As someone that may have stumbled upon this site either on purpose or by accident and are looking for further insight into what Lost Telegram Press is all about, this little glimpse hopefully will clarify some questions.
This post comes at a time when Lost Telegram Press has three versions of a novel to be released shortly and three versions of a poetry book to follow later this year. It may take a little while to see the long game and the wider purpose of this but I would like to use this blog as a platform to inform anyone interested on the latest news of what we are doing here as well as relate it to what has been happening in handmade publishing and conceptual writing.
In an essay titled “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?”, by Kenneth Goldsmith in a paper called Against expression : an anthology of conceptual writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), he said that “with the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically.”
This type of sentiment was the reason why I felt the need to quit the antiquated behaviour that I personally, was taking part in for the last 20 years and start something new.
There are readers that will always read, no matter what. Then there are generations of readers that either lose faith and the drive to read, as well as those that just never find anything uplifting in it to start in the first place. Reading can be fun. I sound like a librarian. But really, if you look at creating a book like how any other piece of creation is made, it opens up a whole world of possibilities.
Why do books have to be just a collection of sentences? Stopping at the idea that a book is a novel or collection of poetry and not thinking more creatively, is a crucial point where readers are lost.
“Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance,” Goldsmith said.
The ‘book’ is just a concept. It is nothing more. It can be anything once that idea is understood.