Auteur-Publishers: Small Press Practices as Avant-Garde Writing

Auteur Publishers relocates authorial intention from the lone writer's vision to the publishers' arts and artisanal craft. Using the notion of auteurism, initially developed by François Truffaut to reframe authorship away from a script writer to a director's creative vision, this book looks at auteur-publishers working from the 1890s through to the present. These small independent book publishers acquired, designed and sometimes printed the books they published. Presses including William Morris with Way & Williams, Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Kathleen Tankersley Young's The Modern Editions Press and Dick Higgin's Something Else Press played crucial roles in modern art and literary movements. Motivated by their idiosyncratic literary and aesthetic values, they cultivated publishing practices and, in retrospect, provide a lineage for publishers today: presses like Information As Material; Punctum Books; Siglio; Sublunary and Roving Eye Press are a few examples of the hundreds of small presses continuing the small press tradition.

Craig Saper is Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He has published widely on modernist and experimental arts and is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown (2016), Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto (2012), Networked Art (2001) and Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention (1997).Saper has also curated exhibits on experimental forms of publishing, and he re-started a small press as a form of conceptual publishing, Roving Eye Press.