Do or DIY (2012–) [EN, ES, SK]

“Mixing anecdote and advocacy, the first section of this two-part polemical essay offers an introduction to the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing—as undertaken by some of the most revered writers in the modern Western literary canon, from Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) to Irma Rombauer (1882–1941) via Virginia Woolf (1871–1922) and Derek Walcott (1930–).

Having looked back at some of the monuments of literary history, the second section takes its charge from the epigraph, ‘Institutions cannot prevent what they cannot imagine’, and looks forward to the political praxis of the 21st-century’s digital future.

The essay was first commissioned by the Foreword for the London Art Book Fair 2011 catalogue.”

by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris, Nick Thurston
Publisher Information as Material, York/UK, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution BY 2.5 Licence
ISBN 9781907468124
18 pages
via Electronic Poetry Center

Expanded second edition
by Riccardo Boglione, Kate Briggs, Craig Dworkin, Annette Gilbert, Marianne Groulez, Simon Morris, Carlos Soto Román, Nick Thurston
Publisher Information as Material, 2015
Creative Commons Attribution BY 3.0 Licence
24 pages

Review: Christina Patterson (The Independent, 2012).

Exhibition (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2012)
Exhibition (Birkbeck, London, 2015)
Interview (Afterall, 2012)
Publisher
WorldCat

Do or DIY (English, 2012)
Do or DIY (Spanish, trans. Carlos Soto-Roman, 2013, added on 2025-9-18)
Vydaj si sám (Slovak, trans. Kristína Pavlovičová, partial trans., 2014)
Do or DIY (2nd ed., English, 2015, added on 2025-9-18)