CCCBLab: The Future of the Book (2015)

“The literary and publishing ecosystem is facing a major transformation. Can we imagine a future beyond the traditional book? What’s going on with new readers, digital narratives and publishing options in a world that’s changing for good?”

With contributions by Jorge Carrión, Javier Celaya, Mariana Eguaras, Martín Gómez, Alessandro Ludovico, Carles Sora, and Jose Valenzuela Ruiz.

Publisher CCCB, Barcelona, 2015
Open access

HTML

Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris, Nick Thurston: Do or DIY (2012)

“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.”

Publisher Information as Material, York/UK, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution BY 2.5 Licence
ISBN 9781907468124
18 pages
via Electronic Poetry Center

Review: Christina Patterson (The Independent, 2012).

Publisher
WorldCat

Do or DIY (English, 2012)
Vydaj si sám (Slovak, trans. of excerpts, 2014)

Nicholas Thoburn: Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2014–) [EN, SC]

“No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.

Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.””

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Cultural Critique Books series
ISBN 9780816621965, 0816621969
xvi+372 pages

Interview with author: Ron Hanson (White Fungus, 2020).
Reviews: Filipe Carreira da Silva (Contemporary Political Theory, 2017), Anthony Iles (Mute, 2018), Samuel A. Moore (Cultural Studies, 2018), Ola Ståhl (Parallax, 2018), Nick Thurston (Comparative Critical Studies, 2019), Martin Paul Eve (American Literature, 2019), Terrine M. Friday (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019), Simone Murray (Left History, 2019).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (SC)
WorldCat (EN)

Anti-knjiga: Materijalni tekst i političko izdavaštvo (Serbo-Croatian, 2014, 1 MB, added on 2017-5-2)
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (English, 2016, HTML; PDF, updated on 2019-7-2)