System D business is related to the “black market” or the “gray market.” That is, the materials being marketed are small, the venue may be a cart or stall that is not licensed or that moves, the customers don’t have much money, and the business is beneath notice, unlicensed and untaxed. Maybe illegal, not so often criminalized. In Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth the journalist suggests that half of the world’s economy is rising to two-thirds very quickly.
In French it’s called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, In China the word is shanzhai which refers to the mountain hideouts of bandits in the Middle Ages. (“Shanghai” as in kidnapping sailing crews?) But it has come to mean cloned or knockoff-branded goods like those sold on sidewalks in major cities. It’s close to what I’ve been calling “interstitial,” the small services like house-cleaning or cake-decorating that people do informally. The evidence Neuwirth presents is mostly about the Third World, but I suspect there’s a lot of it wherever there are poor people, including urban ghettoes, small towns, and reservations.
I suspect that books are entering this context. They are now cheap to make, even as paper. When a child, I was given newsprint scrapbooks in which I drew “graphic” stories. They are ephemera, most such “books” are destroyed or abandoned along the way, but I’ve kept mine. They might be interesting as clues to a child’s mind. I can easily imagine a wonderful compilation of the kind of “newspapers” that kids used to peck out on toy typewriters and distribute to the households of the block. What about all the yearbooks, the local histories, the business directories?
Regional ephemera can be valuable. A used book business in Spokane, Buckingham Books, specializes in things “Western” and sells ancient “wanted” posters or brochures for immigrants to the prairies. A man in Minnesota collects all he can find about Kovar equipment because his grandfather founded the company. He wants brochures, snapshots, even letters of agreement. The standard for ephemera is not brilliant writing or deep insight, but rather sentiment and minutia.
Most of this stuff is not valued or admired. All his working life my father kept a little shirt pocket notebook in which he noted facts as well as info about the photos he took, partly for business and partly for family or “just because.” He noted f-stops and distances, the names of people, the names of geographical features (the heights of all mountains), and miscellaneous things he ran across through the day. He wrote with the same mechanical pencils he used to dig wax out of his ears. The notepads always had a rubber band on them and he filed them in chronological order in shoeboxes. When he died my mother sent all of them to the dump. For all she knew, there might have been checks or hundred dollar bills in there.
When my mother died, I took the family photo albums and posted all the early photos my father took in Swan River, Manitoba, to a blog: www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. Now and then someone up there discovers the blog and adds more comments, names of places and people, how they’ve changed over the years.
I have my paternal grandmother’s journals, or at least some of them. I’ve typed some of them into the computer so cousins could share them. The most interesting was about camping on a parking lot in Portland OR in their home-made Ranger RV while they tried to decide whether to move from the Canadian prairie to the verdant Pacific North West. They did, just in time for the Depression to blind-side them.
On my mother’s side was a box of letters written from Andersonville, the notorious prison camp, plus a ring made there by filing a bone button. My brother took these. He has not typed them up or photocopied them. He is a secretive man who does not communicate. Has been that way since his earliest years, so it must be hard-wired. He has no children. As a youngster he read the Mackinley Kantor book called “Andersonville” and was deeply moved. Privately.
Some day I’ll get a book out the schism between my contentious Irish maternal grandfather and my educated Scots paternal grandfather and their contrasting values. I don’t think I ever saw them in the same room together. Then I will want letters and journals and historical documents about those people, so similar and so different, unless I just invent the struggle in my own head. That may be inevitable anyway.
Writers’ first drafts and resources or even an artist’s musings and scribbles on placemats or calendar backs can be valuable to scholars. The difficulty now is that much of that sort of thing -- we all realize -- is digital, so ephemeral as to be phantom. And yet you can’t stamp it out. My former co-writer and I decided to remove the manuscript of a book from the Internet -- it can’t be done. The thing pops back up on Google when you least expect it. The giant turbines of cloud storage have created something like those cycles we learned in elementary science: how the water goes into the air as vapor, becomes clouds, rains back on the land, where it forms streams and runs into the sea again.
Every cop writes reports that are saved. Every inspector of construction, plumbing, electricity; every nuisance complaint inspector writes reports. Think of the maps and diagrams and blueprints and floodplains, all recorded on paper in the past, but now? Homeland Security is demanding proof of citizenship from people who came to this country as small children decades ago -- documentation: birth certificates, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses and certificates, diplomas, proof of membership. But those things disappear.
So what’s the difference between all this printing and actual “publishing” in the old-fashioned sense? The question came up between two friends of mine who had separately taken poems, written in one case by a husband and in another by a mother, typed them, devised a cover, stapled them, and distributed them to family and friends. Many people do this, meaning it as an honor and memento. Is it publishing?
Here’s the checklist:
1. Acquisition: finding something to publish
2. Curating: deciding whether it is worthwhile or not and choosing the best examples.
3. Editing
4. Illustration: finding photos or graphics.
5. Printing.
6. Binding
7. Distributing.
You’ll notice there’s no money changing hands. Is it possibly publishing if no money changes hands? How many people have to read it to consider it “published?” Isn’t this blog published?
I’ve lived with stacks of paper all my life, constantly fighting to get it sorted, filed, located. Most of it is just ephemera, miscellaneous, valueless except to me. Stray notes. Clips. But somewhere there is a theatre program autographed by Peter Ustinov and a program for “The Visit” signed by the Lunts, and somewhere there is an 8X10 photo of Audie Murphy, signed by him. (I wrote him a fan letter -- I was ten.) I’ve been looking for them for years. Might be worth money! But which box are they in?
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