Click here for the podcast announcement of The Nowhere Library!
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Commission Request E-mail address: nowherelibrary@mail.com
INTRODUCING THE NOWHERE LIBRARY
Never before have so many people had such rapid access to so much valuable information.
Accessing old and rare materials has never been easier, as libraries and universities around the world scan and upload books onto internet sites like Archive.org, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg. Amazon’s “Kindle” makes a great many texts available cheaply and easily to anybody who wants them. This is an absolute blessing for “e-archivists” and independent researchers, as it is no longer necessary to travel miles and miles to get a peek at copy of a particularly precious book. Now, in many cases, all it takes is the click of a mouse.
However, accessing something digitally is not the same as possessing it physically. You can “buy” an ebook but, often, you can’t download it. In other words, you can rent an ebook, not own it. Digital books which were once available online suddenly disappear. Important but inconvenient news articles vanish. The power goes out. In all these cases, the common factor is this: you are not in control of your library.
Despite all of our fancy new toys, physical media is still the best and most reliable media. The batteries never run out on a book. Nobody can delete a book remotely with the push of a button. Physically possessing crucial texts is of the utmost importance. Building a personal library is one of the best investments one can make.
With all that in mind, I present The Nowhere Library. The idea here is simple: institutions around the world put a bunch of books into the internet (sometimes destroying the physical volume in the process), and I pull them right back “out” of the internet. I print them and make real, tangible, physical copies. Of course, I’m not actually removing anything from anywhere, but you get the point. As the big libraries race to digitize, we should race to the printing press before it’s too late.
The plan for this project at this point is to take important and interesting books which are out of copyright and print clear, affordable copies of them for wide distribution. Whenever possible, these will be facsimile reproductions, always watermark free, with wide margins mimicking old-fashioned printing, making each book a valuable resource for independent researchers who like to take notes in their margins while also providing an unimposing, uncluttered, and all-around aesthetically pleasant reading experience. All editing, formatting, and cover-design is by me; however, for the time-being, actual printing and distribution is out-sourced. Obviously, this is not an ideal arrangement, but I’ve got to start somewhere. My hope is that eventually I will accrue enough capital to become fully independent in this endeavor.
Finally, because I am one man and there are a lot of books out there, I’m not going to think of all the really important stuff that needs to get printed. That’s where you come in. There are already companies which reprint old books, yes; but I want to expand that model to incorporate the desires and fill the needs of the consumers. I want to make this “open-sourced.” Simply said, this means that I will take requests. If there is a book (fictional or non-fictional), or a collection of essays or articles that you think belongs in The Nowhere Library and ought to be widely distributed, you can reach out to me (at nowherelibrary@mail.com) and we can discuss the creation of a cheap, accessible, physical edition thereof. Of course, there will be a fee – putting together just one volume can take many hours, and the longer the volume is the more hours it will take, plus satisfying a request will take away from time which I could be spending planning a podcast or working on another book – and there will also be certain stipulations, the most important one being that the work in question must be out of copyright (I’m not trying to get sued). That said, my hope is that you will help me to expand the catalogue of The Nowhere Library.
For the time being, my catalogue is fairly small; I hope to expand it consistently and fairly frequently. Of course, I’ve got many plans and ideas regarding what to print in the future, but I’ll keep those plans to myself for now and present you with the limited, initial-release catalogue of The Nowhere Library.
BOOKSTORE CATALOGUE
(For my book, The Story of Nowhere, click here.)
