Industry | publishing |
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Website | granarybooks |
Granary Books is an independent small press and rare books and archives dealer based in New York City. Owned and directed by Steve Clay, Granary has published hundreds of books that "produce, promote, document, and theorize new works exploring the intersection of word, image, and page." [1] As a rare books and archives dealer, Granary Books also assists in the placement and preservation of authors' and artists' archives. In addition to these activities, Granary Books administers projects such as "From a Secret Location," a digital repository of materials related to the small press and mimeograph revolutions from the 1960s to 1980s. [2] Its trade books are distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers and Small Press Distribution.
The poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg writes of Granary Books: "In the true history of American poetry...Granary Books, as a press & resource, is exemplary of how poets & related artists in the post-World War Two era were able to establish shadow institutions that operated, nearly successfully, outside the frame of any & all self-proclaimed poetic mainstreams." [3] Kyle Schlesinger writes, "It is difficult to imagine that any syllabus (or practitioner’s bookshelf for that matter) about the artists’ book could be complete without at least one title from Granary" [4]
Granary Books' works have been the subject of over 10 exhibitions, including most recently Participating Witness: The Poetics of Granary Books at Poets House, New York City, in 2020. [5]
Granary Books began in 1985 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as Origin Books—the name under which Clay published his first project, Noah Webster to Wee Lorine Niedecker by Jonathan Williams. [6] A series of other small poem-cards and broadsides followed during the 1980s, as well as books by Jane Wodening, Jonathan Williams, R. B. Kitaj, and Paul Metcalf. [7] By 1988, Granary Books moved to Manhattan on 636 Broadway, where Steve Clay and David Abel ran a gallery and bookstore on the tenth floor. [7]
Clay says that publishing "became more self-conscious as a project" and "serious in its ambition" in 1991 with the publication of Nods, with text by John Cage and drawings by Barbara Farhner. [8] In this spirit, Many of Granary Books' limited-edition publications continue to be collaborations or pairings between poets/writers and visual artists. Many also contain unique elements, such as handpainting; Susan Bee describes this creative process for her book, Talespin (Granary Books, 1995). [9] These limited-edition publications are held in special collections and archives internationally, and explore the relationship between "image and the word and tactile comprehension," in collaboration with artists, poets, bookbinders, printers, and designers. [10]
The author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic Johanna Drucker described Granary Books' publishing aesthetic as "late twentieth-century fine press meets literary experiment and innovative arts." [11] Steve Clay says that he began publishing as a result of his interest in "the ways in which writing was distributed on the margins, the kind of sociology of book distribution among small presses, and the poets who were producing work that was primarily published in small presses," along with his interest in booksellers such as Phoenix Book Shop, the Eighth Street Book Shop, Asphodel, Serendipity, Sand Dollar, Gotham and City Lights. [8]
Starting in the mid-nineties Granary Books began publishing books that contextualize scholarship in the history of small press publishing, poetry, and artists' books. The first Granary Books trade edition was Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books, followed by Jerome Rothenberg and David M. Guss's The Book, Spiritual Instrument. Other trade books include Jerome Rothenberg and Steve Clay's A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing, Betty Bright's No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960–1980, and Stefan Klima's Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature. [1] Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips's A Secret Location on the Lower East Side resulted from an exhibition at The New York Public Library by the same name, and is considered "not only significant in its refusal to lose the evidence of the period it covers (1960-80), but for showing that entering the evidence into the public record is a means of shaping the discourse about the critical context of the period." [12]
Granary Books also published out-of-print works for wider distribution, such as Joe Brainard's I Remember , originally published by Angel Hair Books, as well as trade poetry books by poets including Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Larry Fagin, and numerous others.
As of August 2020, Granary Books has a checklist with over 177 publications that includes limited editions and trade editions of poetry, artists' books, and books about books.
In addition to publishing, Granary Books is involved in the preservation and sale of archives, manuscripts, and rare books by important contemporary writers and artists from the 1960s forward.
Some of the archives that Granary Books has placed include: Charles Bernstein, Burning Deck Press, Ira Cohen (The Bardo Matrix, Gnaoua, and The Great Society featuring Angus MacLise, Jack Smith, and Piero Heliczer), Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Ray DiPalma, Richard Foreman (Ontological-Hysteric Theater), Kathleen Fraser, Susan Howe, Susan King, Joanne Kyger, Ann Lauterbach, Bernadette Mayer, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church (literary organization archive), M/E/A/N/I/N/G (art journal archive), Patty [Oldenberg] Mucha (New York City Artworld in the Sixties & Seventies), Ron Padgett, Carolee Schneemann, Leslie Scalapino, Patti Smith (featured in the Janet Hamill Archive), Lewis Warsh, Marjorie Welish, Jane [Brakhage] Wodening, and Woodland Pattern Book Center (literary organization archive).
Granary Books has placed archives in: The Library of Congress; Beinecke Library at Yale University; Fales Library at New York University, Mandeville Special Collections Library at University of California, San Diego; Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley; New York Public Library, John Hay Library at Brown University; and Green Library at Stanford University, among others. [13]
In 2013, Columbia University Libraries/Information Services’ Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired the archive of Granary Books which includes over thirty years of materials which reflects the complete history of the press. [14] [15]
Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger curated a series of talks from 2009 to 2012 about the art of the book featuring poets, scholars, artists, and publishers. The talks were recorded before a small audience at Granary Books and made available on PennSound. Speakers included Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts, Jerome Rothenberg, Cecilia Vicuña, Jen Bervin, Buzz Spector, Richard Minsky, Kathleen Walkup, Johanna Drucker, Keith Smith, Richard Minsky, and Emily McVarish. [16] The series is now collected in a book, jointly published by Granary Books and Cuneiform Press.
In 2016, Granary Books launched an expanded digital version of the book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. [17] The site contains alphabetized entries for small presses and journals of the mimeo revolution, as well as guest essays by their founders and contributors.
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing.
Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry.
Artists' books are works of art that utilize the form of the book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects.
Bernadette Mayer is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School.
Ted Berrigan was an American poet.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He is also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.
From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990 is a poetry anthology published in 1994. It was edited by American poet and publisher Douglas Messerli – under his own imprint Sun & Moon Press – and includes poets from both the U.S. and Canada.
William Craig Berkson was an American poet, critic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his early twenties on.
Michael Rothenberg is an American poet, songwriter, editor, artist, and environmentalist. Born in Miami Beach, Florida, Rothenberg received his Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He moved to California in 1976, where he began "Shelldance Orchid Gardens", an orchid and bromeliad nursery. In 2016, Rothenberg moved to Tallahassee, Florida where he is Florida State University Libraries Poet in Residence.
Kenward Gray Elmslie was an American author, performer, editor and publisher associated with the New York School of poetry.
Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.
Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.
Joe Brainard was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes. In particular, Brainard broke new ground in using comics as a poetic medium in his collaborations with other New York School poets. He is best known for his memoir I Remember, of which Paul Auster said: "It is ... one of the few totally original books I have ever read."
La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France is a collaborative artists' book by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk. The book features a poem by Cendrars about a journey through Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express in 1905, during the first Russian Revolution, interlaced with an almost-abstract pochoir print by Delaunay-Terk. The work, published in 1913, is considered a milestone in the evolution of artist's books as well as modernist poetry and abstract art.
Larry Fagin was an American poet, editor, publisher, and teacher, and a member of the New York School.
Susan Bee is an American painter, editor, and book artist, who lives in New York City. In 2015, "Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s" were exhibited at Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn. She had one solo show at Accola Griefen Gallery (2013) and nine solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. She has a B.A. from Barnard College and a M.A. in Art from Hunter College. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism and Writing program. Bee has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Pratt Institute. In 2014, Susan Bee was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
The Mimeo Revolution of the 1960s and 70s was an active period of small-scale, non-commercial, literary publishing facilitated by the accessibility of the mimeograph. It is distinguished from the traditional private press by its emphasis on quick, cheap production.
Emily McVarish is an American writer, designer, book artist and associate professor at California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco and her work primarily takes the form of books. Clifton Meador says "she uses the form of the book to explore things that cannot be explored any other way".