John McMillian: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, alternative media, counterculture, journalism, mass media, new left, publishing
How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled?
In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade’s end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the ’60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left’s highly democratic “movement culture.”
Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0195319923, 9780195319927
304 pages
review (Dan Berger, International Journal of Communication)
review (Kirkus Reviews)
review (Russ Smith, The Wall Street Journal)
interview with the author (video, 48 min)
34 Multimedia Magazine (2006–) [Belarusian, English]
Filed under magazine | Tags: · activism, art, belarus, contemporary art, hip hop, migration, music, publishing, sex, street art
34mag.net is an online Belarusian independent youth publication, ran from Minsk since 2006. Aside from its online articles it publishes theme-based issues on CD-ROM of which ISO images can be also downloaded. The issues cover a range of topics including Belarusian art and culture, migration, sex, rap news, street culture, or zine culture. Selected articles are translated to English.
The magazine received several awards including Free Media Pioneer Award at the International Press Institute’s 61st World Congress in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago (2012), Free Media Pioneer Award of the International Press Institute (2012), and Gerd Bucerius Prize Award in the category of Free Press of Eastern Europe (2007).
CD-ROM ISO / HTML (Belarusian)
HTML (English)
Andrew Piper: Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, literature, publishing, romanticism, translation
At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226669726, 9780226669724
319 pages