Wolfgang Books Closing

We were saddened to hear that Wolfgang Books in Phoenixville, PA was going to close. It was a really neat bookstore that had an amazing selection of titles. And for Steven, at least, it had a mouthwatering selection of Beat books. We had a number of great readings there and the owners, Jason and Paul, were really supportive of our press, carrying more of our titles than any other bookstore. Wolfgang will be greatly missed. If you have never been there, we urge you to check it out before the doors close for good.

image of the store from their website:

Spring 2011 Season and AWP

Busy Busy Busy so far in 2011.

We are working on releasing the first three titles of the season. In no particular order we have:
1) Paulette Beete : Voice Lessons
2) erica lewis : in this separate existence
3) Lek Borja : Android

Also coming up is our 2011 poetry chapbook contest winner. The contest is still open, so please go to out contest page and check it out. We hope to have updates on the progress of all of these books as we go along, but only one of them is at the printer so far.



We just came back from three days spent at the AWP (The Association of Writers & Writing Program) Conference in Washington, DC. It was a whirlwind, but we got to meet heaps of amazing people and were introduced to some really neat presses. We also saw some of our authors there! We made miniature chapbooks with press information that were gobbled up pretty fast. At our next book fair I'm sure we'll be making little books like that again, but we'll include more imagery. We also had bookmarks and postcards available. Steve will write a blog posing on the highlights in a bit, but in the meantime, here are photos of our table.

thanks again to Jim Mancinelli (for hosting a series)

We want to again thank Jim Mancinelli for his incredible efforts in securing and hosting the poetry series in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia. Here are Joyce Meyers reading from her Plan B Press chapbook, Wild Mushrooms, in 2009 in the first location of the series and Daniel Collins at the new location reading from his chapbook of go & why. We know all too well that curating and hosting a poetry series anywhere is a labor of love. We appreciate Jim's love of the art.

Thanks Jim!

Commenting on two Plan B Press chapbooks

Without
Richard Erdmann
Plan B Press
Stay-at-Home Press
©2007

The Mutual Life
Relationships, Colonization and Other Accidents
A Manual of Reference
James Thomas Stevens
Plan B Press
©2006


I hesitate writing about previous chapbooks published by Plan B Press here since it has felt like a conflict of interest. However the thrust of my comments here have to do with the books published by one of our divisions : Stay At Home Press. Not that that matters terribly much except that I have a bit less to do with this division than our “running man” division of the Press. As a way of explaining ourselves; I digress:

The concept behind Stay–at-Home Press is the attempt to wed image with text in a more realizable way. And to do this in the “book” format, not relying on or hiding behind the non-conventions of the e-book. To produce something a person can hold : a book. This, of course, was only the most basic reason for developing this new division of the Press. One of the statements that our Press tries to adhere to came from El Lissitzky who in 1931 wrote: “The book must be the unified work of author and the designer. As long as this is not the case, splendid exteriors will constantly be produced for unimportant contents, and visa-versa.

Our first attempt was Richard Erdmann’s chapbook Without. This chapbook melded text with image and image with text on. It was more of an experiment than a finished project, in hindsight I say, and as often happens – the poet disappeared into this “day clothes”. It happens. What remains is the chapbook - what has been lost is the meaning or the attempted meaning of the work.

The project that SHOULD have been the first Stay-at-Home Press book was James Thomas Stevens’ 2006 chapbook The Mutual Life . Stevens took much of the language as well as the illustrations that exist in the chapbook and the recreated cover from the original 1901 Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York: Accidents, Emergencies, and Illnesses published BY The Mutual Life of New York. The chapbook itself was the second phase of the work; it was created in 2004 for a writers convention and then published by Plan B Press as the fullest expression of its potentiality (complete with use of same font headings, etc.) before landing in a more neutered state with his 2007 Salt Publishing full book entitled A Bridge Dead in the Water. (the version that exists in that book is devoid of illustrations and the font matches the rest of the book) Besides being the most true expression of the merging of image with text, it presented the most compelling argument for the creation of the Stay-at-Home Division to date. However, Without was not successful as the first effort.

There will surely be more to come from this division as manuscripts continue to come our way with stronger visual elements. At the same time, there are entire publishing firms that dwell only in the e-book universe which challenges the dimension and understanding of what “text” and “book” will mean in the 21st century. Since we intend to being around for a while, it's in our best interest to make the most stunning books that we can. That remains our overall goal.

AT the printers right now

are our two Fall releases :

Third Girl by Finley Bullard Evans

One or Two Feathers by Jo Taylor

new videos up!

M. Magnus and Christophe Casamassima from the Oct. 1, 2010 Poetry Lab and W F Lantry from the 9/3/10 reading!

Plan B Press on Youtube


check it out!


s - a - m

don't believe the hype

here's yet another article dealing with the pronouncements by some "pundits" that print media is dead - or about to be dead - and is misleading as the night is long. Technology Review

the mouse is about to roar

!!!

adding language to our website

Over the weekend we read two stories dealing with the demise of publishing and the crowning "achievement" of e-books, prompting us at Plan B Press to adding language to our website that we PUBLISH ON PAPER. We believe in print. We believe in the physical thing that is a book. We believe in community structures called libraries and in rooms of one's home that are often called the same thing. We believe that there is something to thousands of years of writing and storing those writings that a devise can not compete with. To those who think of a book as a "bound text", then we can see them becoming excited about a devise that shows only text.

To those, however, who see a book as something more than text, we appeal to their nature - their truer nature - for we also see the book as something more than text, and always will. It is not enough to "talk the talk". We do not use Lulu, for example, since their operation is Print-on-Demand. We would rather work with human beings known for centuries as PRINTERS. Ben Franklin, for instance. A Printer! Another Philadelphia based publisher, Robert Bell, should be as famous as the author of a pamphlet he published in 1776 called Common Sense. These are real and actual people. Today, we are supposed to praise machines like The Expresso Book Machine for what they can potentially do "for publishing".

We don't buy the concept; nor the machine. Unless books made by machines are also made FOR machines, there is a flaw in the celebration for the emperor's new clothes. He is naked, as are the arguments toward paper-free books and machine generated books and an entire future programmed out of our (human) hands.

We will have none of it, thank you very much. Others see things entirely differently and that is their right. But, we like what we do and plan (B) to continue doing it for a long long time.

days of the summer dog

Time moves like molasses
the kids are too much, trapped inside when the heat index soars toward 100.
we live - we read (manuscripts), we publish(books), we try to stay cool.


stevenallenmay