London artist-publishers old & new

In the suitable venue of the Bridewell Hall at St Bride's Printing Library on Wednesday, there was a party to celebrate the 25th birthday of the magnificent Book Works, who commission and publish books by artists (as well as selling publishing-related services to others). Commitment, focus and acumen must all play a part in their success, as well as (by the accounts of the artists involved) being great to work with. Now they are launching a Friends scheme: for £35 p.a. you don't get any free books, but launch invitations, newsletter and the warm glow of being a patron, which increasingly substitutes, in this busy life at least, for the white heat of personal creativity ... My cheque's in the post.
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Among the hundreds of cool party guests I met the editors of London's newest artist-periodical, Stone Canyon Nocturne (a.k.a. apparently 9-09), who had their inaugural launch party (they called it a wayzgoose) a week before. Using an Adana proofing press and a weird and wonderful collection of old types, and citing Bob Cobbing among its forebears, this is a broadsheet series whose wholemeal materiality is rather different from the subtle adaptation of trade values that enables Book Works publications to 'pass' in bookshops. Nonetheless, the first SCN is a short, funny text made by Clive Phillpot, the great curator-librarian and champion of artists' books, who happens also to be Book Works' Chair of Trustees.

The 9-09 title references Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's '60s mimeo magazine 0-9, but 'Stone Canyon Nocturne' is the title of a poem by Charles Wright, which seems aesthetically at odds with everything else about the venture. A moment's web truffle however reveals (in an article by Marjorie Perloff, quoting this poem) that Wright & Acconci were exact contemporaries at the University of Iowa -- so there you go, it's ironic I suppose ... I love the SCN mission statement anyway: "to conflate the fractured vernacular and dissemination systems of the twenty first century with the production processes of the nineteenth". Go guys! That's another cheque in the post then.

Please buy a Salt book

You know Salt of course -- a poetry press with an innovative approach to being 'small', i.e.: Burgeon! Salt has a shameless gusto for all the dirty bits of publishing i.e. marketing hype, e-commerce, ratings, bottom lines etc., alongside a genuine informed enthusiasm for experimental writing and determination to bring it to a wide audience. I have always had a few reservations about the enterprise, its scale and its commercial approach, but really huge admiration for both its mission and its apparent success. It has certainly published at least a couple of dozen books I love by superb poets. I wouldn't want to see it fold. However Salt is in need of support, due to the recession and the funding situation, and an appeal is being circulated widely to BUY A SALT BOOK NOW. http://www.saltpublishing.com/ Don't wait, they need to be able to show an upturn in sales pronto.

FWIW here are a few personal recommendations, most of which I own already:

Tim Atkins, Folklore (scary Malvern proses -- beautiful hardback)

Sean Bonney, Blade Pitch Control Unit (angry urban anarchist poems)

Andrea Brady, Vacation of a Lifetime (fierce political American difficult poems)

Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (omniscient, intelligent, infuriating critical / literary history)

Allen Fisher, Gravity, or, Leans (Fisher's is one of the really major oeuvres of our time)

Giles Goodland, Capital (impressive procedural collage of the last quarter of the 20th century)

Bill Griffiths, Mud Fort (enormously talented and learned writer, entirely without pretension or obscurity, towering over this reader's head ...)

Alan Halsey, Not Everything Remotely (possibly the fullest literary sensibility in the biz, extending the sense of 'literature' to the whole code of book; it comes out as some of the most original -- and, yes, obscure, work I know)

Peter Larkin, Terrain Seed Scarcity (profoundly philosophical, and beautiful, work, usually prose poems concerning trees ...)

Tony Lopez, False Memory (dunno, I only have other books of his but it'll be good value, trust me)

Geraldine Monk, Ghost and Other Sonnets (one of my favourite poets, and this is a beautiful white book ...)

Frances Presley, Paravane (Includes our collaboration 'Neither the One Nor the Other' ...)

Ron Silliman, Tjanting (Monolithic, absorbing prose)

The books I have tonight ordered are: Brian Kim Stefans's critical essays, and Robert Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues.