Last week I had the first set of lectures for my next term at #Citylis. This blog will largely focus on one of my new modules, Libraries and Publishing in an Information Society. The title of the post is taken from the title and question posed in the first lecture of this module. To help us answer this question we read “The Author as Producer” by Walter Benjamin. The text provoked a range of responses in the lecture.

One of the questions that was raised a number of times was whether Benjamin’s arguments, presented first 1934, still have contemporary relevance. A potential barrier to accepting Benjamin’s suggestions may come from the use of terms like ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois press’. In the essay Benjamin talks about the political standpoint of authors and the relation this political standpoint has with the form in which authors and artists express their ideas. In this essay Benjamin, drawing on Brecht’s Didactic techniques, suggests that the author should aim to expose the methods of their production methods in order to teach:

‘An author who teaches a writer nothing, teaches nobody anything. The determinant factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production,in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.’

Although Benjamin had in mind a particular purpose for this type of collaboration, it is perhaps something which we are increasingly seeing realised with the use of new technologies. One example is the networks of support utilised in publishing zines.¹ The authors of zines frequently help each other with not only the distribution of each others work but also in the production. A range of different guides on making zines exist and authors often discuss the process of producing a zine as part of the content of the finished product. Another common example is the various communities that have, and continue to, exist around certain blogging platforms or blogging topics. Whether one agrees with Benjamin on his aim of opening up the methods of production used in writing I got the feeling that many might be more resistent to the Benjamin’s essay overal because of the support he presented for the Soviet Union.

A common connotation of the Soviet Union and the GDR is censorship. The support gives Benjamin gives to the Soviet Union might explain some resistance to the ideas presented in the “Author as Producer”. The approach taken to the Soviet Union in this essay is curiously amongst the most orthodox of the material produced by Benjamin who is commonly understood as an unorthodox Marxist and who provided a great deal of inspiration for the ‘Frankfurt School’ who were at least partially critical of the official Marxism of the Soviet Union. Regardless, the connotations of censorship remain. I was therefore interested in exploring censorship in the Soviet Union, something which I have picked up the usual conceptions about but have never explored in more depths. Alongside this I thought it might be interesting to explore other influences on publishing which may constrain the free spread of ideas, and the role libraries can play in this.

Censorship in the Soviet Union

There are a number of important differences between book publishing in the soviet union as compared to publishing in the West. One of the most important is the centralisation of publishing. Following the revolution of 1917 there was a gradual expansion of the state’s power over publishing activities. The scale of this publishing activity involved large numbers of people. Gregory Walker in his book Soviet Book Publishing Policy [^2] suggests a total of around 300,000 people were involved in the production and dissemination of books during the 1970s when he was writing. However, the involvement of the state in publishing had pre-existed this. This is primarily linked to the special role which publishing was intended to play in soviet society.

The expansion of censorship is often associated closely with the rise of Stalin, however, publishing had already been given a special place in soviet policy prior to this. Nancy Baird in her dissertation on Soviet literary policy writes

‘the strict control of literature achieved by the Communist Party by 1934 was rooted in Lenin’s pre revolutionary belief in the political use of literature. In addition, Lenin’s post-revolutionary initiative established the organs of literary control, as well as the attitudes which directed them in the subordination of creative literature to the needs of the Party’²

The special role that literature was intended to play in Soviet society helps explain the reason why so much effort went into both producing and making available books that promoted the official ideology of the Soviet union whilst also constraining the spread of ideas that did not fit with this official ideology. The types of books promoted by the Soviet state was not limited to one genre, although there was a clear preference for certain styles of writing and particular forms of art. One example is the prevalence of children’s books during the early Soviet period.³ These books provided an avenue for artist expression which was less subject to censorship.

Alongside the potential escapes into less censored areas of literature, dissident forms of publishing existed. This dissident publishing included religious, nationalist and literary content but most of the focus was on political themes. There were a variety of methods of producing this content; hand and type copying, or the use of professional or semi-professional printing presses. Regardless of the methods used much of the content had certain presentational features. Covers were often plane, or imitating different content and the type itself often had mistakes and was of poor quality. In this way the content and the form of texts once again come together.

So far the focus has been on explicit censorship by the state and potential avenues people sought to circumvent this censorship. The next section will turn to focus on other ways in which the transfer of information can become limited.

The realities of publishing

The spread of ideas can also be limited by the financial obligations of publishers. For most publishers, making profits - at least over the whole of their list - has always been a requirement for their continued existence. This imperative can limit the possibility for certain books to be published. I recently finished reading The Business of Books by Andre Schiffrin which outlines how this imperative for making profits has increased with the consolidation of many publishing houses in the UK and US. He describes how publishers during the 1920s would usually expect a profit of around 4% after taxes. Following the takeover by conglomerates new targets have been set of 12-15%.

There are a whole host of lists which describe now famous books which had difficulty finding a publisher - often because of a perceived lack of a market for the finished work. Other books, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm were rejected initially rejected by publishers because the content was seen as too critical of Stalin. In this case explicit censorship by the state did not delay the publication of the book, rather, the concerns of the publisher. What examples of this kind make clear is that there will have been, and continue to be, plenty of works of potentially great merit which have been published.

This is not the whole story of modern publishing. Many publishers continue to publish worthwhile works. There has been a growth of smaller, more specialist publishers, which address particular interests or publish very beautiful books and other printed materials (a possible subject for another post). What has been the role of libraries in the transfer of ideas, and its relation to publishing?

Libraries

The potential role of libraries in this process is too broad to cover comprehensively to discuss fully here. I will instead focus on one particular example.

Niche interests

Specialists libraries provide access to specific collections of materials which are often rare and otherwise difficult to find in a curated collection. Sometimes these libraries will be for a particular commercial purpose but other ones are open to the public. Examples in London include; the Wellcome Library, BFI Library, St Bride Library (which collects books on print), The Feminist Library, Westminster Music Library, and the Marx Memorial Library to name just a few.

These libraries can play an important role in transmitting specialist material which may be out of print, or difficult to find otherwise. Returning to zines, there are a number of projects to create zine libraries. Most libraries will not have zines in their collection. The small print runs, the informal channels through which they are distributed and the topics covered in zines all contribute to them being unlikely to feature in most library collections. There is of course the argument that digital technologies make the techniques used in producing zines unnecessary. It seems that despite other options many people still enjoy the physical process of producing zines in a physical format. Zines often make use of ‘cut-up’ techniques, appropriating existing illustrations and text and repurposing them. For many people doing this with analog techniques may be more enjoyable, easier of provide a different aesthetic to digital alternatives. On the other ‘side’, many people, myself included still enjoy the physical handling of printed materials, especially with something like zines where small differences and mistakes in each copy make clear the work and effort that has gone into producing the material. Again, form and content are not separate.

Digitising zines is one potential method of increasing access to hard to get material. There are a range of zine libraries and archives online which often have a particular focus.⁴ Alongside these digital projects there are a number of collections of physical zines. One of these projects, ‘The zine libraries interest group’, aims to outline ways in which ‘traditional’ library techniques and methods can be used to help develop a zine library. Their resource page includes information on collection policy, cataloguing and outreach. Projects of this kind illustrate some of the steps that librarians can take to address the lack of access to particular forms or content of writing. Of course, the interest in these libraries may be limited to small demographics but the techniques used by librarians can still help bridge the gap between ‘publishers’ (in this case self publishers) and the audience, despite the likely lack of professional publishing opportunities.

I’m looking forward to exploring these issues further into the course. This blogging format is new for me so there may well be some technical glitches on the way but I’m hoping that I can use this new platform as a learning opportunity without creating too many more delays in getting my blogs up on the web!