About Granary Books

For nearly forty years, Granary Books has brought together writers, artists, and bookmakers to investigate verbal/visual relations in the time-honored spirit of independent publishing. Granary’s mission—to produce, promote, document, and theorize new works exploring the intersection of word, image, and page—has earned the Press a reputation as one of the most unique and significant small publishers operating today.


Archives and Rare Books

Our project has been strengthened by our continued involvement in the organization, preservation, and sale of archives, manuscripts, and rare books by important contemporary writers and artists. While publishing remains central to Granary's purpose, we are also deeply involved with a widespread and local community of writers, poets, and artists.

Resources and Community

For years Granary occupied a gallery space in SoHo, hosting countless public events, lectures, and readings while curating exhibits related to books, book art, poetry, and writing. Now, from headquarters on Mercer Street, recent projects include Threads Talks Series, a book with audio recordings available on Penn Sound; From a Secret Location, a digital repository of little magazines, small presses, and other materials from the mimeo area; and continued involvement in exhibitions and publishing.

Publishing

We believe that Granary’s publishing, preservation, and community outreach has significant long-term implications for the fields of writing and book art. Since the mid-nineties, Granary has sought to produce, promote, and contextualize scholarship investigating an emerging history of small press publishing, poetry, and artists’ books. Many of the books we have produced in this vein, including Johanna Drucker’s essential The Century of Artists’ Books, Jerome Rothenberg and Steve Clay’s A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing, and Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips’s A Secret Location on the Lower East Side are now being used as textbooks at the college level, further opening and legitimizing the field for a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

Granary Books remains committed to publishing innovative written and visual work, observing progressive scholarship, and supporting adventurous bookmaking while exploring the relationships between seeing and reading, reading and seeking.

Standing Orders

The best and simplest way to acquire our books is though the standing order / subscription plan. Subscribers to the press automatically receive new publications (both trade and limited) in batches, once or twice each year. The standing order plan is friendly and affordable to many university library budgets and runs annually from July 1 to June 30.

To set up a standing order or for more information, please contact us at info@granarybooks.com.

Granary Books is:

Steve Clay (director)       

Steve Clay is the longtime founder and publisher of Granary Books, as well as an editor, curator, archivist, and writer specializing in literature and art of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. He is the author or editor of several volumes including Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins with Ken Friedman, Threads Talk Series with Kyle Schlesinger, A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing with Jerome Rothenberg, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980, with Rodney Phillips and Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005, with Jerome Rothenberg. He lives in New York City and Ancramdale, NY.

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (director)

Mary Catherine (M.C.) Kinniburgh specializes in archives and artists' books at Granary Books. She is the author of Wild Intelligence: The Politics of Knowledge and Postwar American Poets' Libraries (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022); a bibliography and oral history of Maureen Owen's Telephone Books and magazine (with University at Buffalo's Among the Neighbors series); and an editor of works by Gregory Corso and Mary Korte (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative). Prior to Granary Books, she was a literary manuscripts specialist and curatorial associate at The New York Public Library in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College. She publishes TKS Books, a small edition imprint whose works are held in special collections libraries throughout North America.

Kinniburgh is a member of the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Society for Textual Scholarship. She holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY in English, an M.A. from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature, and a B.A. at the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar. She was named a Bright Young Bookseller in 2020 by Fine Books & Collections magazine, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Poetry Foundation, ArtForum, Literary Hub, and other publications.

Julie Harrison (editorial associate)

Julie Harrison is a New York-based artist and has been associated with Granary Books for over 25 years. She received an M.A. from New York University and a B.A. from the University of New Mexico. Her experimental process-driven work has garnered numerous awards and she has exhibited widely. Two books by Harrison were published by Granary Books (If It Rained Here and Debtor's Prison), and her work was included in A Book About Colab (And Related Activities) and M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues. For 18 years, Harrison was a professor of art at Stevens Institute of Technology where she founded the Art & Technology B.A. program. She lives in New York City. Read more at https://www.julie-harrison.com/about.

Conley Lowrance (rare books & archives associate)

Conley Lowrance specializes in post-war avant-garde American poetry, New York counterculture, and digital archives, and has attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar and Rare Book School. He is a poet and crime fiction writer whose work has been published by Bombay Gin, Columbia Journal, and the Stockholm Review of Books, among others. Artificial Respiration, an alchemical poem-collage sequence written in collaboration with the artist Sarah Monks, was published by TKS in 2020. Prior to joining Granary Books, he was involved in academic administration for over a decade and served as Manager of Academic Programs at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Program Manager at the Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.