Granary Books
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| Industry | publishing |
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| Website | granarybooks |
Granary Books is an independent small press, directed by Steve Clay, who sees its mission as one "to produce, promote, document, and theorize new works exploring the intersection of word, image, and page." Located in New York City, its trade books are distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers and Small Press Distribution.
The poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg wrote of Granary Books: "In the true history of American poetry...Granary Books, as a press & resource, is exemplary of how poets & related artists in the post-World War Two era were able to establish shadow institutions that operated, nearly successfully, outside the frame of any & all self-proclaimed poetic mainstreams."
Granary Books moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota to New York City in late 1988.
Archivist, author, curator, and publisher Steve Clay says that he backed his way into publishing through his interest in "the ways in which writing was distributed on the margins, the kind of sociology of book distribution among small presses, and the poets who were producing work that was primarily published in small presses," along with his interest in booksellers such as Phoenix Book Shop, the Eighth Street Book Shop, Asphodel, Serendipity, Sand Dollar, Gotham and City Lights.
Its first publication (published as Origin Books in 1986) was Noah Webster to Wee Lorine Niedecker by Jonathan Williams. Clay says that publishing "became more self-conscious as a project" and "serious in its ambition" in 1991 with the publication of Nods, with text by John Cage and drawings by Barbara Farhner. Since then, many of Granary Books' publications have continued to be collaborations or pairings between poets/writers and visual artists.
Starting in the mid-nineties Granary Books began publishing books that contextualize scholarship in the history of small press publishing, poetry, and artists' books. These include Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books, Jerome Rothenberg and Steve Clay's A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing, Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips's A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and Betty Bright's No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960–1980.
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