Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In the 1940’s, two of my books, Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell, were rejected by American publishers. Winter of Artifice had been published in France, in English, and had been praised by Rebecca West, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Kay Boyle and Stuart Gilbert. Both books were considered uncommercial. I want writers to know where they stand in relation to such verdicts from commercial publishers, and to offer a solution which is still effective today. I am thinking of writers who are the equivalent of researchers in science, whose appeal does not elicit immediate gain.

     I did not accept the verdict and decided to print my own books. For seventy-five dollars I bought a second-hand press. It was foot powered like the old sewing machines, and one had to press the treadle very hard to develop sufficient power to turn the wheel.

     Frances Steloff, who owned the Gotham Book Mart in New York, loaned me one hundred dollars for the enterprise, and Thurema Sokol loaned me another hundred. I bought type for a hundred dollars, orange crates for shelves and paper remnants, which is like buying remnants of materials to make a dress. Seine of this paper was quite beautiful, left over from de luxe editions. A friend, Gonzalo More, helped me. He had a gift for designing books. I learned to set type, and he ran the machine. We learned printing from library books which gave rise to comical accidents. For example, the book said: “oil the rollers,” so we oiled the entire rollers including the rubber part, and wondered why we could not print for a week.

     James Cooney, of Phoenix magazine, gave us helpful technical advice. Our lack of technical knowledge of printed English also led to such comic errors as my own (now famous) word separation in Winter of Artifice: “LO - VE.” But more important than anything else, setting each letter by hand taught me economy of style. After living with a page for a whole day, I could detect the superfluous words. At the end of each line I thought: “Is this word, is this phrase absolutely necessary?

     It was hard work. Patient work, to typeset prose, to lock the tray, to carry the heavy lead tray to the machine, to run the machine itself, which had to be inked by hand. Setting the copper plates (for the illustrations) on inch-thick wood supports in order to print them. Printing copper plates meant inking each plate separately, cleaning it after one printing, and starting the process over again. It took me months to typeset Under a Glass Bell and Winter of Artifice. Then there were the printed pages to be placed between blotters and later cut, put together for the binder and gathered into signatures. Then the type had to be redistributed in the boxes.

     We had problems finding a bookbinder willing to take on such small editions and to accept the unconventional shape of the books.

     Frances Steloff agreed to distribute them and gave me an autograph party at the Gotham Book Mart. The completed books were beautiful and have now become collector’s items.

     The first printing of Winter of Artifice was three hundred copies, and one publisher I met at a party exclaimed: “I don’t know how you managed to become so well known with only three hundred books.”

     Under a Glass Bell was given to Edmund Wilson by Frances Steloff. He reviewed it favorably in The New Yorker, and immediately all the publishers were ready to reprint both books in commercial editions.

     We did not use the word underground then, but this tiny press and word of mouth enabled my writing to be discovered. The only handicap was that newspapers and magazines took no notice of books by small presses, and it was almost impossible to obtain a review. Edmund Wilson’s review was an exception. It launched me. I owe him that and am only sorry that his acceptance did not extend to the rest of my work.

     I had to reprint both books with a loan from Samuel Goldberg, the lawyer.

     Someone thought I should send the story of the press to the Reader’s Digest. The Digest’s response was that if I had to print the books myself, they must be bad. Many people still believe that, and for many years there was a suspicion that my difficulties with publishers indicated a doubtful quality in my work. A year before the publication of the Diary, a Harvard student wrote in The Harvard Advocate that the silence of critics and the indifference of commercial publishers must necessarily mean the work was flawed.

     A three-hundred-copy edition of Winter of Artifice, press, type and bookbinding cost four hundred dollars. The books sold for three dollars. I printed announcements and circularized friends and acquaintances. The entire edition of both books was sold out.

     But the physical work was so overwhelming that it interfered with my writing. This is the only reason I accepted the offer of a commercial publisher and surrendered the press. Otherwise I would have liked to continue with my own press, controlling both the content and design of the books.

     I regretted giving up the press, for with the commercial publishers my troubles began. Then, as today, they wanted quick and large returns. This gamble for quick returns has nothing whatever to do with the deeper needs of the public, nor can a publisher’s selection of a book be considered as representative of the people’s choice. The impetus starts with the belief of the publisher, who backs his choice with advertising disguised as literary judgement. Thus books are imposed on the public like any other commercial product. In my case the illogical attitude of publishers was clear. They took me on as a prestige writer, but a prestige writer does not rate publicity, and therefore sales were modest. Five thousand copies of commercially published Ladders to Fire was not enough.

     The universal quality in good writing which publishers claim to recognize is impossible to define. My books, which were not supposed to have this universal quality, were nevertheless bought and read by all kinds of people.

     Today, instead of feeling embittered by the opposition of publishers, I am happy they opposed me, for the press had given me independence and confidence. I felt in direct contact with my public, and it was enough to sustain me through the following years. My early dealings with commercial publishers ended in disaster. They were not satisfied with the immediate sales, and neither the publishers nor the bookstores were interested in long-range sales. But fortunately, I found Alan Swallow in Denver, Colorado, a self-made and independent publisher who had started with a press in his garage. He adopted what he called his “maverick writers.” He kept all my books in print, was content with simply earning a living, and our common struggles created a strong bond. He had the same problems with distribution and reviewing I had known, and we helped each other. He lived long, enough to see the beginning of my popularity, the success of the diaries, to see the books he kept alive taught in universities. I am writing his story in volume five of the diaries.

     What this story implies is that commercial publishers, being large corporate establishments, should sustain explorative and experimental writers, just as business sustains researchers, and not expect hugh immediate gains from them. They herald new attitudes, new consciousness, new evolutions in the taste and minds of people. They are the researchers who sustain the industry. Today my work is in harmony with the new values, the new search and state of mind of the young. This synchronicity is one nobody could have foreseen, except by remaining open minded to innovation and pioneering.