A PRINT RUN OF ONE’S OWN Roger Kimball, the critic and managing editor at the New Criterion, has a book just out called “Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity” (Cybereditions, 222pp., $17.95). Collecting his occasional essays on Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Paul Klee, Andy Warhol, and many others, it’s proof that Kimball is among the most serious critics now writing. If you’re at all interested in modern art–or perhaps that should read Modern art, for Kimball (like his colleague Hilton Kramer at the New Criterion) is a strong defender of High Modernism against the postmodern degradations of more recent art–then you should get this book. To get it, however, you have to go online and order it at www.cybereditions.com, for “Art’s Prospect” is the product of yet another attempt to publish books with a technique called “print-on-demand.” Print-on-demand is an idea whose time has come–and gone, come again, gone again, and come back for a positively final appearance, like the widely advertised farewell benefit for an actor whom you’ve never seen and probably wouldn’t much like even if you had seen him. But the reason the idea keeps coming back is that there’s actually something to it, if only anybody could figure out what that is. Print-on-demand is a child of the changes desktop computers brought to publishing. From the steam-driven press of the 1850s on, printing basically belonged to organizations large enough to afford the layout and production technology–through all its various incarnations: offset printing, rotogravure, lithography, hot type, linotype, and (oh, Lord, remember?) those awful proprietary VAX systems with the green-screened dumb terminals that newspapers and publishing houses used for layout in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, however, you can easily design a book yourself. Your PC probably came with some junky, stripped-down version of a desktop-publishing program like Quark and a photo-manipulation program like Photoshop–but the programs themselves are the ones that most publishers of books and magazines are using. Nobody needs to store and preserve expensive plates anymore, much less locked-down frames of lead print. Publishers nowadays do just what you would do: send a book’s computerized information to a press to print. So, the idea goes, why not simply print a copy of the book when it’s wanted? The book is all designed, sitting in the computer. Somebody orders a copy and, wham, it’s printed. No more huge investments in risky propositions, no more warehousing, no more wastage, no more inventory taxes, for that matter (and thank you, Jimmy Carter, for that little burden on the publishing industry). THE ANSWER to why not print-on-demand turns out to be marketing and distribution. How do you display the book? How do you advertise it? How do you bypass the bookstore that stands between the publisher and the reader? Every time it looks as though the Internet is going to solve this problem, print-on-demand bubbles back up into view. And every time the Internet returns to traditional marketing techniques, the idea sinks away. Still, Cybereditions has the advantage of having lured the talents of Denis Dutton, New Zealand’s premier literary critic and literary criticism’s reigning entrepreneurial spirit. Dutton is the longtime editor of a journal called Philosophy and Literature, most famous for its annual “bad writing” award, given to the academic with the most impenetrable piece of prose in the preceding year. He’s also the moving force behind “Arts & Letters Daily” (www.aldaily.com), the most successful highbrow site on the Web. Given his previous successes, Dutton may be enough to make this incarnation of print-on-demand fly. The idea is to make available classic and hard-to-find works for which there is a small but perduring demand. Cybereditions titles include Jonathan Yardley’s “Our Kind of People,” Brian Boyd’s “Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness,” and Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich’s “The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics.” If it’s going to publish works like these–and Roger Kimball’s “Art’s Prospect”–then it has every chance it needs. –J. Bottum
