leftovers, part 5

Adam Bellow, a longtime publishing professional, has launched an innovative undertaking that looks very promising (it’s a simple, elegant idea). It marries the latest in technology (print-on-demand) with one of the oldest traditions in publishing: pamphleteering. The CJR Daily interviewed Bellow back in December:

His newest venture has as its goal no less than, as his Web site puts it, “to reinvent the book for the 21st century.” Bellow wants to do this by bringing back the art of pamphleteering. In a series of 4-by-6 inch, $4 booklets with an average of 60 to 80 pages each, he hopes to create a new, affordable forum for presenting ideas.

Bellow is consciously trying to tap into the tradition of pamphlet wars that accompanied “all the great social and political and scientific and religious revolutions in Western history… from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.”
He also notes the climate and times we live in as factors that make short books (not to mention short books that can be delivered electronically) sound so appealing:

[P]eople don’t have time to take in all the information that is thrown at them. And this in a period when the tone and the level of public intellectual argument in this country has been adversely affected by both the media revolution and by current events. It’s been polarized and coarsened by the political climate. It’s also been made shallower and more superficial by the media environment.

Excellent points, both. Bellow continues:

So that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, I noticed the explosion of activity on the Internet. After 9/11 there was this huge explosion. I think it can best be described cosmologically. First there is a big bang. Thousands and thousands of individual blogs are spewed out. Nobody reads them in particular. They are all just little points sort of flickering in the cosmic gloom. But over time, because the Internet is a kind of pure intellectual democracy, little aggregations form. People are drawn to one another by common interests. And at the same time, certain individuals emerge as large planetary bodies, very often surrounded by circles of other people who share their interests.

Best of all, Bellow gets the power of the blogosphere.
Sounds promising. I’ll be watching.