PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (53): THE NEW MANIFESTO, SECOND ITERATION (3)

The second iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press is essentially complete (though I need to reprint exactly half of the covers and then finish binding, due to a, shall we say, minor incident), but won’t be released for Internet sales until Monday, April 22. Right now most of the edition is acting as an installation-ish piece in a show here at the Coburn Gallery in CO Springs. So this next series of posts, detailing the production of the book, are not as in-the-moment as the “Production is Reception” posts often are. But here we go.

The Second Iteration has been percolating, marinating, for quite a while. For more than a year, perhaps two. It was never quite a real thing until I decided for sure that it was going to be a (major) part of the latest show. For most of its existence it has been a bunch of notes, some pieces of sketchy text, and some vague design ideas, like this:

The idea was always to make this new iteration a revision-ing or rewriting of the first book, similar in structure, design, themes, etc. But not simply an “updated” version of the same text, same book. I didn’t know exactly what all of this meant until I really got in the thick of the writing-design. In fact, the specificity of the relationship between the two iterations did not fully emerge until I was just about ready to start printing. The books, when they’re working, funnel themselves towards a precipice. They crystallize at the edge, silent in their poised, posed, paused ideal. Time restarts & they fall, not in a beautiful, freefall dive, but in a clumsy tumble, banging against the side of the cliff all the way down.

Such drama, such wounds to be sustained. To be continued.