Besides being a gallery owner, Picard is–among other things–a painter, collagist, writer, and bookbinder. By establishing an independent press as part of The Green Lantern (now a 501(c)3 organization), Picard reinforced her desire to work across mediums. The Green Lantern Press publishes limited edition original fiction with an emphasis on “underdressed intelligence.” According to the mission statement, these are works that “relate old dusty books to contemporary experience without a lot of noise and pointing”–works like Nicholas Sarno’s God Bless the Squirrel Cage, Moshe Zvi Marvit’s Urbesque, and A.E. Simn’s Lust and Cashmere. The GLP also publishes Phonebook, a handy guide to alternative art spaces in the U.S.

A unique aspect of the press is its “slow media” approach: Books are printed in small, collector’s editions of 1,500. The first 500 books in each print run feature silkscreened covers designed by local artists. The remaining “no frills” editions are sold at a lower price, allowing the books to reach a larger audience. This is just one way that Picard, and her collaborators at The Green Lantern, approach their publications and projects with imagination and resourcefulness. Picard believes that many Chicagoans have these qualities in spades. “I don’t think I could have started [in any other city],” she says. “There is such a strong DIY tradition here. I was talking to a friend of mine once about how Chicago is like the Wild West, where anyone can come and set up a little shanty, put a sign out, and sell bonds. People will always come to check it out. They buy the bonds and, generally speaking, the bonds are legit. Sometimes they’re fake, and then people stop going…. But how crazy that people are always willing to give you the benefit of the doubt!”

I corresponded with Picard about the origins of The Green Lantern, book publishing as compared to co-op milk production, and future projects.

Laura Pearson: I’m curious about how you started The Green Lantern. Did it begin as an individual project or a collaborative effort?

Caroline Picard: The Green Lantern began years ago in a series of conversations that ebbed and flowed between myself, Nick Sarno, Jason Bacasa, and a handful of others who happened to be in the same bar or coffee shop at the same time. Depending on who was involved in the conversation, it tended to have different emphases, For instance, I remember sitting on a stoop with Moshe [Zvi Marvit] in Washington D.C. He suggested we one day buy a warehouse building and open a bar with live music for our friend, Peter Speer, who runs an independent music label called Colonial Records (at the time an undeveloped idea without a name). Moshe suggested we could fund the press with the bar, offer live music, and hang art on the walls. I believe we had just come from a lecture given by Noam Chomsky, after which Moshe (age 20 at the time) and I (18) shook the man’s hand and informed him that we wanted to start a revolution. Chomsky gave us his card. I think, somehow, opening the bar was tied into the revolution idea, but I can’t be sure.

A few years later, after college, Nick and I were roommates in San Francisco and the idea resurfaced. This time we thought we’d start a literary journal. We did the research, felt daunted by the economic prospects and, in all honesty, didn’t have the money. The house we lived in caught on fire; I moved to Philadelphia, another roommate moved to Florida, and the other two–Nick and Kate–stayed in the city.

Obviously, things don’t turn out the way one expects, though I think this is generally for the better. We’d always been interested in independent venues and culture, and it was probably only a matter of time before one of us set up shop someplace. The literal beginning of The Green Lantern happened somewhat arbitrarily. I had lived in Chicago for a year, house-sitting. I decided I would stay in the city more permanently and needed to find a more permanent place to live. I looked at various apartments–dark garden places with sketchy landlords and high price tags. In the midst of this, I happened to walk past the Singer Sewing Machine Shop. Above it, there was a For Rent sign. I went to look at it and realized that it would be cheaper to run a space than go to grad school. It would also be more efficient to run an apartment gallery than to rent a single apartment and a studio (I was painting at the time). So I took the place. The next day I called Nick and asked him if he wanted to start the press with me. That was it.

LP: Were there other small publishers that you looked to for inspiration?

CP: I don’t know. Featherproof, certainly. McSweeney’s. Even the not-so-indie New Yorker magazine.

We got our business model from Slow Food organizations. I worked for a year at The Cowgirl Creamery, an artisan cheese company in California. For that year I helped make 350 cheeses a day (their production has gone way up since). The Slow Food movement has enabled mom-and-pop dairies to stay open. By becoming organic, they are able to control their price points, and thus thrive outside of the rubric of co-op milk production, which, from what I understand, is a real machine that streamlines production to such an extent as to squeeze out the little guys. I really liked this approach, because it showed how innovation and creative thinking could create new avenues of economy that then liberate the individual within the corporate system. Obviously, The Green Lantern has a long way to go before we get to such a point. I hope we can though.

LP: GLP publications are lovingly designed! I understand you’ve chosen different silkscreeners (Mat Daly, Alana Bailey) to design the covers. Any specific artists you’d like to work with in the future?

CP: This year we’re working with Nick Butcher from Sonnenzimmer. I don’t know who we’ll work with next year, but I like the idea that each year is a kind of screen-printer’s residency.

LP: What’s next for GLP?

CP: I’m working out the exhibition schedule for 2009/2010 this January. We will be publishing a few smaller books, in editions of 100–200, a long prose poem by Devin King that references The Odyssey, a translation of Rimbaud’s "A Season in Hell" by Nick Sarno (the proceeds of which will be donated to a children’s hospital in San Francisco), as well as a reprint of The North Georgia Gazette, a newspaper published in 1821 by a fleet of English sailors who were trapped in the Arctic for nine months. Our edition will include the original manuscript, as well as an excerpt from the Captain’s journal, some annotations kept by the transcriber, Lily Robert-Foley, and contemporary artworks by Jason Dunda, Daniel Anhorn, Rebecca Grady, Deb Sokolow, and Nick Butcher, who will be pressing a 7-inch record. This book–it’s probably our most ambitious project–is due for release in February, in an edition of 250. Nick Butcher is also going to be making the covers.

The next book we’re gearing up for is an original novel by Terri Griffith, due out this spring. Next fall, we’re going to release a book called The Concrete of Tight Places, by Justin Andrews, as well as a collection of short stories by Ashley Murray.

Which, I guess is to say, we’re going to be really busy. In the best way.

LP: In keeping with the final question of my last column, what are three words you’d use to describe your independent publishing experiences in Chicago?

CP: Wide open. Supportive.

Photo by Flickr user holisticgeek

The Queer Zine Archive was started in 2003 as a way of preserving and promoting queer DIY publishing, making queer zines available across time and space. From an initial 15 zines, the QZAP has continued to expand and recently celebrated its 5th birthday! Check out the website to find out about recent additions to the archive, ways to contribute, info about new projects (including the QZAP:Meta zine) and other ways to support this awesome archive.

Founders, Milo and Christopher were kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

Why did you decide to make an archive of queer zines? Was it always going to be a web-based archive?

QZAP
When Chris and I first met in 2001, we discovered that together we had upwards of 300 queer zines that we had collected out of our own interests or via trades. We began a discussion of how important we thought they were both personally, and also because of what they represented – a look at queers’ lives, stories, and histories that are seldom visible through mainstream media. We kicked around various ideas of how to best preserve and share these documents and decided that putting them online was the way to go. In the way we’ve built QZAP, these zines can transcend borders, and have become accessible to many more people than those who might have originally seen them.

Had you been involved in other zine projects before this? As a creator? Distributor?

QZAP
We’ve both been zinesters for many years. In the 1990s Chris was the creator of a zine called “Abrupt Lane Edge” and helped produce other arts publications. He also participated in several queer zine events over the years such as SPEW 3 in Toronto. I worked on a couple of zines previously, but really got my start in 1999 with a zine called “Mutate.” So far I’ve done 10 issues and additionally have made several one-off zines, a vegi cookzine called “SoyBoi: Queer Adventures in My Vegetarian Kitchen” and currently self-publish a zine called “Gendercide.” Additionally, most members of the loose QZAP collective are all zinesters in some form. When we have interns or volunteers, we ask them to make zines as a requirement to better understand the material that we’re working with.

I know the archive went offline for a while earlier this year because of technical complications. Can you tell me a bit about the technical basis of the project, both originally and what you’re using now?

QZAP
The Queer Zine Archive Project has been based as much as possible on free open-source software. We originally started out of our home on a Pentium 3 computer running OpenBSD. We quickly moved to a Linux-based server that was housed in a closet at a local cyber-cafe. When the cafe went out of business, we moved to a data center in Texas. After our crash, have relocated to a data center in Los Angeles.

Currently, the server is running on Debian Linux with Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP. Our website infrastructure is built on Joomla!, and the current archive is based on Gallery2.

In our workspace where we scan the zines, we run dual-boot Macintosh desktops (Mac OS X and Linux) and use Ubuntu, GIMP, XSANE for scanning, and have just started working with a closed-source library cataloging system to help us keep track of our titles as well as aid searching what we physically have in the collection.

Philosophically, we use F/OSS software because it is representative of what many zinesters have done over the years. It’s inexpensive, modifiable, and accessible to most people with a little know how.

Do you work most closely with zine creators or is there a network of distributors/collectors who contribute zines?

QZAP
A combination of the two. Many individuals will send us their zines to be included in the archive, and we have also received five large donations from people’s zine collections each containing fifty to one hundred zines each. While we started out with just 300 or so, we now have well over 1000 queer zines. The oldest document in our collection dated back to 1973 and is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The most recent came in the post last Thursday. We have zines from more than a dozen countries and in several languages.

Is the project still primarily archival or is there a distribution aspect of it now that people are adding newer zines?

QZAP
We see ourselves as an archive with an educational mission. Our purpose is to make queer zines available for research and personal enjoyment, but we don’t discount the fact that in some ways we might be seen as a digital distro. That’s not our intent, and we try to follow the US “Fair Use” doctrine as close as possible.

Have you notice a flow on effect of archive-type projects? Do you get lots of people contacting you asking advice?

QZAP
We’re fairly well connected to other zine libraries and archives around North America, but for the most part each one has it’s own way of structuring itself.We try to help folks as much as possible with their projects, but mostly we encounter librarians and archivists who work with more institutional archives (Public and academic libraries.) Part of the reason we use F/OSS software is so that others can see and use the tools we do to make their own projects, whether they’re archival in nature or not.

What are the future plans for QZAP?

QZAP
We’ll keep scanning zines, and are slowly working toward establishing a physical space where people can come and view or check out the zines and documents.

This interview cross-posted with permission from Dandizette.net

If you’ve ever worked at a tiny bookstore (narrow aisles, teetering piles of overstock, employees generally crashing into one another), perhaps you can relate. Maybe you too have taken refuge in this sense of immensity: all those words, all those worlds captured on all that paper.

When I worked at a little independent bookstore, my favorite task was opening boxes of new books and giving them a pre-shelving perusal, à la Léopold Sfax. I noticed that often the most interesting, most expansive stuff came in small boxes—promising new titles from small indie publishing houses, unadorned by stickers declaring “Now a Major Motion Picture!,” “Oprah’s Book Club,” or “Reading with Ripa.” Admittedly, some of the least interesting lit also arrived in small boxes, but more often than not, the independently published fiction and nonfiction we received and eagerly hand-sold (an effort led by one of my particularly book-savvy coworkers, Javier), crept onto the store’s bestseller list. Thus, while working at a neighborhood book retailer in this Amazon.com-ian age, I took refuge in this fact—that tiny presses can have immense impact.

While unpacking those boxes, I became especially intrigued by a press based in Hoboken, New Jersey, called Melville House Publishing. Their books were wide-ranging in subject matter and dazzlingly well-designed (Simplicity! Originality! French flaps!). I was not surprised to learn that the company had won several AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artist) Awards for book covers and interior design. When the bookstore hosted a Melville House writer, Benoit Duteurtre, who was on tour for his fascinating novel, The Little Girl and the Cigarette, I took some time to learn about the origins of this fast-rising press.

Melville House was founded by a couple who had no experience in the publishing field: Dennis Loy Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and creator of the book blog MobyLives, and Valerie Merians, a sculptor and photographer. At first, the two didn’t intend to form a publishing company; their sole goal was to release a book that responded to the events of September 11, and particularly the U.S. political climate at the time. In 2002, they published Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, and it attracted major media attention—CNN, NPR, Good Morning, America, etc. In a New York Times article from July 28, 2002, Merians said, “We thought [the book] would be very modest. We would hand-sell it just to area bookstores. You know, an out-of-the-back-of-the-car kind of thing.” But one book led to another, and after publishing a work of literary criticism by B.R. Myers, deciding to incorporate, finding a distributor, and figuring out things like printing costs and royalties, Melville House Publishing was born.

From the beginning, Johnson and Merians wanted to avoid becoming a niche publisher. Many small presses occupy a niche, they reasoned, but releasing books in a range of genres, subjects, and styles would enable them to stand out as a truly independent voice. In an interview with Bookslut, Johnson said, “We want to do what Random House does, but we want to do it right.” True to their mission, Melville House has assembled a catalog that is as wide as it is deep: French novels in translation (as in the aforementioned Duteurtre book and Justine Lévy’s Nothing Serious); classic and contemporary novellas (such as Adair’s The Death of the Author, plus a lot of other sharp, previously unpublished prose narratives); avant-garde fiction (from the likes of Stephen Dixon and Tao Lin); and leftist political reportage (i.e., Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Torture Taxi, by Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson). The latter political books made big waves by being ahead of the news. Who Killed Daniel Pearl? was the first source to reveal that US ally Pakistan was trading nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, and Torture Taxi was the first book to explore the CIA’s rendition program. In fact, the book was being printed at the precise moment President Bush made a public admission of the program’s existence.

Melville House continues its wave-making efforts, but now from a new location in Brooklyn, complete with offices and a sparkling new bookstore. (I’ve seen pictures, and it looks anything but claustrophobic.) Fortunately for the book industry and for readers everywhere, Johnson and Merians show no signs of slowing down. Last year, the press received the Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing, otherwise known as the Indie Publisher of the Year Award. At his acceptance speech, Johnson reflected, “Valerie and I entered this business with absolutely no background in it… But the fact is that once we had entered the business we quickly found a huge community, both in and out of publishing, who shared a passion for it and supported our approach to it.” He went on to say that in the aftermath of distributor fiascos and in the midst of financial crises, this community has persevered. “There are a lot of publishers out there right now who deserve an award for creativity by simply staying alive,” he said. Here’s hoping that the life of this fresh, fearless publishing company is very long indeed.