translated by Eric Schierloh & paul j holzman
Using Bruce Charles Mollison’s How to Prepare for the Collapse of Capitalism as a starting point, Eric Schierloh partially rewrites and expands far beyond it. The idea of “agricultural reform” that appears in this anarchist flattening of the hierarchy of urgency was outlined metaphorically, and only a few days apart, by two of the author’s friends who don’t know each other. For this, he thanks Chilean poet Diego Alfaro Palma and the Argentine letterpress printer stranded in Italy, Federico Cimatti of Prensa La Libertad.
1 – Learn to print, not a text but a book, and not just using a home printer. A typewriter, stamps, engraving, silkscreen printing, letterpress, collage; this can all be useful for writing and for the book outside of the industrial publishing system.
1 – The industrial publishing system implies, to some degree, a standardization of text (edition) and material for the marketplace, in addition to economic dependency—in the vast majority of cases pitiful and meager and altogether unfair in terms of percentages—both symbolically and instrumentally. Very few writers know how to make a book, and perhaps even far less want to manufacture them.
1 – The material diversity of the publications will never be industrial because the very nature of the industry is replication, centralization, and an endless increase of revenue to the detriment of everything else. Meanwhile, your nature as a being inserted into a dynamic system (which includes the biblio-system) is, first of all, diversity. So take that diversity to the text as a writer and to the book as a publisher—ultimately, toward a new art of making books.
1 – Allow failure and error to have a place in your procedures.
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