Good writing does not make much sense in a market economy. Literature — novels, playscripts, short stories, long and short poetry, essays and other quality non-fiction — ought, in my view, to foster a revolutionary spirit, progressive, positive, educative and empowering. And it must combat all censorship, for its very survival. Literature is conscience and unacknowledged legislation (in Shelley’s sense) in art. It should excoriate the purveyors and underwriters of tongue-slicing reaction.

But little of it will see the light of a new dawn without medium to large-scale Collective Publishing of a special sort.

Particularistic small presses in the tradition of Sylvia Beach Sylvia Beach — valuable as they still are — cannot throw off the Dead Hand of philistine entrepreneurial publishing in these times of bourgeois decline, when usurious Profits across our global pebble have assumed the lineaments of a family of Leviathans. I know, I used to belong to a particularly small one (Aberrant Genotype Press, 1996-whenever). There is no more frustrating experience outside of an American death camp.

I am not suggesting that we swear off all that is small or stop ’submitting’ to the ‘major publishers’: I do not subscribe to a ‘monkey see, monkey don’t’ philosophy (e.g., if Hitler says the earth is round we squeal that it’s flat). Nor do I suggest that writers and readers support the once-popular Soviet style of publishing (though genuine, free soviets might be a capital idea generally). My minuscule contribution to the debate I am hoping to begin, and one no doubt not original to me, is that we all club together and start up a special sort of Library to publish and then lend out copies of the work of new and old writers who have not been smiled upon by Big Money like Joanne Rowling and her ilk. The Library would be funded by its members and might charge a small annual fee like the circulating libraries of yore, but would be run by an ill-paid roster on a not-for-profit basis (apart from its vast horde of rare books appreciating nicely in the basement). It would not depend on untrustworthy bourgeois governments. Its books would also include those published by independent small presses and impecunious Doctors of Dialectical Philosophy. It would also make available members’ ‘e-books’ online, and perhaps lend or hire out e-book readers (i.e., the machines) where necessary. Other than that, though, it would eschew ‘distribution’ as speculative folly.

Above all, it would have nothing to do with that instrument of social control and censorship, the Writers Centre. The point is not to hold ‘workshops’ but to cultivate a small proportion of humanity’s ‘external memory’ (Merlin Donald). Lending instead of selling, the ‘library style’ as I think a famous Canadian librarian once called it, would in at least a small way help to subvert the clutches of the Capitalist.

— Harry Poofter.