od, I love Featherproof.  Observe below as they wreak havoc on their newest title, Scorch Atlas, by Blake Butler, “A novel of 14 interlocking stories set in ruined American locales where birds speak gibberish, the sky rains gravel, and millions starve, disappear or grow coats of mold.”  The book releases on 9/9/09, but you can pre-order a destroyed or a pristine copy now from their site.  Rock on.

hicago publishing twitter-ers to follow:

draccah – Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks
featherproof - Chicago-based Indy publisher
gapersblock – Chicago news source Gapers Block
maureenlipinski- new Chicago author of A Bump in the Road
stopsmiling – Chicago-based magazine and soon-to-be book press

¶ View In Entirety… ⇒

ou won’t want to miss this summer’s literature packed tour from Featherproof Books, Chicago’s indie superstar in the publishing world. Their Dollar Store Summer Tour of Awesomeness (their title, not mine) will kick off at The Hideout on June 28th from 1-6 pm. For $8 dollars you’ll hear readings from over twenty authors, many of whom have been published by Featherproof. They’re also raffling off a “Featherproof-themed bike” (whatever that looks like) and a bunch of goodies, including a mini book, all the bbq you can eat, a raffle ticket (for the bike), and some other stuff.

The entire tour will encompass 11 cities in 14 days. See the Dollar Store site for the complete schedule.

Grow is a “squeaky-green” children’s book.  According to the liner notes, Beaton and Bradley used “the greenest” local printer and “enlisted a group of excellent graphic design students to hand-bind the book,” both exceptionally worthy causes.  Featherproof publishes the book, so they’re local as well.  Each set of heavy paper-board pages features, on the left side, a word or phrase and a daily time line spanning from 8:00 to 8:00. The right side features a white dotted-line design evocative of an environmental issue relating to the facing page and set against a uniquely colored background, ten in all.  According to Featherproof’s website, the book was designed to “take a child through a typical day, implementing a routine that is environmentally and socially sound” and to “benefit the environment, community, health, and a child’s awareness of self in the larger world.”

This book pushes the envelope. ¶ View In Entirety… ⇒

Featherproof’s co-publisher Jonathan Messinger speaks about the much talked-about Paper Egg Books, working as an independent publisher and digital publishing as the way of the future over at The Scowl.

Featherproof has all kinds of interesting and innovative things going on. We recently ran a piece on their new press Paper Egg Books, and now we’re reviewing their free mini-books.

The mini-books at Featherproof are short stories (often VERY short, e.g. 300-3,000 words) from both famous and unknown authors that are formatted in such a way that they can be printed out on several pieces of paper and folded into neat little mini-books that you can hold in your hands. Additionally they have cute cover images and information on the authors, with photos, in the back of the books. Their list of mini-books is relatively huge, and could be used as a great way to discover a new author. They also have excerpts from recently published books in mini-book form.

I printed out two of their mini-books today to see what they were like. The books I chose were Peanuts and the Amazing Gro-Beast by Chris Bower, which was the first book on the list and Every Night is Bluegrass night by Tobias carroll, which I chose at random. I’ll do a review for the individual books below.

As far as the mini-books are concerned, I have to say that I was somewhat charmed. It was nice to hold a little object in my hands that felt and looked somewhat like a book, though I have to say that the print was quite small and somewhat annoying to my eyes. I did think to myself that if these mini-books were available as well produced, graphically beautiful PDFs that could be read paperlessly, the same act of providing free literature and promoting new authors could be achieved with less work for the reader and less stress for the environment.

But that’s just me, always looking for ways to make publishing digital.

As far as the books go, here’s what I have to say:

Every Night is Bluegrass Night by Tobias Carroll

Of the two mini-books I read, this was without argument the more disappointing of the two. There was absolutely no character description and very little character development, even though there were lots of characters, which always leaves me, a visual reader, feeling lost and having to look back at names (which isn’t a good thing when your story is only nine mini-pages long). Furthermore, there were grammatical errors in the beginning, including switching back and forth from past to present tense (urgh), and logical errors such as a character fitting a new string to his banjo a few hours before a performance (which players of stringed instruments know is always a bad idea, as new strings stretch). It seemed to me that the story was trying to achieve a kind of character and scene analysis of a few musicians at a specific point in their lives together, but the scene wasn’t clearly presented, and neither were the characters. The dialogue, too, was weak and awkward. This story deserves a 4 |10.

Peanuts and the Amazing Gro-Beast by Chris Bower

This is the newest of Featherproof’s mini-books, and it’s very abstract. It’s decently written, in that it keeps you moving along, wondering what the hell is going on. I liked the scene dressing, which is to say that I felt like I could see the action of the scenes as they unfolded. Not too much information, not too little. Just right. The story is interjected with a poem about halfway through that was supposedly written by the narrator. I actually kind of liked the poem because it brings the act of writing a poem into the poem in a rather neat way. All in all, the story was evocative, but I think the abstraction, at times, veers in the direction of being abstraction for abstraction’s sake. I don’t have a problem with things being crazy (I loved Ubik by Philip K. Dick) but I like them to be crazy for a reason or for them to be crazy in order to show me something as a reader–to impart an idea. Senseless abstraction is frustrating, from the standpoint of the reader, it seems like the author is being like, “you think THAT was crazy, check out how much crazier I can make this! Man am I a crazy author!” Which is great if you can do it well, but worthless if there isn’t a reason for it.

Which, in all honesty, is how I feel about all writing.

In any case, I think I’d give Peanuts and the Amazing Gro-Beast a 6 | 10. As you can see, I didn’t actually like the content of either mini-book very much. I am aware that this is a very small sampling of what Featherproof has to offer, so I wouldn’t take this as a solid review of everything they have. I would like to know, however, if any of you have read a Featherproof mini-book and been blown away.

ote from the editor: this post has been revised.

I just stumbled on this article at Publisher’s Weekly about a new press at Featherproof called Paper Egg Books. Basically, you pay the press $20.00 upfront as a subscription fee (renewed every year unless you tell them otherwise, much like the CTA) and they mail you a book every six months.

At first I thought this might be a decent idea, but open further inspection, most of the books published by Featherproof can be purchased for about ten dollars anyway, so you’re not really saving any money by subscribing. You’re also not getting to pick out books that you might like. You also don’t know exactly when you’ll be receiving your books from Paper Egg. All in all, I have to ask what the point of this press is, because I can’t actually think of a way in which this is better than just buying books straight from Featherpress. I suppose you get free shipping, and you don’t have to spend time picking out books, though the drawback of that is that you’ll never know if you like what you’ll be getting. I can’t say that I’d be willing to pay $20 a year for this service.

In any case, as an added incentive to subscribe, Paper Egg is providing a free copy of AM/PM by Amelia Gray to the first 250 subscribers. Are you planning on giving this a shot, and if so, why?