Nick Ripatrazone Considers the Practice of Self-Publishing

Starting with William Carlos Williams, Nick Ripatrazone's latest article at Literary Hub is a meditation on self-publishing, in particular, its ties to the poetry world. "It was 1909, a year before William Carlos Williams would open his pediatric practice in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey," Ripatrazone writes. "A friend of his father owned a local print shop, so Williams paid for Poems, his 22-page chapbook, to be produced." Picking up from there: 

Epigraphs from Shakespeare and Keats led the earnest little book. Williams brought a dozen copies to a local stationary store to be sold.

“Sold” might be a generous word: Williams only sold four copies, and made one single dollar in profit. He gave the unsold books to his family. The printer stashed away his own remaining copies, which “were inadvertently burned after they had reposed ten years or more on a rafter under the eaves of [the printer’s] old chicken coop.”

Williams wasn’t alone: there is a tradition of poets publishing their own books. Williams thought his early poems were “bad Keats, nothing else—oh well, bad Whitman too.” Walt Whitman was an appropriate influence; in 1855, he paid a print shop on Fulton Street in Brooklyn to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass. A newspaper veteran familiar with the world of press and print, Whitman took a hands-on approach. As Ed Folsom notes, Whitman “designed the binding, chose the typeface, designed the pages, worked with an engraver on the frontispiece, and even set some of the type himself.” Whitman said “I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing… the way books are made—that always excites my curiosity: the way books are written—that only attracts me once in a great while.”

His portrait first appeared opposite the title page, although in some later additions it would appear near “Song of Myself.” Whitman certainly had ambition: “I know perfectly well my own egotism, / Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less.” He even ghostwrote some reviews of his book. In one, he waxed: “Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer.”

Read more at Literary Hub.