In 1974 a handful of writers—including Jonathan Baumbach, Steve Katz, and Ronald Sukenick—started meeting in Baumbach’s Brooklyn apartment. They were frustrated by the increasing McDonaldization of New York publishing, by how innovative writing practices were being marginalized to a greater and greater extent. Their solution: launch what then was a publishing experiment (and what now has become one of the primary paradigms among the small-press world): a collective run by and for authors. The idea was for that handful to contribute their own money to construct a small alternative publishing ecology that would last, at most, two or three years.
