Simply Designed, and In Great Quantity

There are books that I keep on my bookshelf because they are pleasurable artefacts to have around, even if I’m no great fan of the text that exists inside them. Occasionally, these objects are what you’d expect: leather-bound tomes and special editions, books that look like something out of a movie.

More often, they’re smaller books. Paperback novellas or chapbooks whose slim page-count is wrapped in a beautiful, simple design, turning what should be a weakness in the marketplace with regards to page count and paper quality into a strength:

I may care very little for Freud’s work, but I love this book. It’s a compact hundred pages long, four essays bundled together in a very pleasing package. Maybe 25,000 words in total, and part of the Great Loves series from Penguin that shares the same design aesthetic while being recognisably related to the longer Penguin Classics line. It’s not designed to take up much room on a shelf as a single volume, but when you line up all twenty books in the series, the aesthetic and packaging quickly combine with the series theme to occupy physical and intellectual space.

When I think about my long-term planning for Brain Jar Press, it’s books like this that sit in the back of my mind. I could quite happily spend the rest of my life writing short, sharp novellas and thin novels designed for a few hours of dedicated reading. Weird little stories and off-kilter pulp of thirty or forty thousand words, stand alone stories in disparate genres that feel a little slight until you line up a whole row of books on a shelf and see them unified by design and authorial habits.

It flies in the face of all sensible advice about going it alone as a publisher, makes each book more difficult to market because you’re speaking to existing fans instead of drawing in new readers who see the little cues in font and title that tell them “this is something you’ll love.”

But man, every time I pick up Freud’s book on my shelf, or look at the row of Tor.com novellas and James Paterson Bookshots lined up in a row, a little part of me is tempted to blow a few years just trying to make something like this work.