An independent publication covering art, history, literature, visual storytelling, and the tools and decisions behind serious independent publishing.
Self-publishing is the majority of publishing now, by volume. The number of titles published annually through Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, and similar platforms exceeds traditional publishing output by orders of magnitude. This fact is cited both as evidence of a democratized …
Street photography has always operated in a zone of contested consent. The photographer moves through public space, makes images of people who did not …
Most writers who start blogs on hosted platforms eventually encounter the same problem. The platform changes its algorithm, adjusts its monetization …
Montaigne invented the essay by accident. He was not trying to create a literary form. He was trying to think on the page, using his own experience …
The separation of text and image in literary publishing is relatively recent and probably temporary. For most of the history of the book, illustration …
The Rijksmuseum Research Library was not designed to be convenient. It was designed to be overwhelming. Four floors of floor-to-ceiling shelving …
Every decade produces a version of the claim that the novel is dying. The novel has survived the claim every time, though not always in the same form. …
The illuminated manuscript is easy to misread as luxury. The floral borders, the painted miniatures, the red rubrication that punctuates columns of …
The photo essay was a form. It had a grammar. A sequence of images, usually between eight and twenty, selected and ordered to carry a narrative or …
On Photography was published in 1977 and has not been out of print since. That fact alone suggests Sontag was doing something more than journalism. …
