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Greetings,
Web Press Happa-no-Kofu!
I am happy to have you join us in our quest to conquer the world through
feats of gentle poetry and building blitzkrieg bridges of lightning-quick
international human understanding. *laugh*
Over here, at A
Small Garlic Press, we are just a tiny handful
of people, and historically not even the same people throughout, mind you,
quietly working at making or little stapled poetry books, nonetheless real
books with ISBNs, books available through Books in Print, as well as enlarging
our permanent online poetry installations, both the free pamphlets available
for downloads (Broadsides) as well as the magazine that is both a web and
printed serial. It is also an internet archive. Yes, we are proud of Agnieszka's
Dowry (AgD) ISSN1088-4300, celebrating its 4th birthday -- tomorrow!
Since our inception as a partnership between me and Kim Hodges, bringing
my chapbook "Utah Poems" to the Chicago 1995 Underground Poetry
Conference held at DePaul University, we have published 23 titles. We keep
them all in print and, yes, they are selling, slowly, but they are selling.
We also average about a 1000 distinct hosts visiting our site every week.
Today we are a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Corporation organized in Illinois, and
while we are still just a handful of part-time volunteers with day jobs
or family obligations, we are in a position to do so much more -- and to
do it in an obviously non-monied way.
Of course, this is nothing compared to commercial traffic on the web.
But -- what is the web? What is its most telling use? We think that the
web is the sum total of planetary community-making online. And, most tellingly,
the web is the massive use of things in the small, a massively coexisting
use, networked.
This means that the little presses such as yours and ours should make little
blips on the radar screen of individuals searching the world over for kindred
souls and kindred projects to take part in, in a world that is as accessible
in their towns and nearby cities as easily as it might be 16 time zones
away, where another worldscript altogether is the everyday idiom.
And it need not be a world driven just by money. Not that there is anything
wrong with money -- but the world would be a sad, twisted and ugly place
if everything of value reduced to material things and getting ahead through
selling things. I am keenly aware of the American enterprising tendencies
in this regard -- and of the great commercial spirit of the Far East.
Yet there is so much more in both places, always has been.
Perhaps that is where the true beauty of doing things for the satisfaction
of doing them well comes in. And yes, doing publishing, publishing on paper,
publishing on the web, publishing which costs at least one's effort, time,
and outlays on software and access, and the cost of producing and consuming
electricity.
We hope to continue to redeem these costs with beauty and poignancy, experience
and cross-cultural enrichment, the beauty of work well-done and well-conveyed.
I hope that you, the Reader, will support our two tiny press endeavors and
find much joy in each -- perhaps enough to start your own? Go ahead, make
our day!
Here's to the growing planetary network, the conquest of imaginations.
Marek Lugowski
A Small Garlic Press
Chicago * and internet
7 March 2000 (my mom's birthday!)
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