Small Press Review

Abstract

Bennett Cerf said it, and he was in a position to know. He and his associates made the Modern Library a success, offering good writing and the opportunity for self-education to a generation. He got rich doing it. He published Ulysses in America, suing the United States government in 1933 to lift a ban on one of the most important small-press books in modern publishing history. There's no need to rehearse the heroic story of the publication of Ulysses by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co. and the pressmen and machines of M. Daranti?re of Dijon. But it's worth remarking that the small press was resorted to after the efforts of Ezra Pound and others, to secure large-press publication, had failed. In a nutshell, that is the story of the small press, as I understand it. It is the vanguard of publishing art?run by lovers of paper and type fonts, and sometimes language, as well as by writers-manqu??and it is the last resort for those who cannot publish elsewhere. The two func tions are honorable, historically valid (think of Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau) and publicly useful. No one will be surprised to think of small presses this way, though I've said it coldly, and most utterances about the small presses are declaimed by cultural cheerleaders; one usually is reluctant to speak coldly of these presses, just as one is reluctant to criticize health foods, talkative children, and petitions that include the word justice. But it's important, I think, at the outset of this meditation on recent fiction from the small presses, that the two factors be linked. The small press is an outpost in the darkness and is needed by literary pioneers, and it sometimes is necessary to a readership. A lot of federal money, and sometimes separate state money, as well as private-foundation money, is spent by the small presses to publish poetry and fiction. Government exists to put milk in babies' mouths, medicine in the bodies of the sick,