Literary Labels

Independent record companies turn to publishing books


| May / June 2004


One is round and plays recorded sound; the other is rectangular, conveying words and pictures. Otherwise, records and books can both communicate artistic inspiration, something to which a handful of book-publishing record companies can now attest.

In the 1990s, the record company Ellipsis Arts started publishing books to accompany some of their CDs. Their recorded anthology Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones, which featured music played on invented instruments (plucked bike wheels, bamboo saxophones), cried out for illustration and textual description.

Brooklyn-based Akashic Records took the next logical step -- publishing books without any musical accompaniment -- and actually became Akashic Books in 1997. Founder Johnny Temple, bassist in the band Girls Against Boys, says he 'got enough musical satisfaction as a musician.' His strong political sensibility and eclectic literary tastes have led Temple to publish nearly 40 titles, three-fourths of them novels -- including Arnaldo Correa's Edgar Award-winning mystery, Cold Havana Ground. Noteworthy nonfiction titles include Bandits & Blues Bibles: Convict Literature in Nineteeenth Century America, We Owe You Nothing (interviews from Punk Planet magazine), and The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq.

Chicago-based Drag City has struck a balance between making books and making music. As Lisa E. Reardon reports in the weekly Chicago Reader (Dec. 19, 2003), six years after the record company made its publishing debut in 1997 with Victory Chimp (a novel by a musician in one of the label's bands), books accounted for 12 percent of the company's sales. They've published about a book a year, and their best-sellers have been two books by the late guitarist/musicologist John Fahey. Vampire Vultures is a wild ride of self-psychotherapeutic folk tales about 'cat people' and a godlike figure known as 'the great Koonaklaster,' as well as thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of being sexually abused as a child, hyperlucid confessions, and letters, one to a would-be author who slept with Fahey and then ripped him off. How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life is an earlier volume that also blurs that arbitrary line between fiction and nonfiction.



Reardon sees a 'trademark irony' tying together Fahey's words and the music of Drag City recording artists such as Smog. But why, after 33 and a third years of putting out eclectic sounds, representing everything from Colombian cumbia to pop artists Nanci Griffith and George Thorogood, would Rounder Records in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decide that its publishing debut should consist of three books, two of which concern baseball? Turns out that Rounder co-founder Bill Nowlin is a longtime baseball fan, an author of baseball books, and now co-editor of Rounder's forthcoming The Fenway Project, which looks at a single major league baseball game from the perspective of 61 fans.

Maybe it's all about passion. Nowlin writes that over the years Rounder has released albums 'simply because we like the music and believe in it, not because it looks like a moneymaker.' With a credo like this inspiring these new book publishers, listeners and readers alike may be richly rewarded.














Pay Now Save $5!

Utne Summer 2016Want to gain a fresh perspective? Read stories that matter? Feel optimistic about the future? It's all here! Utne Reader offers provocative writing from diverse perspectives, insightful analysis of art and media, down-to-earth news and in-depth coverage of eye-opening issues that affect your life.

Save Even More Money By Paying NOW!

Pay now with a credit card and take advantage of our earth-friendly automatic renewal savings plan. You save an additional $5 and get 4 issues of Utne Reader for only $40.00 (USA only).

Or Bill Me Later and pay just $45 for 4 issues of Utne Reader!




Facebook Instagram Twitter flipboard


Copyright 2018, All Rights Reserved
Ogden Publications, Inc., 1503 SW 42nd St., Topeka, Kansas 66609-1265
https://www.utne.com/community/literarylabels
www.utne.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
92056
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7X3LKHLH65OJAMOI5EPK4MOIUGSV233K
<urn:uuid:1b030ff4-df34-489f-87bc-0666a8d3dba1>
2018-06-18T13:26:22Z
24.248.159.168
text/html
sha1:35SVO2QDW7TRMIZLSFROPJLO75XYGGBE
<urn:uuid:40c49606-ad08-4411-96cd-4bd107e56b5c>
https://www.utne.com/community/literarylabels
response
<urn:uuid:ffecc122-a04f-40a2-8194-1f98fb565e91>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-188-101.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf