We speak with Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press, which joins the MIT Press this month as a distributed partner
The MIT Press is proud to bring on New York-based publisher Inpatient Press as a distributed partner this month. Inpatient Press, founded in 2013 by author and editor Mitch Anzuoni, seeks to publish “what others do not.” And Anzuoni has spent over a decade distributing his publications in ways that others, also, do not: through 25-cent newsboxes on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, in the pockets of his own jacket, by hand in airports or on the street.
MIT Press editor Marc Lowenthal spoke to Anzuoni about his work on the press and his publishing philosophy. Read on for our conversation with Anzuoni, and sign up for our newsletter to hear more updates from the MIT Press.
Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press: You’ve defined Inpatient Press with a credo: “to publish what others do not.” What, to your mind, does that constitute? And by extension, what do you see as currently lacking in the world of publishing that has left a space for you to operate in? What in independent publishing excites you these days? Do you see kindred publishers out there, even if they are publishing what you do not?
Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press: As an editor, I am essentially a void seeker. There is great promise in lack and Inpatient is a means to fulfill that; to champion the occluded and unmanifest. So I edit with a dowsing rod and try to be a living antenna. Many times I have no idea what the book will be and then it will appear as an off-hand mention in conversation, a fleeting reference, an email from a stranger. But when I feel the book-presence, I follow it.
For instance, The Spiritual Hunt, the purportedly-lost-and-then-controversially-found Rimbaud manuscript; I first came across it as a footnote in a rather dry article about literary pastiche, but I kept pulling the thread and couldn’t believe what it unraveled: these tourmaline poems that had lain fallow for decades. And then this compounds, as the more books uncovered the more sensitive the attunement to the submerged book-presence becomes. So I suppose it is this attunement which hums at the core of all the books and gives voice to the press.
Inpatient operates almost like a studio practice, with lots of variety and experimentation due to this credo. So the most important, and perhaps defining, characteristic of my publishing is the treatment of the book as a substantial object on its own, not some ready-made crucible for text and image to be poured into; and the understanding that despite this wide variance there is a unifying thread, an ethereal spine that binds them under the banner of a “press.” And readers are receptive to this, perhaps more so than ever. That’s where the energy of small presses are derived from. Some other presses that truly tap into this are Colpa Press in San Francisco as well as Ugly Duckling Presse and Primary Information in New York. They make widely different books covering all manner of matter and form, yet you know immediately when you are holding their books. Publishing is about knowing how to immanentize. It is a school of summoning.
Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press: Inpatient Press has been going for a little over a decade, yet this is the first time your catalog will be distributed through official channels (warehousing, sales reps, etc.). How have your books been reaching their market until now?
Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press: Newsboxes. Trench coats. Dead drops. Whenever I travel, I bring extra copies and place them at Hudson News or in a drug store book rack. I’ve sat behind a lot of tables and watched strangers rifle through my life’s work and move on without a word. I’ve made a lot of great friends who welcome the books into their stores. But every book reached its reader by my hand. Since the press was founded in 2013, I’ve personally mailed every order, from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine. Or Portland, Oregon for that matter. Of course, even with warehouses and pallets, I’ll still be slinging from the trench and making the rounds to refill the newsboxes around New York City. It’s press decorum at this point. Core catechism. Some things you can’t leave behind.
Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press: Will having this distribution change the sort of work you publish? What directions do you intend to develop now?
Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press: I intend to publish even more obscure and remote material. Currently, that seems to be shaping up as a lot of writing by filmmakers such as Chris Marker, the Kuchar Brothers, and Marguerite Duras that’s been left to languish in vitrines and archives. I want translations from far-flung tongues and traditions. I hope to use this distribution to signal boost new and emerging writers. Work that is paradoxical and transcendent, unprecedented and transgressive. The proposition for a writer with a small press can be dicey—the publisher is seen as a sort of an initial waypoint on the journey to the Pantheon. I endeavor to build up Inpatient as a bastion for innovative and experimental literature that is in itself a destination for writers, a standard to rally under for revenants and greenhorns alike.
Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press: How would you qualify the type of work you look for to bring into English, especially given the extra costs involved in publishing translation?
Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press: With Mercurial Editions, the press’s translation imprint, the impetus is to uphold the art—the sorcery, really—of translation itself. So much of the work is peculiar and idiolectic, almost like mythic riddles, and Mercurial lets the translators ponder upon them. Rip It Up by Kou Machida, for instance, is a novella of some one-hundred-and-thirty pages but took the translator, Daniel Joseph, over half a decade to render in English due to its intricacy and pyrotechnic nature. I heard of another translator who nearly went mad trying to bring it into English; he was apparently found gibbering away in a lamplit carrel by library staff. I would love to buy him lunch.
So for the press, and translations in particular, I try to ambiguate the line between enterprise and expression. Publishing isn’t seen as an art: it’s an industry, a sector. I question such a notion and thus stand to confound it.
Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press: Like some other indie publishers I know, you work a day job (as a programmer). Is there any overlap in your two work-worlds?
Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press: In college I studied Computer Science and Creative Writing so I cannot help but synthesize the two. One informs the other in manifold ways—what language, whether computational or natural, can make manifest. In fact, I created a game which is the ultimate overlap of my work-worlds: Small Press Tycoon, the original DIY press simulator that is the crystallization of my experience in independent publishing. I’ve used it for lectures and presentations and students love it, which I find heartening. I’m actually working on another book-related game, Ex Libris, a first-person role-playing game set in a medieval monastery that has you deciphering ancient languages and exhuming rare texts from the depths of a sunken library. Computer dreams I hope to one day realize.