By Steven Huang
I didn’t really understand what small presses were before this project. Now it feels as if I’ve been made privy to a different world: something which seems to stand in opposition to fixedness in literature.
The exciting and important thing about this work is that it is a resource. This is something that can be used, and as such, needs to be accessible and have this ability to foster togetherness or community.
Working on this project has exposed me to a wealth of different literatures and ways of thinking: the problem is, recording all this variance, and coming up with a coherent way of not only giving meaning to the way we structure this archiving but also trying to maintain a kind of sensitivity to the identity of the individual presses.
As for “archiving the unarchivable,” here’s something to be said about the ‘boxing’ nature of the work we are doing. We’re kind of in the business of boxing things into neat categories (genre tags, and other descriptors), things which by nature of existing defy definition? There is a sense that the more you try to pin down and define something, the further you get from its actual meaning. There are no such things as fixed or static meanings; things like tags really obscure more than they reveal (although that’s really not a complaint because in our world this kind of ‘boxing’ is necessary, or something like that, there’s no way to do a project like this without an attempt to define or categorize). Although we’re really not just doing this ‘boxing’–we’re also putting it into practice, like, actualizing it in a way (through buying books, making a class, etc.)?
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