I like the wilderness of that early stage of letterpress printing and book production, prior to typography’s standardizing influence and how guilds/companies corralled radical imperfect expressions…I’m also into waste and debris: collecting objects that appear in my day to day environment, inking them up in the bed of a press and printing off of them. And, I’m trying to think through ways to float books that are non-conceptual human experiences.
We think poets as such should be lousier business people on the whole, kind of like those politicians who mine the family fortune on a pipe dream (but not rich, not politicians). The least exciting presses are typically the ones who’ve sorted the market part out without breaking a sweat, and in most cases it takes a special effort or an accident to remain vital once you can afford an employee. It’s not just that we think you should be willing to lose money with your poetry press (which, in general, we do): we think your press should be a refusal of professionalization, at least if the work you publish rejects same (& if it doesn’t, we probably have very little interest).