Making Literature Now

The editors of McSweeney's literary quarterly and press have long assumed we want to know how their work is done, have assumed that their readers somehow cannot help but ask. And these editors, which include most prominently the writer and book designer Dave Eggers, have been right. At first, culture watchers were curious about how the literary quarterly came to be, because the enterprise seemed far-fetched at its founding in 1998: McSweeney's was to be a quarterly that would thrive without compromise with the market; it was initially focused on humor writing, a nearly nonexistent market in print; and Eggers required that early submissions be explicitly rejected by mainstream venues, making the quarterly a home for writing that was experimental or sometimes — we should admit it — simply raggedy. The retro book design and increasing elaborateness of the quarterly's bindings and graphic art, and the ever-changing literary ideas that surge through issue after issue, have made questions about how it did its work relevant in new ways as the growth of the internet has raised predictable worries about the future of the book. How was it possible to lavish these objects with editing and embossing when the ebook was making paper itself look antique? So the question about how Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the books that soon joined it under the McSweeney's colophon are made has persisted throughout the enterprise, and the editors have been obliging in answering it, dedicated to showing, in loving detail, how books — or at least, their books — are made.

Those accounts have been focused on the practicalities of book production, and have often taken the form of detailed cost breakdowns, like this one from the first issue:

TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION: this journal, of which 2,500 copies were made, cost $4,109 to print (approx. $1.64 copy). Shipping to and from Iceland, where this was most assuredly printed, was about $1,400, bringing the total bill to about $5,509.

Issue 5 reprinted an invoice from the printer in Iceland showing what all the different elements cost, right down to the optional shrink-wrap. The December 2009 issue, no. 33, an old-time, one-off broadsheet newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama, had a whole section devoted to "print runs and costs." And a deluxe version of this impulse rolls out in full color in The Art of McSweeney's, a coffee-table retrospective published in 2010 (Figure 1.1). It features drafts of cover designs, commentaries about paper stock, and discussion of the technical details associated with die-cut covers and the French flaps of issue 12. We even see the Oddi print shop in Iceland, the staff there, their machines. Each of these examples can be unpacked: the early costing out justifies, and implicitly apologizes for, the price charged to readers in an effort to rinse the transaction of commercial traces; The Art of McSweeney's documents the highly regarded book design work of Dave Eggers and also honors the other kinds of workers — factory workers, writers, editorial staff — who play a part in making beautiful books; the Panorama's accounting implicitly argues that the newspaper can flourish as a medium even in the virtual age.

But from first to last, despite the varying aims these descriptions of process serve, they have been framed by a DIY exhortation: it is possible to make the books you want to read and hold. "Impossible, You Say? Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus," declares a splash page at the front of The Art of McSweeney's, and a personal letter from Dave Eggers goes on to encourage the faint of heart. It is a message rooted in the anticommercial DIY ethic of punk in the 1970s and 1980s, and in its spin-off, the zine culture of the 1990s. That's where Eggers, McSweeney's founder, got his start making the short-lived cult zine Might, based in San Francisco, downstairs from the offices of another little start-up called Wired. And there is anecdotal evidence that these accounts of the bookmaking process did in fact inspire others to make books that would transcend the subgenre of the zine world, just as Wired did and McSweeney's has. Notably, Mark Greif, one of the editors and founders of the journal n+1, acknowledges that he and his collaborators studied the accounting statements in the early McSweeney's issues before they launched n+1, and decided that making a journal was financially within reach on the basis of the evidence they saw there.

But of course the "making of" story is a feature of contemporary media culture that transcends McSweeney's and these materialist versions of it. The rise of the DVD film release, with its deleted scenes and director commentary, has made a stand-alone documentary genre into the expected side dish at any home viewing. The "making of" story answers not only the film geek's love of craft but also the star hound's love of gossip. Its literary forms are less ubiquitously packaged with the literary object itself, although we see them sometimes in the "P. S." guides appended to paperbacks aimed at the book club market. More frequently, the "making of" story emerges from Terry Gross's or Oprah's interview couch, from the little prefaces before book-tour readings, and from the industrious work of reviewers and academics. And McSweeney's doesn't neglect this version of the "making of" story for its own books, either. Alongside the numbers and invoices and stories about cardboard, we find another kind of process described in McSweeney's: the process of how the content of the magazine comes to be and who is writing it. In this respect, the quarterly's self-representations become more vexed, and to understand them, a little background will help. The foundational fact is that Eggers became famous as a writer by writing about himself and his family, which is to say, he became famous by revealing, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the process by which he himself was made.

Pushing Back on Backstories

Eggers built a successful career on the platform of stories about process, stories that at the beginning were identical with self-revelation of various kinds; early responses to that debut have conditioned his subsequent relationship with the media, with an animus reminiscent of Philip Roth's decades-long response to Iriving Howe's critique of Portnoy's Complaint. Eggers became wary of people interested in him as a person, especially after a family tragedy made his public life even more fraught. The experience has made Eggers's relationship to the memoir, and to nonfiction writing more generally, especially "complicated"; in writing about living people now — in What Is the What and Zeitoun — he takes a Hippocratic approach: First, do no harm.

Despite Eggers's undeniable suffering, a certain schadenfreude was also projected...