As I write this, the founder of Spineless Books is sleeping in
my living room. He’s exhausted after driving 13 hours straight
in a ridiculously overloaded car. Spineless Books is leaving Providence and
a small Toyota has become a mobile box crammed with computers, CDs,
books, disc golf discs, clothing, cassettes, food and remnants of
food, empty coffee cups, and a driver escaping Ivy League New England.
I’ve been seeing a lot of William lately. Which is a good
thing. I like to see William as often as possible, even if he’s
just passing through and using Chateau Strattonius as a cheap flophouse.
A couple of weeks ago, William appeared in an SUV that was carrying
boxes of the latest Spineless Books publication, Fourier
Series, by Josh Corey, the first winner of the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn
contest. There was also a large stack of book covers printed on thick,
luxurious paper. Our mission was to cut the covers to size, fold
them, then wrap them around the books.
Fourier Series
(To understand how this turned out to be a fairly complicated thing
to do, you’ll just have to buy a copy of Fourier
Series.) To help us with this task, Lorien Carsey (the Official
Muse of Spineless Books) also drove to Cincinnati. After
William figured out exactly what steps needed to be taken to transform
the huge pile of potential book covers into actual book covers covering
books, we set to work. You had your choice of three separate tasks,
though each was mind-numbingly tedious, repetitive, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing,
and just plain boring. My criminal deficit in the music reproduction
department (i.e. no working CD player with actual speakers) made
things even more difficult, particularly for William and Lorien.
It took us the better part of three days to finish all 400 copies,
taking several desperately needed disc
golf breaks to revive our
assembly-line bludgeoned spirits.
Day 1
Though I groused and complained freely throughout the experience,
I was actually elated, for a couple of reasons. First, it was a concrete
example of the Art/Life Ratio I championed in my
last Editor’s Skull rant. Art was happening in my apartment,
all day long. For some, the dominant art form, the form all other
arts aspire to, is music. For me, it’s sculpture. Preparing
book covers for Fourier Series was
a very sculptural experience. There was the huge pile of uncut and
unfolded book covers that sat on the floor, taunting us and daunting
us. Dealing with that pile was like facing a huge lump of granite
and slowly whittling away everything that wasn’t part of the
finished sculpture. The cutting and the folding also suggested sculptural
activities. As the pile of unmanipulated covers shrank, piles of
jacketed books grew. William, Lorien and I were building an edifice
of completed books. That this sculpting was the final step for Fourier
Series was most appropriate given that one of the book’s
primary approaches is spatial (get your copy today to see what I
mean). All and all, a most satisfying experience.
Day 3 The
second reason I was elated was because this was a milestone event
in the maturation of Spineless Books as a publisher. Let’s
face it: there are those out there who would dismiss Spineless (or
any other small press) ( i.e., “They’re not a “real” press;
they just publish themselves and their friends.”). [This
is true but only because we strive to make friends with people
we publish—I didn't meet Mike
Maguire until a year after Drawn
Inward was published, when we taught our palindrome
writing workshop at the Kelly Writers House at Penn.—Ed2]
So with the publishing of Fourier
Series, Spineless Books provides the first evidence that it
is a publisher “just like” other “legitimate” publishers.
In other words, before Corey’s manuscript was chosen as the
winner of the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn
Award For Best Book Length Work Of Constrained English Literature,
no one in the Spineless universe knew who the hell he was or what
he wrote. In essence, we discovered Josh, just as he discovered
us, and strangers came together to jointly produce an artistic
enterprise.
Christian Bök, Joshua Corey,
William
I realize I am biased, but I believe we have produced a wonderful
book. Check it out and tell
me otherwise, if you dare. —Dirk Stratton |
