Episode 1: Thinking out loud with punctum books

People should be able to do anything they want with any number of objects—call them texts or other thing—and put them together and think about them. To think out loud is another way I think about it. This should be a place where thinking out loud is the job.

That is Eileen Fradenburg Joy, talking about the academy and why we need punctum books, the independent publisher she co-directs with Vincent van Gerven Oei. The clarity of this idea, that the academy should be a place where thinking out loud is the job, is why I wanted to interview Eileen and Vincent on the first episode of this new podcast. Punctum undoes the idea that there can possibly be a single right way to think. Their vision statement describes their fight for academic freedom as a clearing and securing against structures and systems of academic privilege, the open spaces of radical hospitality within which individual researchers might have more freedom to experiment, to take risks, and most importantly, to pursue in their work, their and not our desires. Punctum’s radical hospitality for different forms of thinking is why I sent them my first book manuscript, The Ruins of Solitude, a book which sits at the limits of academic discourse, trying to figure out what happened when love unraveled my knowledge structures.

I am Lette Bragg and this is Many Academies. And today I talk to Eileen and Vincent about the adventure of punctum books and open access publishing, how librarians are heroes, and the joys and ethics of publishing the weird. For me, the critical question of any inevitably vulnerable world building project, which is kind of what punctum is, is what makes the risk worthwhile. For this reason, I begin by asking: What are the stakes of punctum books? What is at stake?

The stake is about thinking otherwise. As, what I would call myself, “a recovering academic.” I, unlike Vincent, who has a different career trajectory, what we share in common is that we both decided in different ways that we don’t want to work within the proper academy—as professors, for example. I did do that for roughly 20 years, and I guess you could say I went through a process of disillusionment where I thought, you know, the Academy would be a place where thinking would be highly creative. And I have a background as a creative writer, and that makes a difference. Vincent has a background as a creative artist as well. I have an MFA in creative writing, and I thought when I went into a Ph.D. program and then beyond that, into professorship, that I could bring different parts of my brain together, that I could be a scholar of medieval literature, but I could use my skills as a creative writer in my scholarship. And that was never going to be the case.

What I realized was that I was going to have to write a certain kind of article, for instance, to get published as a scholar. And I was working on Beowulf—I’m a medieval literature person—and I remember when I got my first job, I spent a year writing a kind of fake article that would be published by the best journal in my field, which is Speculum, which is over 100 years old. [laughs] And woe betide the name of this journal, don’t even get me started on that. But it is the most prestigious journal, the most august, you know, the most traditional. And one of the jokes I used to share with friends was that in medieval studies, if you published an article in that journal, it had to have a minimum of 150 footnotes. [laughs]

So, I started writing an article—like I literally had a folder and all these pages, you know, I was going to write an article just for this journal. It was going to have, you know, a hundred thousand footnotes. You know, it didn’t happen. I did write an article for another similar journal that had 182 footnotes, of which I’m very proud. And that that was the first and last time I attempted doing that. So, you know, then I realized if I wanted to write the weird kind of things I wanted to write, there was no venue for them. It was that simple.

Because my, my thing was the diptych where I would take a contemporary object—which could be a text or a political event or something like that—and I would pair it with a medieval text and I would have I would put them together and have them kind of speak to each other. In one case, I wrote an article—which I had to publish myself—about Chechen female suicide terrorist and Grendel and Beowulf. And I won’t go into all the reasons why I wanted to do that, but no one was going to publish that. So I published it myself. And actually a version of this article appeared in a book edited by a really well known medievalist who said to me—and it was about Emmanuel Levinas and medieval literature, the book, the collection, because I used Emmanuel Levinas in this essay to think about the face of the other and the ethical relation and violence and the state. And she says to me, I’m going to publish your article, but take out the Chechen suicide stuff because it has nothing to do with Medieval Lit and I’ll publish it. So what did I do? I took out all the Chechen stuff. I let her publish it, and then I edited a book for Palgrave, and I put it back in. [laughs]

And so what happened to me, and I’ll shut up about this, is that, you know, I wasn’t allowed to do this. And it’s not the first time that happened. I had another journal reject an article that was about Tony Kushner’s play Homebody Kabul and an old English poem called The Ruin. And the same thing happened! [laughs] The editor was like, this is great. Take out the Kushner stuff, will publish the rest. It’s really good.You are great.

You know, I would get this affirmation of myself as a scholar of old English poetry, but it’s like, What is this stuff doing in here? The article that I published with 182 footnotes had this Italo Calvino thing running through it, [laughs] and I was asked to take that out and it would be published if I took that out.

So, three stories there, right, of being told. We don’t what the heck are you doing with Tony Kushner and Chechen suicide terrorist and Italo Calvino? Stick to the subject and do it the proper way. And that, to me, was the beginning. That was probably the beginning of the road to punctum.

Well, your question was what the stakes are. So like Eileen, I come from a somewhat mixed background, but I ended up—quite accidentally—also in medieval studies. This was not my initial intention, but I ended up in medieval studies as a nubiologist, studying medieval Nubia and its languages.

For me, since Eileen talked about more, let’s say the the the editorial line of punctum, let me address why we are open access or why I was initially attracted to open access. In my field, I collaborate intensely with scholars that are not in Western academia. These are scholars that operate in Egypt, operate in Sudan. In Sudan, there’s currently a war going on which makes everything even more difficult. Egypt is a military dictatorship, and this puts an enormous pressure on my local colleagues. My colleagues that I work with who are living in Nubia itself. And for them, access to knowledge as Western academics have it, is not a given. Many of the articles that are published in the field are in books that are unaffordable, in journals that are inaccessible. Yet they, yet all of this knowledge production exists and are predicated upon the harvesting of artifacts from a non-Western, from a non-Western region.

And so I have always found this utterly unacceptable. Like, we are, as Western scholars, we are welcomed into another region of the world. We are offered hospitality and I have experienced this all for myself, doing fieldwork in Sudan. And then we take the artifacts, or at least our knowledge about these artifacts and publish them in ways that are utterly, absolutely inaccessible to those who are the actual guardians of these artifacts, of these texts, of these sites. And so for me, a lot of the ideology behind punctum’s open access policy is related to that. It is a fundamental conviction that we as scholars ought to make our knowledge of the world, the production, you know, no matter how weird as I mean, has already spoken to, of knowledge should be available to all and as long as it’s not, this is a scandal of inequality and I won’t stand for it. I think that selling knowledge for money is utterly despicable and any form of copyright patents, any form of lock and key on knowledge—especially that knowledge produced by public funding, which is the majority of Western knowledge, including all its pharmaceutical inventions and its space inventions, and what you have not—is utterly unethical.

And so I think from the beginning—and I think also Eileen can speak to this—we did not intend to be an open access press. We are just an open access press because that is the word that has been given to returning public knowledge to the public. But we would be doing this still if open access was not a thing, if it was not becoming a rapidly popularizing revenue model for multi-million multibillion dollar publishing conglomerates. If it were not the watchword of policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, we would still be giving our– we would still be giving our books away for free. I don’t care what it’s called. It’s the principle that counts. And I think that this is what motivates both Eileen and me in terms of like trying to not only to be hospitable to the weird, the unexpected, the intersectional, the extra sectional, but also to really try and invent ways how to get it out. Right. Because hospitable is one thing, but we are publishers. We have to get it out into the world and we continue to rack our brains as to how we can do a better job, as small as we are, in getting the books to those who read.

Thanks so much. Yeah, you speak of a scandal of inequality, right? Which exactly what it is. And you bring up also this idea of being locked out. So people are locked out from learning, from knowledge, from getting their own work out. And we have a tendency just to read each other’s stuff, like the stuff we read is becoming increasingly limited. Your answer kind of prompts me to, to talk about this other side of punctum because you have this, this ideology of publishing, right, which comes down in a lot of ways to ideas of theory, right? What does it mean to be hospitable? What does it mean to be what does it mean to think? But it also entails this infrastructure and this responsibility. Could you tell me a little bit more about this infrastructure that you’re trying to develop, as well as the robust sense of responsibility you have for your authors and for your publics?

I think there are two important components to that infrastructure, and I think Eileen and I can both maybe talk to one one part of it. There’s obviously the sustainability issue, like how do we develop the infrastructures of sustainability, How are we able to do what we do in the economical system that exists nowadays? And I think that Eileen has been has been thinking a lot about this and working. So I would leave that aspect to her to respond to as she likes to.

The other aspect is like, how do we get things out? Which is something I have been a little bit more closely involved in, in terms of like how do we improve the discoverability of open access books? It’s often thought that once it’s open access and once a book is open access, it is discoverable and anyone can find it and nothing can be further from the truth. If you put a PDF on your website, literally no one will ever find it. The problem is, is that a lot of these discovery infrastructures as they exist currently are not built for open access. They’re not built for digital books. They are built for print books. They’re built for books that are under lock and key. They are built for books that have a specific shelf life, in a specific jurisdiction, under a specific commercial enterprise, none of which pertains to the books that we publish.

And so with other open access publishers, we have been the last few years trying to develop ways in which we can either change the existing infrastructures for book discovery or develop software solutions that allow us to get the books into all the repositories that are currently feeding into the library catalogs, through which most scholars at least discover these books. That leaves out an enormous, enormous part of the rest of the population, right? That leaves out everybody who deals with public libraries. That leaves out anyone who walks into a bookstore. So like, this is only one step, right? Reaching scholarly authors. The next step is like, how do we reach public libraries? They have their own infrastructures. They are all extremely integrated. Public libraries are under attack currently. They may not have the bandwidth in terms of personnel to deal with, you know, the types of books that we publish. So there is a whole series of other problems that come with that, but we’re trying to to take these problems one at a time and see how we can somehow it somehow really feels like you’re infiltrating, You’re infiltrating a book distribution book distribution discovery system that’s not built for us, that is actually quite inhospitable to us. But by building smart, you know, software solutions, we kind of have a way in, especially if those solutions are much better than what exists, because then it becomes attractive, even to those who are, let’s say, a little bit more old fashioned.

I’m going to keep this idea of infiltration as a kind of like inspiration, you know, when I’m trying to get my work out there.

Once we’re in, we’re kind of this viral presence that behaves in a way that you’re not supposed to behave. And I personally very much enjoy that.

I was about to say, you lean into it, [laughs] like you do enjoy that.

There are certain conferences that are held every year. It’s interesting for me because I used to always go to academic conferences, you know, and now we go to publishing and library conferences, and some conferences are about publishers and libraries together, which makes sense because there’s a kind of traditional, I hate this term, but there’s a traditional “vendor” relationship to libraries from publishers. And so there are these conferences set up around that synergy, you know, that we now go to. And we are kind of the outlier in the mix because you have all these university presses and commercial academic presses like Springer Nature or Elsevier or Palgrave Macmillan, you know, and we’re the oddballs, you know, we’re often the agitator. But as time has gone on, we’ve become more and more allied with these interests, but in, in good ways, primarily through libraries.

So what I was going to just mention briefly is that a huge part of our infrastructure right now that’s critical to everything we do are university libraries who support us now. But that did not always used to be the case. That was not the case until late 2019. And libraries all over the world, as you know, with your own library, pay a certain fee, a pretty nominal low amount, usually averaging about $3,000 a year, to help us run the press. And if you have enough libraries contributing, you have a pretty ample amount of money that you can use to hire staff, publish more books, cultivate more authors, etc. and do a lot of things, actually, a lot of other stuff that we haven’t been able to do. But that wasn’t always the case, and it was hard, to go back to what Vincent was saying. All of the infrastructure for academic production, you know, of knowledge primarily through books and journals, has never been set up or designed for an open access press like punctum books. But open access has become a buzzword, which I think Vincent was circling around when he says, whatever you call it—open access has become a buzzword. It was a politics. Now it’s the mainstay. It used to be the oppositional political position. Now it’s ka-ching, ka-ching.

I mean, it will I know we all know this if we’re educated, we’ve all read, you know, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? And we’ve read every other book. We know that, you know, everything will be monetized is what I’m trying to get to really quickly. I think Wendy Brown actually summed up the definition of neoliberalism that way everything can be monetized, that’s neoliberalism. So guess what? Open access has been monetized. All of the big publishers and also the university presses have realized that it’s, you know, a big moneymaker. They used to see it as a threat. It made them afraid. They’ve even admitted that that they were dazed, five plus years ago, where they would sit in their offices and go, oh my God, are we going to have to go open access? How will we make any money? What will we do?

Increasingly, presses are looking to libraries, you know, to fund open access. And I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it as thoroughly as is required. But we’ve been lucky to have lots of love from university libraries who actually really understand our mission. And this is interesting because when you think of a so-called neoliberal landscape, let’s say a capitalist world where everything is about exchange value, use value, etc., and libraries do make a lot of decisions and they have to make decisions with their budget that do hinge on exchange value and use value and utilitarianism. And they have to put together statistics every year proving to higher up admins why the money they spent on a database was worthwhile. So. So when libraries make a decision to fund punctum, you know, the main, there’s different rationales and they share these with me. But the primary one is our catalog. They just look at the catalog and they say, We want something like this to exist. You know, we want to support the existence of this catalog because of its diversity, its uniqueness, the fact that it is experimental, that it that it covers so many different kinds of voices and types of scholars, not just the university professor. And and that’s our drawing card. And so that’s our way in to, that’s going to, and this is why I love libraries, because going back to what Vincent was also saying, you know, when I first was trying to get punctum more recognized and was first starting to, you know, I couldn’t get anyone’s attention. I can’t tell you how many emails I wrote Project Muse. I’ll just give that as one example. They have an open books section now in their– which we’re in now. But you know, I would write them and say I’m Eileen, I run punctum books. We have all these open access books and we’d like them to be in Project Muse… No response. But when I started hanging out with librarians at UC Santa Barbara Library, they picked up the phone. Sherri Barnes in particular. I have to namecheck her, you know, just picked up the phone, you know, and wrote emails and told people you will put punctum books in Project Muse. And they did. She did the same thing with Jstor. We were at a library publisher conference and she went up to the vice president of Jstor and said, I want a meeting with Jstor and punctum books to discuss getting their catalog into Jstor. And so that happened.

The the real watchdogs, the real guardians of an unbounded open public knowledge commons are the librarians. They’re fighting. They’re the Jedi, [laughs] you know, with one sword, they’re fending off Elsevier, and with their other hand, they’re doling out money to punctum books, and they’re fighting for punctum, and they’re fighting for other open access presses, not just us. So that has been the sunshine on the horizon of our journey.

I have to say, every librarian I have spoken to loves punctum. And I’m wearing my Celeste West t-shirt for good luck today. [laughter]

Let me let me switch gears a little bit. So we’re going to imagine that I am a precarious scholar or I’m a grad student and I’m working on my first book manuscript. I’m facing the academy and I’m trying to get in, but it doesn’t want me, right, or it wants me only in a certain form or in a certain way. So publishing my book in the right place or to the right market seems crucial, but critical, my only chance. So what do you think I’m going through at this moment? What would you like to say to me?

The Academy is not interested in your work. This is the sad truth. It is interested in a version of you and a version of your work that you have the choice to transform into. That entire transformation will be yours to accomplish, and it will be theirs to judge. Personally—this may be very pessimistic, especially in the humanities; If you are a current grad student wanting to enter academia and have a flourishing career in which you do your own research and have the freedom to interrogate those things that you find compelling, it’s going to be excruciatingly difficult. Yes.

The Academy is transforming, or has been transforming, in ways that make it rather inhospitable to thought. I think this is the reason that Eileen has left. This is the reason that I have—except for one sad afternoon in which I attended a postdoc information meeting that I wanted to flee the moment I entered the room. I have never again tried to enter academia on its terms. The way that I have approached it, because I still do scholarly work, is I ended up specializing in something so obscure that I was the only one. So if you want to know something about it, then you can invite me, pay me a fee, and I’ll teach you a course and then I’m out. I will do none of your paperwork. I will do none of your meetings. I will do none of your accreditations. And the class will consist of the people that I select. This is a luxury that you have when you’re not dependent on academia or on your scholarship for your income. And this is this is a privilege that I have fought for my entire life.

I also recognize that that’s not possible for everyone, but I really believe in scholarship outside academia. If you want to preserve, if you want, if you believe in your research and you believe in its direction and believe in your own voice, then I would say you have much more time to pursue that while having a 9 to 5 job than by being in academia. That’s at least my experience. I have so much more research time while running punctum than if I had been teaching some type of ridiculous class load as an adjunct. It’s just incomparable.

I’m thinking too, of the drain on one’s energy when you’re trying to do all that administrative work.

And it’s not valued. I mean, it’s not that you were doing a little bit of admin because, you know, you need someone needs to write down the grades. You know, it is literally an institution that is making millions and millions of dollars and doling that out to sports teams, and you are doing their paperwork and teaching on the side aome course that they have decided that is value for money. I mean, it’s just it’s completely beyond me. It’s completely beyond me that academics have not revolted collectively. I mean, if you see that the money that these people make in this position, money that should go to to education, not to administration. Anyhow, I’m getting very angry now.

I mean, it has to be admitted, though, that at the end of the day, pursuing a Ph.D. is done with the hopes of a professorship afterwards, and that that is, for better or worse, the most secure employment you could probably get with the right kind of benefits and all of that.

One of my responses to your kind of provocation, Lette, to this person who says what you just said, is cruel optimism, you know, á la Lauren Berlant. Knowing that you want something that you already know in advance isn’t going to be what you think it will be. And you know that, you know. Aone pursuing a Ph.D. right now kind of already knows what they’re in for right now. And I find this the most difficult question of all. You’ve hit the nail on the head in some ways. You have hit the nail on the head with the one question I’ve been most confronted with much of my career, even before, because even before I started punctum.

You know, I did do the work I wanted to do, you know, the work that no one would publish. Well, I did it anyway, right? And I presented it at conferences and I managed to craft a kind of a career because of the open access part. I got an audience, and as I gained an audience, I started to have a career. People started inviting me to give talks. I started getting so many invitations to speak, you know, I couldn’t accept all of them. Do you know what I mean? It was really bizarre. But I always got asked the same question every time I would give a talk and I would do my weird thing, there would always be somebody in the audience who would get up and say, and they were often a graduate student or an early career researcher, and they would give me a variation of what you just said, you know, where they were like, Well, this is thank you very much for what you just did. That was really interesting. But what makes you think anyone else can do that? You know, I can’t do that because I need to get a job. And I would hear this over and over again. I can’t do what you’re doing because I will. I am I going to get a job? Same with publishing an open access book with punctum. I am often asked or told I can’t publish a book with you because I need to get a job. I wish I could do this, but I need to get a job.

I was at a talk by a brilliant scholar who wrote a book, open access to his credit, with Palgrave, with a grant he received from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was able to publish this book open access. Palgrave charged him $15,000. [chuckles] But afterwards I was talking to him about the link between the politics of publishing open access and the politics of his subject matter, which fell technically under post-colonial diaspora studies, and the ways in which these two things are linked. And did he understand that the commercialization of open access by Palgrave is not good or ethical? And how did he feel about that? And, you know, and he just looked at me and he said, Eileen, you need to understand that as a scholar of color, I have to prove myself even more than a non-scholar of color. There’s a higher bar for me. I have to run faster and leap longer to prove myself in terms of my worth as a scholar. And I cannot take any risks at all.And yes, I recognize that there is a weird, you know, disjunction in between telling you that and the subject matter of my scholarship.

And so to me, I had two feelings when I left that conversation. One was understanding and one was depression, and the third one was disappointment in the scholar. Does that make sense? So, you know, but on the other hand, understanding like, I understand, I understand. And he’s at a research one university, very well known, very well highly regarded flagship state university, you know, and with very high standards for tenure and promotion and a lot of competition. Right. So I understand. I said I understand, but I don’t understand. At the same time, to me, it’s like it’s like, what is this? You know, I can’t I cannot put together your subject matter and you, the radicalness of your own work, the radicality of your subject matter and and the fact that you would not ever publish a book with punctum or with an open access press that didn’t charge exorbitant fees because they aren’t Palgrave and none of it makes sense, but it’s the norm. So. Okay, but how do you tell someone that they’ve made the wrong choice? You can’t say that. You can’t say to someone you’ve made a bad decision. Now you’re on the inside of the academy. You’re in a tenure track job, you’re an early career scholar, and you’ve got to do all the right things because your whole life depends upon it. I can’t tell you that I can’t. o you have children? Are you married?D You know. I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t take it. I left. Vincent couldn’t face it. He didn’t go in, you know. But I can’t tell every academic in the world to run off [Vincent: Right.]and survive on their own, because clearly that won’t work.

So it’s cruel optimism. It’s a cruel world, and you decide you’re going to live in it. I don’t know. I don’t want to be a jerk and say you chose the safe path. You’re a coward. You know, I can’t say those things, but through punctum books, I can try to create a hospitable environment where something else can be done. And maybe it won’t harm your career. I mean, as we’ve grown and as we’ve been around a while now, we’re in our 13th year. You know, we do kind of have a reputation now. There is a certain amount of regard for the press. We do have international regard, so we are getting more and more first books for tenure and things like that. And people’s departments and universities are saying, that’s great, but I don’t want to brag about that either, because then I don’t know what I’m saying. Am I saying, we have a reputation now, so now it’s okay to publish with us. I want it to always be okay to publish with us because of our ethos, not because all of a sudden we’re cool. So I find this to be such a dilemma. You, you’ve, you’ve hit on something that really bothers me on a deep level. And there’s nothing I can do about it except run a press that does something else and offers a different place for people to come to when they’re ready. If they can. And with however much coaxing, we can give.

Let me end by bringing back up the theme of hospitality that has kind of run throughout this interview. So punctum works to be hospitable right to miscreants, experiments, the wayward, the beautiful. It acknowledges that the boundary of the legible is often the emergence of something otherwise, right? And there is this mess. We can’t know what’s going to come. And you want to be committed to an ethos. You want to remain who you are. So it has risks. But what has come? So what has this adventure let in?

A wonderful community of authors. A few years ago, maybe two years ago, we started doing, this was during COVID, I think, we started doing monthly author groups? Just inviting all the authors that had This was also inspired by my own work. I am training as a as a group analyst, and this was something absolutely marvelous. It’s really weird that we never thought about this before. It seemed so natural to bring all these people from completely different fields: poets, researchers, artists, very classically trained scholars of medieval England all together and talk about how they write, what they read, what they’re working on, what are their dilemmas, obstacles in their writing process? How do they write? You know, what are their living situations, how do they operate? And and time and time again, we get all this feedback from authors: This is absolutely amazing. Writing is so lonely. Writing is such a lonely thing. And now there are all these other people that, you know, I wouldn’t have met otherwise simply because we are sharing a catalog. So, part of my background, as Eileen already indicated, is in the arts and I curate exhibitions and work with artists quite a bit where I live here in Albania and, and I see the punctum catalog as a curated work.I think that’s how Eileen and I both approach and we look each year at manuscripts, not only from the perspective of is this a good manuscript, is this something that resonates with punctum, but also like how it gels with the rest? Like how can we, how can we see connections between the manuscripts that come in and and the books that are already out there? You know, sometimes a manuscript comes in, reminds us of a book from ten years ago. It’s, my God, they’re picking up on this trend. How interesting is that! Right? So, like, there are all these, you know, recalls and memories that that go into. Also, our reviewing is like this book looks like this or like it will be so interesting to have this author in conversation with that one from five years ago, which is also one of the reason that we recently starting to to to actually stage these encounters, which are which are another project that we’ve been launching, which is called Encounters at the end of the book, which is on Vimeo.

Yes. So we’re basically like we we are really trying to figure out how we can do more in terms of promotion. And so this has been one of the outcomes also partially in conversation with our offers, right? So what can we do? What will be an interesting format? And so then together with Livia Snyder, who is our outreach outreach director, we have been developing this, this concept and it’s currently already online, and you can visit it through our website.

So I think really the the catalog is curated object I am incredibly proud of. I, I love looking at it. I love thinking about it as a thing, as, as a coherent, but also very messy assemblage, as this giant super book that somehow contains punctum and and yeah, this is I mean, I really like to think of punctum in that sense, like as this very long art project also in a way as an exhibition project, somehow as a curatorial project. This is very much how we often think about it, Eileen and I, at least, this is the impression that I have.

Yeah, I like this and I that’s why I like—this relates to something we were talking about before we started the podcast, which has to do with how we select books. Well, there’s a lot of things to say about that. I won’t go into all the details, but at the end of the day, we’re a little bit like a trade press or a literary press in which you have two directors who are essentially like the selectors of all the titles, and there’s still external review, there is still a so-called “scholarly peer review” of the manuscripts we select after we’ve selected them and and only like one or two times, you know, in ten years has an external reviewer reversed an opinion of ours, said to us, you know, you’re making a mistake. You know, you know, so, you know, but that almost never happens. We choose well and so I Vinson’s getting me to realize that this is really true, that the punctum catalog is a curated object. It’s a wonderful museum exhibition where the two curators are running around to all the different rooms. And, you know, and it’s interesting because sometimes there’s a book that I really love, and Vincent’s like, whatever, but I really love it, so we’re going to publish it or he really loves something and I’m like, Whatever. But 95% of the time it’s we both really love it.

You know, it’s very rare that we argue over a book. There might be one or two every year where we have to kind of convince each other, you know, or we just put or we do give each other a special power, which I love. We have vested each other with the power to accept any book you know, that we want or even to solicit one or get one from the outside or whatever, and the other one will not challenge it, you know, if we feel really strongly about it and it’s never steered us wrong. [chuckles] And and so it is and I would say it’s a community. And I would also say what what distinguishes us is that, you know, we’ve published all these books that have found readers, authors, never knew they had or would have. To me, that’s the real accomplishment that we’ve published all these books for readers, authors never knew they had or would have.

That’s the real strength of this catalog. And I don’t know if academics care about this because they are worried about their jobs, but your readers are just everywhere. And yes, they’re academic. And yes, there are other scholars and there are so many other people you never knew needed your book.

To learn more about printed books, to read their vision statement, to browse their catalog, please visit punctumbooks.com

Thank you, Sebastian Bauer, for composing the music for this podcast. Thank you JD Radix for the art and thank you Adyelotte Foundation for your support. Thank you for listening.