History of the Press > Books About Books
Given the press’s attention to bookmaking, one could say that all Granary publications are books about books. But beginning with The Century of Artists' Books in 1995, Granary has committed to publishing books that explore what it means to put word and image into the book format in essay form. They are works of criticism and poetics, reference books, and documentations of exhibitions.
The essays in these collections aim to think anew about “the book” — not just the book as physical object, but the idea of the book, and not just the European tradition of the printed book that begins with Gutenberg, but the book as differently constructed by myriad cultures around the world. Jerome Rothenberg's The Book, Spiritual Instrument defines the book broadly and uses a wide historical lens, whereas others such as Judd D. and Renée Riese Hubert's The Cutting Edge of Reading focus more particularly on artists’ books, encouraging a critical discussion about this art form.
Among the Granary books that think specifically about printing and the form of its book is Johanna Drucker's The Word Made Flesh, which calls attention to the visual materiality of the text. Rather than including illustrations, as Marjorie Perloff points out in Radical Artifice, "it is the alphabet itself that is made flesh, the letter being seen in all of its visual potential." This Granary edition is a facsimile of the original Druckwerk letterpress edition (1989, handprinted by Drucker).
Part of Granary's commitment to publishing books about books involves its attention to a greater archive of literary production, especially in New York City. The exhibition for which A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 was the catalog documented certain poetry scenes: the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissances, the Beats, Black Mountain, the New York School, and Language Writing, with an emphasis on the small presses that defined each. Steve Clay mounted this exhibition with New York Public Library curator Rodney Phillips at the NYPL to great acclaim in 1998.
The exhibition focused on poetry scenes wherein poets “seize(d) the means of production” by becoming publishers themselves. In this catalog Clay and Phillips asserted the political importance of that decision, discussing what it means to work as both a poet and publisher, and underscoring the importance of access to cheaper reproduction technologies, such as mimeograph, ditto, and later Xerox. In order to fully capture the scope of the scene, Granary published a timeline on a page that folded out from the book — refusing to be hemmed in by the traditional proportions of the published codex. Granary went on to publish many of the writers featured in this exhibition.