New Acquisition is thrilled to announce that we were given a second Puffin Foundation grant to help support the project. With this grant we’ll be launching a new pamphlet and performance in the fall throughout the city.

Many more details to come, so stay tuned.

We at New Acquisition have got lots of ideas about what we’d like to use as themes for future pamphlets, but we would love to hear your ideas.

What topic do you think we should do for the next issue? (tell us in the comment box below)

A lot of people have been writing to point out that Rev. Billy over at the Church of Stop Shopping stole my idea . But I have to say, if he wants to dance his debt away and help the people do the same, more power to him! I think it sounds like a fine thing to do on Black Friday and if I were going to be around I’d probably join him in the dancing.

Happy moves, one and all.

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.