Self-publishers, serializers, team publishers, and traditional print publishers all start with the text, choosing a manuscript for publication because they feel a connection with the writing and because they think others will, too. The publishing guru Brian O’Leary calls this “focusing on the container.” He believes that publishing is set to shift gears, to focus instead on “context”: who wants the book and how it will be sold, rather than what it is about.
At the fringes of publishing today are nimble new digital start-ups that are reversing the publishing paradigm. They start with what readers want—convenience, specificity, discoverability, easy access, and connection—and produce books that offer all this and more. O’Leary asks us to imagine a world where storage is plentiful, where writing and editing tools are cheap or free, and where content can be sent out in multiple formats to multiple platforms at the push of a button. In many ways, that digital world already exists. In it, instead of giving priority to what will be published, publishers will focus on how to make what is published discoverable. The container—the book—has to be rich, layered, linked, and relevant. Readers born in the digital age won’t accept anything less. My sons, my granddaughters, and I, in increasing intensity, live in an open and accessible world in which we expect to be able to find what we want easily and quickly, where we expect to be able to mix and match and create something of our own from what already exists. Bricolage.
Does this means that the branders have taken over the artist’s studio? I don’t think so. In a way, beautiful books, electronic or print, are now a given. The challenge for a publisher is to create and embed into their ebooks sophisticated ways for readers to find a book and engage with its ideas.
Digital thinking is sideways, experimental, the opposite of hierarchical. It is how creative leaps have always been made. In fact, it is how the manuscript for Gutenberg’s Fingerprint is being written, not by having a vision of where I am going and planning every step in advance, but by wandering around inside an idea, figuring out how this, then that works, standing back and assessing where I am and where I want to go next. Despite what our teachers told us in grade eleven history class, progress is rarely straightforward, A to B to C. More often, the movement from idea to articulation is lateral, circular, spiral, expanding like waves in a pool when a hook is dropped in, like the swirling, limitless links in a digital universe.
The declines I’ve received from publishers are what my husband likes to call “rave rejections”: We love your work, but it isn’t right for us. I used to think this was just a polite way of telling me my writing was crap, but now I wonder if Calasso isn’t right when he says, “Why does a publisher reject a particular book? Because he realizes that publishing it would be like putting the wrong character into a novel.” Calasso sees a publisher’s entire list as the equivalent of one book, each individual work like a chapter in the longer oeuvre that reveals the publisher’s principles and tastes.
“Let’s get together,” I write to Hugh after the launch of The Paradise Project. Our visits are more relaxed now, and often involve lunch at the Star Diner, which hasn’t changed its turquoise stools, its boomerang Arborite, or its menu since the 1950s. After our hamburgers and fries, I propose going back to his house for tea. “I want to see all your books.”
“What’s a book?” he responds.
It is a serious question. Hugh has produced posters and monographs, keepsakes and broadsides, thousands of pages collected in various ways. Some are so slim the word “book” does not immediately spring to mind.
“Anything over forty-eight pages,” I toss back, following the definition adopted by the Canada Council for the Arts.
When I arrive, he has all the books he’s produced in his thirty-five years as a printer-publisher stacked in a wobbly tower on the kitchen table. They are in chronological order, starting at the top with A Letter to Teresa, published in 1983. At the bottom is The Sky These Days, a poetry collection by Susan Gillis, hot off the press.
Every book is different in size and shape and colour. A range of genres is represented: poetry, memoir, essays, fiction. It’s hard to grasp a binding thread through all these Hellbox books, in either form or content.
Hugh seems a little shy, faced with his oeuvre. Or maybe he’s tired. In recent months, he’s been having some trouble with his heart. I peer across the table at the tower of books, but really I’m looking at him. His colour is good. The prickle of anxiety at the back of my neck wanes a little.
I pick the top book off the pile, turn to the first page, and read aloud: “The old chief who made us welcome in English and then offered prayer in the soft poetic tongue of the Ojibwa radiated a concern for the future and the past of the North American Indian.”
Hugh leans across and flips forward to an illustration of a warrior that seems to dance across the page. “I wanted to show the dynamics of the powwow, a bit of the dance,” he says. “So I carved three images and overprinted them in progressively fading colours.”
He digs into the pile of books and pulls out The First Paradise, Odetta, published with Pasolini’s original Italian on the left of each spread, Antonino Mazza’s English translation on the right.
“Pasolini was a communist, he was spurned for that,” Hugh says, his voice trembling with emotion. “That’s why I put his original words on the left. And you see how, when I typeset the lines, I biased them to the left. There is less white space on the left of every line than on the right.”
He closes the book and holds it up to the light. The cover paper is herringbone. “Look from this angle. The title seems to float on the high points. Pasolini was bipolar, so I did this to show that he wrote in the high points of his cycle.” He grins at me. “Of course, everyone sees that right off!”
Then, for a moment, he is uncharacteristically introspective. “I’m not sure why I do this. It is a neat thing to do, of course. I hope there is some person out there who will pick it up.”
The early books are few and far between. Hugh was occupied with getting his tilt wheelchair into the marketplace. Then Verla died, and he sold the wheelchair business. It was the press that kept him going. In 2009, he published Piecing It Together, a collection of poems by Queen’s University student Tanya Neumeyer. He had been in Cuba with her a few years before, taking a course on Che Guevara led by his friend Susan Babbitt, who teaches in the department of philosophy at Queen’s.
“Tanya was a spoken word artist. In one of the poems, she was coming out. That was the main reason I did the book. It took great courage, it seemed to me, the same kind of courage Che had, so I illustrated that poem with a soft-block portrait of the revolutionary.”
I am starting to glimpse the thread: it’s the personal connection that Hugh has to feel with a work before he can choose it as a Hellbox book; it’s the uncanny attention to detail that makes even the most minuscule aspect of a Hugh Barclay book significant to what the words are saying.
Hugh hands me Out of the Mouth by Shane Neilson. The rough burgundy cover is cleaved by a silver shard headed for the word “Mouth.”
“The poems deal with his son Zack, who started having seizures at age two,” Hugh explains. “That shard shows there is a break in his brain.” Deeper into the book, I come upon a collage of shards in silver and gold. “The silver is the seizure, and the meds are in gold. You see? The meds never completely cover the seizure.” Pasted into every one of the 104 copies of the book is a bookmark made from the same green fabric that surgeons wear in the operating room. On the final page, a soft block made from a painting by Zack. “I wanted to give him the last word in the book. He deserves it!”
Who else would publish these books? Who else would publish them in this way?
And who, at almost eighty, would see every book as a fresh opportunity to stretch himself, stretch the reader? When he published The Truth About Rabbits, by a young poet who divides her time between Paris, France, and Kingston, Onta
rio, he developed a collaboration with Larry Thompson, a fellow letterpress printer in Merrickville, Ontario. Hugh printed the text, then drove the pages up to Larry, who reprinted the pages with the wood engravings he’d carved.
“I even got him to write his own colophon in the first person, beside mine,” Hugh chuckles. He reads it aloud to me: “I am Larry Thompson . . . whose happy task it was to cut the wood engravings that adorn this book, here under the Sign of the Gothic Tree, in the picturesque village of Merrickville while the promise of spring could just be felt in the sunshine.”
Paging through the book, we come upon a signature of upside-down pages. “Oh dear,” Hugh says, “I’ll have to take that one apart.” There is no moan and groan in his voice. He makes the correction sound like a treat he can’t wait to get at.
And that’s part of what makes Thee Hellbox Press unique: these books are flawed. They don’t pretend to be made with machine precision. They are made by human hands, a human mind, an exquisitely human heart.
The tower has tumbled into a sprawl of books between us. A lovely jumble. A bricolage.
People often say that writing a book is like having a baby, to which I usually reply, “I wish it only took nine months.” Writing may not be like childbirth, but producing a book is. The minute that longed-for creature is in your hands, the hard parts are forgotten. Hugh is not irritating at all; he is a genius. I look back on the grubby print shop, where we lurched from one near-disaster to another, with a fondness I recognize in Rita Dove’s memoir of the making of her letterpress book of poetry.
“I love the world of the print shop,” she writes in “The House That Jill Built.” “There is a calm and order, an adagio sense of time that permits the appreciation, the heft, of each detail—the positioning of a comma, the measured appraisal of every letter and space, the sheer physical investment of setting a page of type. Isn’t this how every writer imagines writing, setting down each letter with deliberate care, setting it to last, tamping it in?”
The nostalgia I feel for the Hellbox production of The Paradise Project is part of how I feel about all books. I love books. An irrational, deep, joyous, fierce, sometimes enraged love. I cannot imagine my world stripped of printed books. And I’m not alone. Something about printed books elicits strong emotion. People refer to them as friends, as companions, as the scripted playlist to their lives. In part, this may be because language provokes the emotion that attaches to the sensory cues so important to the memory-storage process. But that doesn’t explain why printed books, in particular, become such heartfelt icons for so many people.
Clearly, books are more than plot, more than characters, more than ideas.
“Books sell a house,” our real estate agent told us when we listed our country place for sale. By the time we put the grand old stone farmhouse on the market, we had moved the heart of our library of 10,000 books to our city house. “I wish you’d left them here,” she said. “Buyers love books!”
From the 3,000 or so we left behind, she made stacks of oversized books to serve as lamp stands and side tables. She laid out books with covers that matched the walls, the floor, the furniture of each bedroom, the living room, the kitchen. When we were ready to deliver the books we didn’t want to the Symphony Sale, she asked if she could take some. “Sure!” we said, naively delighted to have a reader for a realtor. For an hour she sat on the floor, pulling out all the books with red spines, white spines, deep blue spines, to decorate other houses she was staging to sell.
Books are a brand. Restaurateurs buy them by the yard to paper the walls of their bars and bistros. Books have been glued together to make bed frames, couches, chairs, benches, even an outdoor bench in Berlin, where the books are renewed each season. In Sweden, a floor-to-ceiling partition was made of books laid flat, end to end, like thin bricks. An Australian bookseller made a waist-high counter for his shop entirely from books. A British company makes chandeliers from the fanned pages of unwanted books. A gift shop in downtown Kingston has two mannequins in its window, one wearing a very swish suit and the other an evening dress, both made from pages of books by Ovid and Noël Coward.
The sight of those orphaned pages makes me queasy. Printed pages are meant to be read. What does it mean when they’re used as decoration, as decor, as art?
In novels, books are a kind of short-hand that indicates a character is educated, sensitive, enlightened, worldly. The books that line the rooms in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country spell emancipation. In Fahrenheit 451 they symbolize freedom of thought and free will, everything the fascist society is not. In The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, books are identity, immortality, an emblem of hope. But what is the meaning of a book on a restaurant wall?
My local used-book dealer told me about a fellow who came into his store looking for a book. Not a certain title or a certain author; he just wanted a book about yay big by yay thick. He spent hours roaming the aisles and finally came to the counter triumphant. He was carrying his Kindle on top. His plan was to cut out the pages of the paper book to make a carrying case for his ereader.
He should have waited. Amazon now sells a Kindle cover that looks exactly like a leather-bound book. You can even order a hand-bound book to hold your reader “that perfectly imitates the look and feel of a classic hard back book.” The titles on offer: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Book covers for iPads include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dracula, The Great Gatsby, and The Theory of Relativity, depending on whom you admire and whom you want to impress. You can also order a “book case” for your smartphone.
I’ve seen old books reamed out to hold flasks, secret documents, and house keys. I can wear actual pages from Pride and Prejudice pasted over a big wooden bead to hang around my neck. Or a pendant made of a glass bottle containing a page of Wuthering Heights. Or a brooch in the shape of a bird covered with a varnished “original page from damaged copies of Harper Lee’s classic” To Kill a Mockingbird. At the Grimsby Wayzgoose this year, an artisan printer was selling teensy books to wear as necklaces.
Copying quotations and likenesses of authors is one thing. But repurposing actual pages of actual printed books strikes me as sacrilege until I look over at the frame on the wall by my bed. It contains a page from a nineteenth-century book, The Language of Flowers, showing an early lithograph of roses, violets, and tulips. Brought together in a bouquet, the flowers say, “Your beauty and modesty have forced from me a declaration of love.” A razor-bladed book page has been staring me in the face every morning for twenty years, and I’ve only just noticed.
It gets worse. Amazon sells a candle called New Book that promises a scent reminiscent of the beautiful smell of a newly opened book, what they call “an unabridged blend of lignin paper, ambered glue, and fresh India ink, narrated charmingly with white ginger and sweet pine resin.”
Such bookish paraphernalia would not be sold unless people were buying it. I suppose there are those who would wear “old book” perfume if it were offered. If nothing else, these earrings, candles, and page-dressed mannequins tell me one thing: people may not be reading printed books, but they still want the smell, the touch, the sight of them close at hand.
And what does all this say about what a book means in our culture? I think it says the brand is still fresh. A book is intelligent and thoughtful. Not old and fusty. Books still matter.
What is a book?, Hugh asked me.
It is not an idle question. When scientists with the Human Genome Project finally sequenced all the genes in human DNA in 2003, they called it a book—the book of life. When I worked in magazines, every issue was called a “book.” A book can be a whole packet of knowledge, as in “Who wrote the book of love?” In fact, it can be any gathering of like things: a book of matches, or the number of tricks I need to win in a game of bridge before I can start scoring. For half a millennium, humans r
egarded a “book” as a stack of pages between covers, but I wonder how many pages have to be in the stack before it earns the title. And what about ebooks, which have neither physical pages nor covers?
The Oxford English Dictionary cites the original meaning of book as “a writing tablet,” a definition that expanded to include any sort of written narrative, record, list, etc. Eventually, a book was defined generally as a collection of sheets of paper, written or printed on, and “fastened together so as to form a material whole.” Contemporary online dictionaries such as the Cambridge English Dictionary pry the definition open a little wider: “a written text that can be published in printed or electronic form.” The notion of stacked pages and fastening on one side has disappeared. Instead, the word is often modified: print book or ebook; paper book or digital book. Rarely just book.
I spend some time pondering a definition of my own. It starts out long and convoluted, but in the end, the only inclusive, conclusive meaning I can come up with is this: “A book is a longish written work published in some form.” I recall the wording in a film contract I was once offered and feel tempted to add, “in some form now existing or yet to be invented anywhere in the universe.”
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