Thinking the unprintable in contemporary post-digital publishing

Abstract

In a recent interview, poet and publisher J. Gordon Faylor jokingly remarked that the American publishing collective Troll Thread, which publishes PDFs and print-on-demand (POD) versions of those PDFs, “exploit[s] Lulu’s bookmaking technology in more diversely insidious ways” than his own Gauss PDF, another Tumblr-based project that publishes PDFs and multimedia works. These contemporary uses of online or POD publishing are so “diversely insidious” not because they bypass carefully calculated and often handmade print runs, or because these presses publish work that might not otherwise appear elsewhere (which has become an avant-garde truism in itself over the last century). Rather, the artful exploitation lies in Troll Thread’s and Gauss PDF ’s publication of works that seem out of place in a codex form. These are works that cannot or should not be printed but insist on printedness — even if only imagined — all the same.