This September’s Brooklyn Rail featured a great interview with Adam Bellow, founder of The New Pamphleteer. What’s fascinating is that they founded the new pamphlet publishing venture with the aim of making it a going concern and searching for creative ways to not only distribute the work within the traditional publishing framework, but also to make it a viable business-i.e. get people to pay money for these things.

I’m not really concerned with making my own project a going concern, but it’s interesting to see this evolution.

From Bellow:

We all recognize that traditional publishing, like most traditional means of disseminating creative work, are no longer working–they’re too big to take risks and too tied up in decision-by-committee to be able to make good choices.

…

But with the Internet, I realized not only did you have an immense pool of talent to fish from, but you also had a low-cost delivery system. As long as you could print small quantities of a pamphlet and sell it cheaply through your website, you didn’t have to spend a lot of money on printing, shipping, and warehousing. You didn’t have to have a big marketing budget. All you had to have were certain conditions to be met in terms of an author with a certain visibility within a very well-defined niche market, and you could break even, in effect, and even make a little profit at low levels. And really what I’m describing is a re-invention of mid-list intellectual publishing.

I have to admit I haven’t been in this game nearly long enough to have seen the burgeoning of it, but I’m excited to see there’s a crew of people embracing this old medium. I also find it interesting that first to go for the project in a paying sense are a generally conservative crew, politically speaking, with a real male-focus (see Pamphlet #7, “Raising Wild Boys Into Men: A Modern Dad’s Survival Guide”).

More on all this later.

I was just turned on to this via a link from Luna Park, and it is remarkable.

The Modernist Journals Project, housed on the Brown University website, archives a number of long-defunct journals of the modernist era. The journals are all available in high-quality PDF scans, including the original art and design. Many are gorgeous and I can’t wait to dig through them.

And yes, it’s been ages since I’ve posted here, but the research is not dead, nor is New Acquisition-Dance Away Your Debt is going strong. I just posted some images from the FIGMENT event on the main page.

Dance Away Your Debt was part of FIGMENT 2008, a massive participatory arts festival in its second year, that takes place on New York’s Governor’s Island. We roved the island
Saturday, June 28, dancing and talking to hundreds of people.

Thousands of people came out to the Island and great fun and sun was had by all (except maybe the ferry dudes, who were very overwhelmed by all the people)Find out all about the whole thing by clicking here.

The Dance Parade took place 17 May 2008. Starting at 1pm between 27th and 28th Street on Broadway, winding its way downtown, ending in a huge DanceFest in Tompkins Square Park, we distributed a few hundred pamphlets to just about the entire DanceFest crowd to begin this year’s pamphleteering. Learn all about what happened at the Dance Parade here, or by reading the Brooklyn Rail article that mentioned the project.

Hear ye, hear ye! It is here, the newest issue: Dance Away Your Debt. Yes, that’s right, we’ve got debt and so do you, most likely. And we’ve got the perfect scheme to help you deal with it. Read the contents of the entire pamphlet in the panels below.

Special Thanks
We would like to give special thanks for help in producing this issue and the dance performances associated with it to April Greene, Hillary Kolos, Brian Patchett and Matthew Schaffer (more thanks to come).