IFSF Publishing walks into a Barnes and Noble bookstore

As a publisher, I don't do what I do for money; I've been a businessman and don't necessarily want to be one again. 

I often have to strongly resist the businessman that still remains in me to take on the publishing projects I take on, knowing as a businessman that the best I can do as a publisher is to break even.

I think of publishing as an art, the art of bringing something of beauty into the world that hadn't existed before. The books I publish, whatever else they are, are essentially art projects where the thought of money is either stashed offstage for awhile or pushed so far to the background that it ceases altogether to perform its normal capitalistic function. All energy is directed toward the making of the book, which is to fulfill as completely as possible the author's (artist's) conscious and unconscious intentions in a physical object affectionately known as a, "book."

As publisher I have the privilege of collaborating with artist's who consciously choose to partner with a purposely small press like mine, I SF, not for money--though none of them are socialist's or god forbid, Marxist's, as far as I know--but for the purpose of having their work expressed with as much distance from the dictates of the marketplace as possible. Almost all my recompense as publisher is the pleasure of collaborating with vital, engaged people, people like Thomas Fuller whose funny and prescient book, Monsieur Ambivalence, came to me unbidden and with whom I now have a deep and abiding friendship; Dawn McGuire, the neurologist poet whose work with aphasia patients led her to write The Aphasia Cafe and whose new book, American Dream with Exit Wound, examines the experience of US vets returning from the 'forever' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Renate Stendhal, who now makes her home in Point Reyes, California but who lived in Paris in the late 1960's and 70's, the epicenter of the great global cultural shift then taking place, and has written a gorgeous memoir of that place and time, Kiss Me Again, Paris to be released in June, 2017. Often these collaborations between publisher and artist become real and sustaining friendships and, if not friendship, then at the very least both share the good feelings of having produced something worthwhile together.

Walking around the huge Barnes and Noble bookstore, killing time while waiting for my car to be repaired nearby, I look to see if any of the twenty books in the IFSF catalog are on the shelves, knowing not one of them is, knowing why they aren't,  thinking that's perfectly ok.