Arch(d)ive: Intro; Ep. 1: ARC Season
One of my first tasks when I started as managing editor at the Poetry Center in the summer of 2022 was to clean out and reorganize a storage room up on the 18th floor of the concrete tower we and the CSU English Department call home. The room contains a desk, a landline phone, shelves, backup shipping supplies, and most of the books the press has produced from about 2014 to the present. It does not have windows.
At the time, it also contained boxes housing a few decades worth of old files. Contracts. Meeting minutes. Copyright applications. Notes made on manuscripts on their way to becoming books. Flyers from readings, author visits, and AWPs past. Receipts for flights taken, dinners eaten at restaurants that don’t exist anymore. Floppy disks. VHS tapes. Job postings. Matchbooks. Printed out emails. Lots of pre-electronic correspondence. And more binder clips than likely exist at any OfficeMax within a 50 mile radius of downtown Cleveland. “To be gone thru then thrown away”, the flap on one insisted.
It was summertime at the university and there weren’t many people around. I spent a week combing through everything in those dusty cardboard boxes, saving any materials that seemed legally or financially salient and recycling the hundred pounds of what remained, sneezing a lot and listening to podcasts. Then I organized the room. It was a good week.
As I combed, filing and recycling, I also started a third pile of stuff that looked cool or otherwise struck me as potentially interesting, to us and maybe to you, dear reader, for the way it might reflect something particular or peculiar about this press or its process or publishing in general, or harkened to bygone eras, preserving once-unknown names and faces that now glimmer with wide recognition. I also saved a lot of junk I just thought was funny.
What follows is a series we’re calling Arch(d)ive, with a subtitle to explain more about what it will actually consist of: artifacts and ephemera plucked from the dust. As time continues its measured procession, apathetic to the woes of us carbon-based lifeforms and our increasingly cloud-based ways of doing, we’ll pluck a rescued piece of treasure from these notional historic archives once in a while and share it here, with you. Just think: this could all have been trash.
Ep. 1: ARC Season
New book publicity email, pre-internet.
The first thing I was going to say was something like “now here’s something from a time when book publicity was done the right way” in my best Hank Hill voice. Or I was going to say “who needs email” but then realized that said more about my personal feelings than anything anyone would want to hear. I also realized that, barring the cut-up technique for mass-Xeroxing and mailing, book publicity is actually still done the exact same way. We make a book. To help it sell, we fling a bunch of free copies out into the world in the hope someone will enjoy it enough to say something about it on a platform that might make the book more visible, if not more compelling, to other potential readers. We slip in the coy blurb, we build up the resumé, we try to tell a good story. The price of the book hasn’t even kept up with inflation. Save for a few ancillary factors (the internet) everything is still the same.
Maybe saying so reflects how little I actually understand about the world, but I believe that the small press’ continuance to exist by insisting on its own existence and on that of its output, regardless of and precisely in spite of other factors that would make it otherwise, is what, well, enables it to continue existing. The main difference between small press publishing and publishing where sales figures are the metric for success is that we don’t take any gambles. We aren’t making bets. We start out believing a book should exist and then we make it. And then it does. That’s it.
But anyway, I’m not here to make a principled stand. It’s unclear up to what my principles even could stand. I saved this 30-year-old slice of copier paper from the shredder because I liked what it remembered, what it showed had changed and what had also remained—annoyingly, hilariously, hearteningly—the same. I happened to have researching reviewers and mailing ARCs for our new books on the brain. I also like the old letterhead and the tactile tedium that would have characterized this forgotten process. The font. The watermark. Thinking we should consider bringing back that triumphant flying unicorn. Or maybe get tattoos.
ARC mailing, August 2022.
—Zach Peckham, Managing Editor, CSU Poetry Center