Episode 15: “What Brains Eat: On Small Press Distribution”

Join us for a raw one as we respond in the moment to some real-time small press world-historical events (the end of SPD). With minimum filtration and maximum range, it’s an occasion to revisit one of our all-time favorite recurring topics in particular depth: Distribution. To us, distribution—the way a book gets from publisher to reader—exemplifies the whole matrix of logistics, politics, and aesthetics coupled with all the material considerations, problems, and choices that define the work of small press publishing. And it’s not just “small” presses that are affected by basic distro realities. These under-examined process nuts and business bolts dictate which books sit on shelves or don’t, what shows up in an e-commerce storefront or doesn’t, what a reader will find in a search or won’t, what can be cataloged and can’t; in other words, what literature gets to exist.

Come for a post-mortem on the dissolution of the US’s largest distributor of small press books, stay for a primer on small press distribution (the practice), admin, and biz essentials; a reading of what this moment means for literature and literary culture in the United States, and the role of small presses in the formation of national literature; SPD, Ingram, the Big Five, Follett; old friends, new enemies, revenge buys, reliable joys; archives, ecologies, recycling, red weddings, surgery theaters, slaughters, prizes, sales, scales, readers, breaks, poems.

If you’ve ever read a small press book, we love you.