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[I've been working for several months on a new series of .pdfs for the ubu.com site. The series is called /ubu ("slash ubu"), and includes the following titles in its first run:
Kevin Davies, Pause Button
Deanna Ferguson, The Relative Minor
Richard Foreman, Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!
Madeline Gins, What the President Will Say and Do!!
Jessica Grim, Vexed
Peter Manson, Adjunct: An Undigest
Michael Scharf, Vérité
Ron Sillman, 2197
Ron Sillman, Sunset Debris
Juliana Spahr, Response
Hannah Weiner, Little Books / Indians
Mac Wellman, The Lesser Magoo
Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm Foundry
Below is the general introduction to the series -- stop on by!]
Our hope, with the /ubu ("slash ubu") series is to complement and augment relatively "traditional" methods of publication by usurping one of the most common functions of independent presses -- bringing vital new literature to the attention of a wider public -- while moving into an area that most small press publishers are not able to approach: reprinting important works from the past decades that are too commercially unviable to do as print books.
What made this idea seem interesting now, as opposed to eight or so years ago when internet publishing began its colorful but checkered history (prematurely vaunted by poets as the sequel to the "mimeo revolution") is the realization that people are willing to read long, complex works of literature from the internet provided they can print them out.
By formatting these books with professional typesetting tools and publishing them as Adobe Acrobat files, not only is the amount of paper needed to print out a book lessened because web page items like menu bars and graphics are absent, but the letter-size (8.5 x 11) page is transformed into a visually pleasing "book" page, its seductive gutters, leading and tracking making Cinderellas out of the plain-Jane ream of photocopy paper.
Publishers of innovative poetries on the web have always had trouble formatting works in html (which, among other limitations, does not have tag for a tab), but the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat format is perfect for giving the designer all the features of advanced typesetting and graphic techniques that are stable and consistent across several computer platforms. A color printer lets you fully enjoy the cover pages of these files, most of them original designs by Goldsmith and including one of the artworks from the ubu archive.
And over the course of the many years these books will be online, they will no doubt be downloaded, printed out, and most importantly read by hundreds of readers who might not otherwise have access to poorly distributed, limited edition small press books. New works will enter circulation relatively quickly, and older works, after some hassling with a scanner and proofreading, will make their bids for being unjustifiably ignored classics.
All of the reprints in the /ubu series from books that were not already digitized (any title published before 1992 will be one of those) have been painstakingly reset, either after having been scanned and OCR’d, or being retyped into the computer. More recent titles are based on the files used to produce the original book, either for Word files or, in that rarest of instances, Quark files.
The original mandate for the series was to publish single-author titles of creative literature but as with any venture such as this there are stirrings that suggest new approaches in the future. For now, we encourage you to please steal our books -- you don't have to be bored Hollywood starlet or an Abbie Hoffman wannabe to walk out with bags full of priceless items here. Please check back regularly for new titles as they arrive, and thanks for stopping by.