James Davies'
Plants and Carol Watts'
Occasionals have now been published and met with a gratifying response, including already a couple of online reviews of James' book and many viewings of the
launch videos on YouTube. There have been a couple of glitches sending copies out directly from the printers to Reality Street's currently over 70 Supporters, but I hope they have mostly been resolved by now.
Right now, I'm working on production of Leopold Haas' The Raft, in some ways one of the strangest books Reality Street has taken on. It's essentially a performance text, although I can't imagine what form a performance would take: a multi-layered dialogue between 12 characters, occupants of the doomed raft of the Medusa (see detail from Géricault's famous painting above), composed according to a rigorous method inspired by 12-tone serialism. Appropriately, Reality Street author and music critic Paul Griffiths has just provided a back-cover endorsement. The language is comic, brutal, exquisite in its (sometimes almost Shakespearean!) invention.
It's one of the more challenging typesetting jobs I've had, in that the text is set across a wide measure, with 12 potential tab-stops, and placement has to be pretty exact. Originally I planned to publish it as a landscape book, but our new printers, Lightning Source, can't do landscape, so it's been reconceived as 235x191mm (upright) - the same size and shape as Shearsman's The Ground Aslant anthology. It will come out at a bit over 100 pages in this format.More news of this anon, including any more information I can glean about the reclusive author.I'm doing this in between typesetting Richard Makin's Dwelling, which Richard is painstakingly revising and feeding revised chapters to me weekly. That's a much more straightforward setting job, but a considerably longer book. About 400 pages. I hope it will be out late summer, with The Raft and Johan de Wit's Gero Nimo (my next job!) to follow in the autumn.
This blog is written by Ken Edwards, co-founder and editor/publisher of Reality Street, and it's mainly about the press. Ken's personal blog can now be found at http://www.kenedwardsonline.co.uk
