The Last Days of the Mimeograph Kid
Written by John Erianne on October 29, 2008 – 11:46 am -In 1960’s, when those young boom generation poets and pundits were spewing their screed into waiting mimeo presses, I sincerely doubt any of them could have imagined the coming of the digital revolution and how it would change publishing. My generation — generation X has been lucky in a way. Gen Xers like myself are old enough to remember the small press the way it used to be and young enough to see the digital small press emerging in its embryonic stages. The first time I was exposed to a personal computer back in the 1980s when the first Apples and Ataris and Commodore 64s were rolling off the assembly lines you could almost feel the vibrations, the ripples in the universe. The 1980s and ’90s saw an explosion of new small press publications the likes of which even the mimeo revolution couldn’t touch in sheer numbers.
With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, what we think of as the small press has changed and expanded to include more and more non-traditional means of production. The spider traps have been set and those who haven’t embraced the new order are just flies for the spider to feed on.
Zines and literary journals that don’t have at least a marginal presence on the Internet are failing to find a significant audience. More and more publishers are either moving entirely to the Web or publishing as part of a Web/Print hybrid. Social Networking and email micro-blogging has replaced older, slower, less efficient means of communication and promotion.
The mainstream publishing media, though even slower to see the writing on the wall, is itself waking up to the fact that the traditional paradigm is dead, dead, dead. Just today, we learn that the Christian Science Monitor is shifting from a print operation to an online-only operation. This is very telling. If a long-standing, mainstream news magazine like CSM sees no future in traditional print media then it’s clear to me that those of us in the small press who’ve long embraced the new media have been right all along. There has been a definite paradigm shift and it doesn’t mean that print media has no role to play in the future — it simply means that print as a medium is no longer the wellspring from which all written art and information flows. I’d go so far as to offer that, if you are thinking about starting a print literary journal right now, you’d have to be an idiot not to at least have a grass-roots following for yourself and your prospective publication online before sinking money into a print-based project.
But that’s just my opinion (albeit one that others are starting to share). In any event, those last few hold-outs still clinging to that romantic vision of the “good old days” of rogue basement zine publishers are in danger of becoming irrelevant and extinct.
The small press is dead — long live the small press!
October 29th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
OK, I figured out what I’ve been doing wrong. I didn’t realize the random question was mandatory for commenting. Feel free to delete this and my ‘test’ comment.