issue #07 pdf - Razorcake

These things make books exciting and vital.Manic D has been around for almost twenty years now. And thoughJoseph still isn’t making a whole lot of money off of it, she’s excitedabout the future of independent publishing. “Fuck it,” she told me, “Igrew up in the suburbs and thought I was the only one interested inobscure novels and poetry – luckily, I found out I wasn’t alone. Byexporting alternative literary culture out to the far corners of America,we’re letting people know it’s okay to not conform to society’s absurdconstraints and to think for yourself.”Of course, Manic D isn’t the only case of a publisher growing upfrom an underground community and using the model of indie musiclabels to build her business. On the other side of the coin from Manic Dis Adam Parfrey. Inspiredby a love for unusual booksWriters are releasing self-publishedbooks out of a desire to push conventionsand challenge the mainstream, notbecause they can’t meet conventions orbe a part of the mainstream.and a dissatisfaction withmainstream publishing,Parfrey decided to take mattersinto his own hands. In1986, he teamed up withKen Swezey to form AmokPress. Together, they publishedeight books in twoyears. They also stirred up a lot of controversy. The first two books thatAmok released were Michael – the novel written by Joseph Goebbelsbefore he became the head propagandist for the Third Reich – andApocalypse Culture – a collection of essays on necrophilia, murder,pornography, satanism, and GG Allin. Still, Amok Press managed to sella lot of books and raise issues that mainstream publishers ignored.Parfrey and Swezey lived on opposite coasts, though, and collaborationwas tough. They decided to part ways in 1988. In 1989, Parfreystarted Feral House Publishing. Feral House continued to publish fringebooks. They kept the first Apocalypse Culture book in print, and Parfreyedited Apocalypse Culture II, which includes an essay on “the biologicalresurrection of Jesus Christ via modern cloning technology” and recipesfor cooking babies. One of Feral House’s biggest selling authors is thenotorious Satanist, Anton LaVey. And Feral House published severalother books about the occult, drugs, black metal, and conspiracy theory.Beyond the sensational and the blatant attempts to instigate the easilyoffended, Feral House has also put some very important books back inprint. One of those books is The X-Rated Bible 7 , which examines all ofthe passages about sex and debauchery in the Holy Bible, and the otherbook is The Bomb by Frank Harris.The re-issue of The Bomb is something that I find very interestingabout Feral House for two reasons. First, a few years ago (before FeralHouse re-issued the book), I tried to find a copy of it, and I couldn’t findone anywhere. With the help of my local librarian, we searched throughthe databases of every library system in the state of Florida and couldonly find one copy of the book. This amazed me. Frank Harris is a majorfigure in American literature, and The Bomb is his take on the Haymarketangry young spaceman jim munroe, trying to convincepeople to teach English on other planets.Affair, which, though it’s largely ignored, is an immensely importantevent in American history 8 . So it’s great that this book is back in print.It’s an interesting re-issue for a second reason, though. When I spokewith Adam Parfrey, he told me that the Apocalypse Culture books and theAnton LaVey books more or less kept him in business. He also told methat it’s extremely difficult for Feral House to break even and keep goingyear after year. These two things – coupled with the knowledge that TheBomb was written over a hundred years ago and is a pretty obscure book– suggest that The Bomb doesn’t sell all that well. That’s when I realizedthat books on Satanism and cooking babies are essentially keeping one ofthe most important novels in American literature in print. It’s a strangeand telling insight into the modern publishing world.Manic D and Feral House cover two ends of the independent bookspectrum. Manic D utilizes intelligence,humor, and determination, and theycome across as a literary equivalent toSuperchunk; Feral House outwardlyinstigates and offends, but has aninward sense of intelligence, and theycome across as a literary equivalent tothe Dwarves. And just like you can findone underground community withSuperchunk and the Dwarves peacefullycoexisting with each other and amongst a diverse mixture of other bands,you can look in that same underground community and find Manic D,Feral House, and a world of books in between.Hey, Man, I’ve Got This ZineThe next logical group of people to enter the world of independentbooks were the people who put out zines. These folks were already writingand already had a back catalog of work. They had developed theiraudience, they’d learned how to publish their work themselves, andthey’d learned how to get their stuff in stores. It just made sense for a fewof the more serious zinesters to take the next step and make books.Beyond all of this, though, zine writers had one more advantageover other writers. Coming out of a Do-It-Yourself community and carryingcertain DIY ethics with them, zine writers understood a few thingsabout corporate publishing. They understood that big media corporationswere made up of people who didn’t necessarily have any passion forbooks and who didn’t even necessarily like their jobs. These big mediacorporations and the people who worked for them didn’t have any magicalstamp of legitimacy. In fact, big corporate book publishers have gonethe same way of the big corporate music industry. The lowest commondenominator rules. Just as an amazing band like Fugazi couldn’t exist ina corporate music industry, but a joke band like Limp Bizkit can thrivethere, an amazing writer like Howard Zinn will always be passed over bya corporate book company to make room for the latest biography by TheRock 9 . Despite this fact, most writers view self-publishing as a failure,and they see small presses as secondary to big New York publishinghouses.Zine writers, on the other hand, know better. They come from acommunity where you can publish something yourself and people knowthat it’s probably a choice based on ethics – you don’t want RupertMurdoch to make money off your book, or you want to have completecontrol over your work, or you don’t want to be swallowed up by a facelesscorporation that won’t market or promote you, anyway – and notsomething you did because you couldn’t get a big publisher to publishyour work. So the zine scene took the next step.One of the earliest publishers to transform a zine into a book wasa guy who goes by the name of Harvey Wallbanger. Wallbanger workedfor over thirty years as a journalist in Chicago, where he “spent most ofhis time at Ricardos, an Italian restaurant and bar halfway between theChicago Sun-Times and Tribune Tower.” 10 After Ricardos closed,Wallbanger migrated down to New Orleans and formed Garrett CountyPress. His initial inspiration behind Garrett County Press was a smallzine called Temp Slave! Temp Slave! was the brain child of Jeff Kelly,who wrote the first issue of the zine during his last two weeks of a temporaryassignment at an insurance company. Initially, he did the zine tovent his frustrations as a temp worker, but the zine caught on. He continuedto write issues. Other people contributed their own stories abouttemping. The circulation grew from twenty-five readers to over threethousand. One of those readers was Harvey Wallbanger. Wallbangerbelieved that the zine was “great literature,” so he started Garrett CountyPress specifically to publish a collection of the best material from Temp