Lost & Found General Editor Ammiel Alcalay interviews Lost & Found Editor Mary Catherine Kinniburgh on the origins and journey from CUNY Graduate Center student and Lost & Found scholar to her present position as partner with Granary Books—and the book that she wrote along the way. Her book Wild Intelligence: Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America published by University of Massachusetts Press (2022) in collaboration with Lost & Found Elsewhere takes up case studies of four poets and their libraries: Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992). Here...

By Johanna Drucker, originally published in The Codex Papers: Volume One. Berkeley: Codex Foundation, 2018. The essay was reprinted by Tibetan Kite Society/Granary Books on the occasion of an exhibition by the same name at Poets House in Spring 2020.

OVERVIEW

Granary Books occupies a singular place in the American publishing landscape. Through its commitment to work at the intersection of current literature, art, and book production, Granary exists at the living edge of culture, producing books that participate in contemporary aesthetics as well as offer evidence of it. Few editors have positioned themselves so fully within the independent mainstream, or had the...

William Corbett. "The Beginning of Granary Books: An Interview with Steve Clay." The Paris Review. Feb. 1, 2016. 

Last September, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library opened “The Book Undone: Thirty Years of Granary Books,” an exhibition celebrating Columbia’s purchase of the Granary Books archive. “It’s difficult to fully describe the range and impact of Steve Clay’s Granary Books,” wrote Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. “Beginning in 1985 he has concocted a mix of poets, artists, printers and craftspeople whose work defines an era and fundamentally shapes our understanding...

By Elliot David, originally published on Art Slut. Feb. 2007.

We’ve reached a privileged historical moment when keeping an archive can be a work of art.

Granary Books publisher Steve Clay knows everything: Ask him. Anything. Ask him anything about the history of the small press: its manufacturers, distributors, spine binders, font designers and content providers. Ask him about poetics on film, semiotics collectives, brushless painters, the conductors of orchestral space concepts. Ask him about your grandmother’s diary entries re: your grandfather’s erectile dysfunction. Ask him, and he’ll tell you what you want to know, speak it softy and...

Hosted on Penn Sound, "Cross Cultural Poetics" is produced at the stations of KAOS 89.3FM, in Olympia, Washington. Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including A Message Back And Other Furors (Chax), The Library Of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Tower Of Diverse Shores (Talisman House), Words Before The Articulate (Talisman House), Language As Responsibility (Tinfish Editions), At Element (Talisman House) and IF. (Talisman House). His book The New Babel: Towards a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press) is inclusive of poetry, essay and transcribed interviews from this program. 

Keys to the City

With Kyle Schlesinger at the Penn Club, London, England. Oct. 24, 2004. A verision of this interview was published in Ampersand: The Quartlery Journal of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts, vol. 24, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 5–7.

KS I’m interested in the intersection of ontology and the book — particularly the question of how, where, and in what sense it exists. I feel that most books, particularly the handmade, exude a residual element of collaboration long after the printer and papermaker, typecaster and binder, calligrapher and lithographer, etc. have done their work. At Granary, you’ve clearly taken collaboration to...

By Claire MacDonald, originally published in Performance Research, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), 135–137.

When Will the Book Be Done? Granary's Books¹
Edited by Steven Clay, preface by Charles Bernstein
New York: Granary Books, 2001

The Book of the Book: Some Works and
Projections about the Book and Writing²
Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay
New York: Granary Books, 2000

A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980³
A Sourcebook of Information by Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips
New York: The New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998

Figuring the Word: Essays on Books...

By Steve Clay, originally printed as introduction for When will the book be done? Granary's books. Granary Books, 2001.

The first item that I identify as a Granary Books¹ publication was actually published by Origin Books² in 1986—Wee Lorine Niedecker by Jonathan Williams. It embodies several elements that remain important to me now, some fifteen years later, among which is an acute awareness of the "book" as a physical object. I write this in quotes because the work in question is not a book per se but presents a short poem by Mr. Williams, printed on a small piece of card...

By Jeffrey Beam. Originally published as "Three Books about Books." Oyster Boy Review 14 (Winter 2001): 52.

Jerome Rothenberg's always original and thought-provoking work within language and poetics has established ethnopoetics as a discipline encouraging expanded definitions of cultural artifacts. In these two books, he and his co-editors explore the meaning of "the book," envisioning a primal book written "out there" from which all manifestations of language spring. Proposing a book as a metaphor for imagining opens its interpretation to something more than a vessel for words; it becomes a communal theater of experience and instrument for action, facilitating invention and belief, communication...

Originally published as Elliot, Joe. “BACK TO BASICS: 3 Primers from Granary Books.” The Journal of Artists’ Books, (Spring 1995): 16-19. Viewable online.

Talespin by Susan Bee
Abstract Refuse by Ed Epping
A Passage by Buzz Spector

primer 1. An elementary textbook. 2. A book that covers the basics of any subject.
primer 2. A cap or tube containing a small amount of
explosive used to detonate the main explosive charge
of a firearm or mine. 2. An undercoat of paint or size
applied to prepare a surface, as for a painting.

Ed Epping's Abstract Refuse is subtitled "A Heteronymic Primer." Like any good primer, Epping's covers its subject; it collects examples, postulates rules, and...

Larry Fagin 

Larry Fagin grew up in New York, Hollywood, and Europe. He began associating with poets and writers in 1957, meeting David Meltzer in Los Angeles, and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso two years later in Paris. In 1962 he became part of the circle of poets around Jack Spicer in San Francisco, and befriended Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Robert Duncan. At the end of 1965 he traveled to London where he lived for two years and met his first wife, Joan Inglis. They returned to New York and settled in San Francisco for most of 1968. Clark Coolidge became a close friend. Returning to...

Edward Sanders 

Edward Sanders (b. 1939), is a poet, historian and musician. He has published more than 20 books, including Tales of Beatnik Glory (4 volumes published in a single edition); 1968: A History in Verse; The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg; The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion; and Chekhov, a biography in verse of Anton Chekhov. His selected poems, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War: New and Selected Poems (1986–2009), was published by Coffee House Press. Da Capo Press published his memoir of the 1960s, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs...