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WELCOME
TO ISSUE 8 . P R I N T .
FEATURING.
ALEXANDER
BOOTH
BILLY CANCEL
BRANDY
RYAN
HENRY FINCH
JEFF J SARGENT
JOEL
CHACE
KARIN
SEIDNER
LAURIE PRICE
NIKKI
REIMER
PETER
GRIECO
ROB MCLENNAN
RUSSELL
JAFFE
THEODORE
WOROZBYT
“The
world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else
that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish;
civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new
races build on others. But in the world of books are volumes that have
seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still
as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of
the hearts of men centuries dead” - Clarence
Day, The World of Books (1938)
It's
not like it's entirely new. In
the 1920s there was also a scare, and likely before. Mechanical
reproduction, it seemed, would herald the end of the book, and the
response (or at least one of them): editions.
Books conscious of being books turned up in the plethora; objects;
small, gilded runs, not only from the expected Black
Sun or Hogarth, but a precious Walt Whitman from Random House (1929),
an elaborate Willa Cather from
Knopf (1923). Perhaps the most absorbing cumulation of the twentieth
century's book-dimishing anxiety was Marcel Broothaers's Pense-Bête of 1964, a poem
overlooked in literary form and hailed once sculpted in plaster.
Yet, even. In
light of
today's growing uneasiness over the vanishing of the book, or, to
update
it, print, these historic qualms can seem quaint. Would
Clarence Day have retracted his eerie dictum if he'd
done a simple google search, on a rainy afternoon,
in an internet café, consisting of the
three words print is dead? More
likely, his sentiment would have taken on a more lengthy,
desperate
form: the argument has gone so far beyond your standard Gutenberg
Elegies or Books in Our Digital Age that it has pushed into such
cerebral New York Times frissons as the Book as Fetish Object, the
Decline of the Footnote, the Extinction of Marginalia. Issue
8 of Dear Sir, is dedicated
to print,
and counterintuitively. The works presented in this issue either
started out hardcopy
or writers were asked to mail in a hardcopy form of a
digitally accepted work; the piece, after arriving in the post, then became
re-digitized in transfer to this particular here. Why go
through all the bother? What interested us for
this issue was the bother. How the tangible work
becomes assimilated to a(n in)tangible era,
showcased in 0s and
ones, and the labour, increasingly more invisible, behind it. While some writers chose a literal
embodiment for their poems—such as glass (Sargent), pen-in-hand
(Booth), or another's book (Reimer)—others leaned towards a more
abstract representation, printing out their pieces directly from Word,
letting the
materiality show
its face in a specific font (Seidner), a small ink smear at the top of
each
page (mclennan), one tracked change (Price).
Beneath those works mailed to Dear Sir,
in Berlin: a proof of
postage. Although the world of books is no longer necessarily young,
fresh, no longer necessarily the weathered survivors that Day painted
them to be, the world of words still is. And though I personally will likely never read a novel on a Kindle, the fact
remains, at least where poetry is concerned: writing is coltishly
returning to the
unbound, as the book painfully loosens its monopoly on it. It's the
change I guess. The process of being sent from one age to
another, from pages to screens, from North America to
Berlin,
that
kind of vulnerability of the time between having been sent and having
arrived, that this issue hopes to, at least momentarily, hold; show.
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