& THE NEW MANIFESTO &

The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press was produced in a theoretically unlimited edition. 250 copies were made in the first printing. I figured that it would take awhile to sell 250. But as the year draws to a close, the numbers are dwindling, and it’s time to start to thinking about the second installment.

[The Manifesto was important for NewLights from a production standpoint in the sense that it was the first book produced in such a way as to make letterpress printing it in a large edition just as economically feasible as digitally printing it. And now that I have the films & plates already, all I need to buy is the new paper.]

The plan from the beginning was to reprint the Manifesto when it ran out. This goes against the general NewLights policy of NO REPRINTS, so for the first time the idea of the reprint has to be considered. And of course we can never leave anything alone. A simple reprint? Why not force that work to do more work?

This problem is particularly important for this book because of the idea that keeping the same manifesto, reprinting it over and over again, will keep the press locked into the same theoretical framework. And this is important because the Manifesto itself is about resisting such ossification. A specific example: the NewLights mission statement is printed at the end of the Manifesto, but I’ve been thinking about rewriting the mission statement. So how does a new mission statement fit into a second, or third, or fourth, or n printing? How can a book like this sustain the idea of an infinite amount of printings?

Many books are revised from printing to printing, from edition to edition. So why can’t the Manifesto function in a similar way? Why not make The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press perpetually new? Make the book the living, growing, changing, dynamic object that this very text describes. Actualize, damn it.