Auteur-Publishers - by Craig J Saper (Hardcover)

About the Book

An examination of the way in which small presses expanded authorship to include publishing practices as forms of avant-garde conceptual writing.

Book Synopsis

Auteur Publishers relocates authorial intention from the lone writer's vision to the publishers' arts and artisanal craft. Using the notion of auteurism, initially developed by François Truffaut to reframe authorship away from a script writer to a director's creative vision, this book looks at auteur-publishers working from the 1890s through to the present. These small independent book publishers acquired, designed and sometimes printed the books they published. Presses including William Morris with Way & Williams, Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Kathleen Tankersley Young's The Modern Editions Press and Dick Higgin's Something Else Press played crucial roles in modern art and literary movements. Motivated by their idiosyncratic literary and aesthetic values, they cultivated publishing practices and, in retrospect, provide a lineage for publishers today: presses like Information As Material; Punctum Books; Siglio; Sublunary and Roving Eye Press are a few examples of the hundreds of small presses continuing the small press tradition.

Review Quotes

Auteur-Publishers shows us that the editorial and production work of small press publishers is not peripheral to literature but constitutes authorship in its own right. By naming this practice "infrastructuralist poetics," Saper offers a compelling framework for understanding how design, typography, materiality, distribution and infrastructure have shaped avant-garde writing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the book's most illuminating aspects is its treatment of Dick Higgins, whose editorial and typographic experiments at Something Else Press exemplify the publisher's role in aesthetic production, not as a passive conduit for authorial expression but as an active force in shaping literary form.-- "Roger Rothman, Samuel H. Kress Professor of Art History, Bucknell University"