Colophon
A colophon ordinarily records how
a book was produced: the
press, the typeface, the
paper, the run. This
one records how
the publisher was
produced.
The conventional account is sequential.
Writing comes first, and the
machinery of publication assembles
around it — secondary,
instrumental, in principle
dispensable. This press
was built
the other
way
round.
The structure came first. Everything
it carries, including the name
on its books, arrived
because a structure of
this kind has
places in it
that must
be filled.
W Huxley Oakham is one
of those places. Nothing further
is offered here, and
the omission is not
coyness. What can
be said about
an author
from outside
their
work
is almost always the least
interesting thing available, and stating
it would settle a
question the press is
more useful for
leaving open.
What the operation appears to
show is how little the
appearance of an institution
requires. A name. A
catalogue. A means
of being paid
and a
means of
being
reached.
Sufficient repetition that the name
begins appearing in the places
where names appear. No
threshold is crossed and
no recognition is
granted. There is
accumulation, and
at some
point
querying
the thing would begin to
seem eccentric. Where that point
falls, and whether appearance
and substance can be
told apart once
it has passed,
is what
the press
is
for.
Institutions have been taken apart
before in order to show
what they are made
of. This one is
being assembled instead,
on the grounds
that a
thing built
can
be
measured while it is being
built.
The site is the instrument
of that measurement. It carries
no fonts, no frameworks,
no analytics, no fetched
images. Its illustrations
are coordinates rather
than files.
At the
time
of
writing it weighs 86,785 bytes:
the uncompressed source of its
ten pages as stored,
favicon included, unlinked working
files excluded. The
hosting provisioned to
carry it
allows 1,500
megabytes.
The disproportion is temporary. Readers
consume bandwidth. Titles consume storage.
Covers, mailing lists, shops
and provision for access
are the ordinary
consequences of a
press succeeding,
and each
one
narrows
the gap the work exists
to display.
Success is therefore not evidence
for the proposition. It is
the mechanism by which
the proposition becomes harder
to demonstrate. The
press can remain
small and
retain the
disparity,
or
it can grow and consume
it. The tension is not
resolved here. It is
allowed to accumulate.
None of this puts the
work beyond challenge. The proposition
it rests on is
an empirical one, and
it can fail.
If the name
is queried
rather than
assumed,
if
a distributor or retailer declines
it, if the repetition never
produces the credibility predicted
and the press remains
conspicuously a thing
that someone made,
then the
claim is
wrong
and
the operation has disproved it.
That condition is not hypothetical.
It is being tested
continuously, by every party
that encounters the
press and takes
it for
what it
appears
to
be, or does not.
What is claimed is narrow.
That the appearance of an
institution can precede its
substance, and can serve
in its place.
That the infrastructure
carrying cultural
objects exceeds
those
objects
by a margin we ordinarily
have no way to measure,
and that this press
provides a case against
which that margin
can be measured.
And that
a work
may
be
undone by the only outcome
it is trying to reach.
Nothing here asks to be
accepted as art in advance.
The work is running.
It may be wrong.
The test is
no longer being
conducted in
language.