Small Publishers Fair

At Bloomsbury’s Conway Hall, home of South Place Ethical Society, where Orwell once spoke, the Poison Girls sang and whose proscenium arch exhorts “To Thine Own Self Be True”, I mingled with a very particular collective, producers of rare, recondite and marginal publications.
 
Here, uniformly anomalous, were creative ephemera, limited edition etched linocuts, esoteric and hybrid poetics, experimental and conceptual, stone lithographs, reconstructed images, single-story chapbooks, a “purveyor of slow dissemination” and hand-stitched, rubber-stamped paper pulp.
 
I rather liked the celebration of oddness. It made this one-man publishing enterprise, i.e. me and my books, who am incapable of defining my own genres, feel positively mainstream. They still did a better trade than me that day.