Ink & Paper Group, a Portland publisher comprised of Three Muses Press, Dame Rocket Press, and Bowler Hat Comics, will be holding a 50% off sale the entire month of March in honor of National Women’s History Month. All but one of Ink & Paper Group’s authors are women, so this sale is a way to honor and recognize those authors along with women everywhere.
The titles on sale are:
Bowler Hat Comics
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You may recall that local indie publishing house and bookstore Reading Frenzy launched a fundraising effort back in January: together with Kickstarter, they needed to raise $12,500 to reissue Crap Hound #4 and keep the Reading Frenzy boilers chugging along.
Not only did they reach it, they blew right by it. As of right now, they’ve raised $14,492 (and there are still 4 hours left to chuck a few bucks in the pot for your very own copy of the issue.)
Congratulations, Reading Frenzy! And thanks to all and any Reading Local Portland readers who contributed to that goal. We look forward to seeing Crap Hound when it comes out.
Thanks to Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus for pointing out this terrific deal from Tin House: The Tin House Writer’s Series.
For $39.95, you get four Tin House books: The Writer’s Notebook, The Story About the Story, The World Within, and The Journal of Jules Renard.
Seems like an awfully sweet idea for a Valentine’s Day gift…
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Local comics publisher Dark Horse is offering a full run of Season 8 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics to a lucky Twitterer. But Tweet fast–the contest’s only on today.
Full contest rules are here.
The last time I was in Microcosm Publishing’s zine store located in the ActivSpace building on SE Main, I spent more time keeping the lil’ guy at bay than I did actually browsing for new books. The reason being that the store was so small that no matter where I positioned myself, he was always within reach of one book rack or another. And since one of his favorite things to do is pull books off shelves, it became a constant battle between the two of us.
Since then Microcosm has relocated the store to a larger space within the same building, while also adding a “zine trike.” What is a zine trike? Exactly what it sounds like, a zine store mounted on a trike. While the trike is used as a display shelf on Portland’s many rainy days, any time the sun comes out you can spot the trike out and about finding new readers. Have I mentioned before how much I love Portland?
Microcosm’s zine store offers all the zines and books Microcosm publishes, such as the DIY guides and Powell’s bestsellers Make Your Place and the Zinester’s Guide to Portland, but it also carries thousands of self-published zines and small press titles. The store opened 18 months ago, right before the bottom dropped out of the economy, and has since managed to hold on through some rough patches. In fact they continue to buck the general malaise that hovers over the economy and the book industry specifically, and according to Microcosm’s Jessie Duke may be looking to expand the store front yet again.
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Hop on over to this post on Lit Drift and leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of Erased (Tin House Books) by Jim Krusoe. One random winner will be chosen and notified tomorrow (1/29) at 12:00pm. Here is the publishers description of Erased:
Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe’s trilogy about resurrection.
In Erased, Krusoe takes on a dead mother who mysteriously sends notes from the beyond to her grown son, Theodore, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business. “I need to see you,” the first card reads. Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second card that’s even more urgent, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. There, aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan’s Samaritans, an all-girl biker club, he searches through the realms of women’s clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing until he finds the answers he seeks.
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Congratulations to Portland’s newest publisher of the new weird and dark fantasy, Underland Press. Underland’s first published title, Last Days, was chosen Best Horror Novel of 2009 by the American Library Association. Underland’s second title, Pilo Family Circus, was also shortlisted for the prize.
Brian Evenson’s Last Days is “a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult,” starring Kline, a gumshoe who finds himself strong-armed into solving a murder mystery within the secret society. All that and an introduction by Peter Straub. You can download a free excerpt here.
Will Elliott’s Pilo Family Circus comes with an introduction by Katherine Dunn, and dips into the dark, chaotic world of a circus that straddles the border between hell and earth. If you’re not already afraid of clowns, you will be after reading this.
Peaches & Bats is a hand-bound poetry journal produced semiannually by Portland’s own Sam Lohmann. The latest issue includes work by Emily Kendal Frey, Sheila Murphy, Allison Cobb, Robert Kelly, and many others–all for the low, low price of five bucks. You can pick up Peaches & Bats issue 5 from the journal website or from Powell’s.
But what will that five bucks get you? Good question. We took a look at some of what you’ll find in the latest issue.
Click through to read more about the latest issue of Peaches & Bats.
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Several presses have established themselves in Portland, with a wide variety of genres represented by each. The newest on the block is Patient, Folded Hands, a small press started by Jaret Ferratusco the “quiet little proprietor of Corpse On Pumpkin Photography.” Jaret plans to release dark fiction that gets at the “underbelly of civilization,” stories that tell the truth in a way most publishers aren’t willing to. In doing so he hopes that Patient, Folded Hands will cultivate a readership that gravitates towards these stories, and appreciates that through this press they have a chance to be told. My guess is that he will be successful in these efforts, and I’m sure after seeing the determination and passion offered in the words below, you will feel the same.
1) For those of us who are uninitiated but nonetheless interested, what’s it take to get a press up an running?
So far as I can tell (I’m new at this, and new responsibilities are still unfolding), one simple thing and two not so simple things to get it started. Desire is the simple one, I suppose, if you can describe it so effortlessly. Desire to do it and wanting to make it work. The bigger ones are money and time, with more emphasis obviously on acquiring the financing but no little amount of time within which to pour yourself into. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, but money was always the biggest obstacle telling me no; this has definitely involved borrowing money and so I still haven’t beaten that. Even before I got somebody to help me out with it, the first step (for me), was finding a printer. I couldn’t have a company unless I could print a lot of books. So once I found one with prices I could afford and a bulk plan that made sense, that’s when I decided to do it, and looked into what it takes to get that book from the printer to the reader. And the internet is so far my best friend in this. Having websites, promoting, networking, gaining interest, making the books easily available through the web. Getting the book into stores will have to be something I’ll experience along the way. I’m hoping that sooner or later I can say exactly what it takes to do that part. I think maybe it might involve standing outside of a bookstore and asking repeatedly every couple of minutes with almost no change in vocal inflection until it becomes a matter of putting the books into their inventory just so I’ll leave. Only I think that might start Patient, Folded Hands off on the wrong foot.
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In today’s world of expanding digitalization and electronic media, book publishers are facing increasing threats to their way of life. Undoubtedly some of these publishers have and will fall by the wayside, unable to compete with the economics of free. One way that publishers can push back against this onslaught is to reinvigorate and innovate the craft of book making. There are certain books that when you first see them, and then hold them in your hands, you can sense the care and craftsmanship that went into their production. One of the reasons I was drawn to a book like The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross, is because the cover was simple yet elegant, the pages had a different texture when in your hands, and it gave you the innate feeling that the writing must somehow match the quality of the binding.
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts is a publisher that understands this concept. They seem to realize that trying to compete purely on economies of scale is inevitably a losing proposition. But how they can compete is by creating works of art. Books that can’t be replicated on an electronic reader. Books that you wan’t to have in your personal collection, because not only are the words in them beautiful, the book itself looks as though you picked it up on your latest First Thursday jaunt.
This does not mean to imply though that their titles are in anyway “expensive,” in fact they range in price from $5.00 to $16.95. So not only do you have something you could essentially frame and hang on your wall, you don’t have to pick up an extra shift at the local dive washing dishes to afford it.
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I started to write this post giving my take on Another Sky Press and their approach to publishing, but in the end I felt that the passion that emanates from the words on their website could do it far better than I. So here are a few gems, but do yourself a favor and please check out the rest on their site:
Our mission is to subvert the traditional publishing paradigm and do it our way.
Our mission is to put the artist and audience in direct connection with each other, removing the middlemen.
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Do you learn best by listening, watching, or doing? I think for most it’s certainly a combination of all three. If you happen to be a student interested in the Publishing industry, Portland State University and student run Ooligan Press will provide you with just such an opportunity.
Founded in 2001, Ooligan Press is part of the Department of English at PSU, and “is a general trade press rooted in the rich literary life of the Pacific Northwest that publishes books that honor the cultural and natural diversity of the region.” Students get to experience every aspect of the publishing process, and come out the other side well rounded candidates for the “country’s growing community of independent publishers.”
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