not a post-modern book. Physically, it
is very conventional and it has a conventional narrative and text flow. What
is really different about it is that I controled every aspect of the visual
presentation and the content. It's the same kind of control that a painter
has over a painting. There are lots of amateur painters and always have
been. There are very few artists who do what I do and get it published. If
you know of any opthers, I'd like to hear about it.

Most of the stuff you're talking about is the literary equivalent of
performance art. They aren't even really books in the true sense of the
word, but mere amateur pastiches. Even some of these will turn out to be
historically important.

One of the problems in discussing art is that the concepts of the master
craftsman and the master artist are not really significant in the art world
any more. It is assumed that anyone can learn anything and that what really
counts is what the museum curator thinks of it. In the commercial world in
which I've lived and worked all my life (even when I've been in places like
Puerto Escondido) art is judged by what it is rather than what someone says
it is. To be a genius is not enough. You also have to be good at what you do.
 
>> [4] It is one of the first (maybe only) books about the Internet culture
that attempts to provide a kind of slice of Internet life, rather than
extended technical and philosophical discussions about cyberspace. It is
cyberspace set in type.

>My friends and I wrote an interactive "novel" on a BBS a few years ago; the
record of it (interspersed with the everyday chatter of the bulletin boards)
is at http://www.afn.org/~vvc

Not a published, printed book. See if you can get any publisher, no matter
how small, to put enough cash into it to get it into B. Dalton. Then we'll talk.

>> I think that "Lineland" is the beginning of something new that has no
name. I believe that I have invented a new kind of book, but we will have to
wait for

>Sorry if my mail seems to have an attitude, but this kind of statement
invites refutation and, well, mockery.

Keep mocking. It's all in the record now. Perhaps your mockery will be some
future scholar's target of equally amused scorn.

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