| Payseur & Schmidt: The Definitive Interview | |||||||||||||||||||
| An interview with Jeff VanderMeer | |||||||||||||||||||
| February 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||
When the blindfold came off, I was half-way up the Space Needle, standing in Jacob McMurray's apartment. Smiling, he pulled aside the steel-girder-colored drapes and I was looking down on Seattle through an early morning drizzle. "This is crazy," I said. His smile widened and he said, "I specialize in crazy." This is something he said often during the interview. He also would rant for long minutes on the excruciating impossibility of publishing a book in the form of a sushi roll, and yet show me detailed blueprints for the creation of this very impossibility. Even though Sven had left, I was beginning to wonder if this had been a good idea. But my doubts evaporated when we sat down on the red kidney-shaped seventies-inspired love seats and I began to ask the driven Jacob McMurray my questions. Jacob is a tall man with short legs and a short torso who likes bright clothing that looks dull. He is very terse and loquacious, wears a beard but is clean shaven, wears glasses with contacts ("for oracular simulation"), and in general conducted himself like a contradiction in mid-terms. What is not open to debate is the impact that he and his associates, Therese Littleton and Brooks Peck, have had on the publishing scene in just a very short time. Their very first book has been lauded and condemned for the very same qualities: eccentricity and conformity, meticulous design work and a rock-and-roll cavalier disdain for specifics. Few subjects were verboten, but Jacob would not answer questions about the connections between funding for P&S and a suspicious rash of coffee shop robberies in Seattle over the last year. Nor would he answer allegations that he and his associates once attended a rave with Madonna where they all assisted in dumping the famous singer in a huge pickling barrel. (In fact, I had to climb home after asking about this last subject, luckily at the end of my list of questions.)
When asked a few days after the interview to provide biographical notes, the founders of P&S provided me with the following:
Therese Littleton
Brooks Peck You've apparently been editing at Payseur since 1912. How have you managed to preserve your youthful good looks? 
Why thank you very much, Mr. VanderMeer, for the compliment. Our editor, Alice Schmidt, however, is not
well-versed in the email, unfortunately, so she has asked me (Jacob McMurray) to answer the questions for
you. I hope that's OK. I've been interning at the new Seattle Office of P&S for the past 6 months, working
with our art director, Ruby Joell Payseur, and my fellow interns Therese Littleton and Brooks Peck, to get the
new office up and running. I'm afraid I didn't know a whole lot about the lengthy history of this fine publishing
institution, but luckily, the home office in Cauheegan apparently thinks of our Seattle branch as its storage
closet, and shipped probably 50 boxes of corporate archive material when our office opened last year. So,
I've been going through that material, and I feel like I'm able to fairly coherently answer your questions.
Alice Schmidt, great-granddaughter of Hilde, assumed the post of editor-in-chief in 1996, despite significant complaints by the Cauheegan Ministry of Decency. What those complaints are aren't listed -- I can't imagine what they would be, since Ms. Schmidt has always been very kind to me.
I'm not sure how to answer this. I've had a hard week. A near psychotic break. Too much tea was consumed. You're
my Oprah and I, as a result, am your Mr. Frey. You've got me, Mr VanderMeer. I'll give you a couple of options:
Option A:
Option A:
Option A:
By the early 1930s, Payseur & Schmidt was seeing quite a lot of financial success from a string of hit Japanese
children's books, published by our Kyoto-based imprint Pinky Cheese Books. The Luffy and Zoro series by author
Atsuko Murata (Luffy and Zoro Love Their Mommy!, Luffy and Zoro's Bedtime Razzle, Luffy
and Zoro and the Happy Cannibals, etc.) really raked in millions of yen for the Cauheegan coffers. That
particular international success spurred on discussions at the home office about other worldly
expansions. Soon after, offices in Lisbon, Cairo, Xiang-Tao, Madras, Mahi Maho, Ngembe, and Stuttgart
were opened, mainly selling stock P&S titles translated (often poorly) into local dialect. Stuttgart
became a nice hub for us for northern Europe, and regular shipments were scheduled direct from Cauheegan
to Stuttgart via the Zeppelin Verstummt. As I'm writing this, I'm looking at this cool old photo of
Cauheegan residents mugging it up in front of the camera with the Verstummt tied to the ibn Ali mosque
tower in the background. Must've been quite a sight to see something as huge as that in the Wisconsin
skies. In any case, the Northern Europe office pretty much collapsed with the rise of Hitler and the
cessation of transatlantic dirigible flights by Goering -- and besides, P&S's communist leanings
at the time didn't jibe too well with all that national socialism.
We at Payseur & Schmidt have many and varied interests, and we hope that this is reflected in our
publications. It seems that we have a quite a diverse audience, but I would say as a general guide, people
who would like P&S releases are also discriminating appreciators of quality content, innovative design
and artwork, strangeness, wit, absurdity, scholarship, and categories similar.
At Payseur & Schmidt, as far as I can tell, the message handed down from the higher-ups seems to be to
take the long view on events in the publishing industry. Everything is cyclical in nature. Nothing is ever
original. The underground and the mainstream are yin/yang poles of each other, ever revolving. There's always
a new cool kid on the block and their always will be. What the nerd liked 5 years ago, the frat boy will
like today. Talk in clichés, axioms, adages, and meaningless sentence fragments. This is what is given
to us from the suits in that long, dark, smoky room on the seventh floor of the Cauheegan office.
But seriously, publishers like McSweeney's Press are great, because they revitalize the market in ways that the public has forgotten are important -- like production values. I'm not sure about that Eggers fellow, but the McSweeney's books and periodicals that I have seen are beautiful. I tend to buy quite a few of their releases -- just to check out the competition, you know -- and I find, funnily enough, that I end up not really reading them, but just enjoying them as the beautifully produced objects that they are. Of course, I remember back to the golden days when P&S was swimming in the mucho dinero and could afford such production values, but like I said before, we take the long view. It probably has something to do with the general attitude of people raised in Cauheegan (which was named after the Chippewa word for "perfection"). One of the regional history books that I recently read went on for some length about Cauheegan's founder, J. Tycho Jespersen. He was an explorer and taxidermist whose utopian leanings molded the Weltanshauung of the town. He built the town on a circular plan to emphasize unity, equality, and continuity. All the old Masonic buildings in town have that ubiquitous Miter/Trowel doodad, but it's always surrounded by what seems to be a stylized Ouroboros type figure. Totally weird if you ask me.
Thomas Disch actually has quite a lengthy history with Payseur & Schmidt. His first connection to us was
via the publication of The Brave Little Toaster: A Critical Examination and Dialectical Dissection,
by Franklin Schmidt-Harvey. Schmidt-Harvey's work was, for quite a time, considered among the best and most
revealing deconstructions of Disch's most renowned "kid's" book, allowing as it does the auctorial voice
to carry the weight of the analysis, rather than imposing external meaning of such concepts as "brave" and
"toaster" onto the reader's presuppositions. He became involved personally with Payseur & Schmidt in
the late 90s with a series of one-act plays penned and directed by himself and performed at the open air
amphitheatre in Cauheegan's Greenhill district in the summer of 2000. When he came to us with his idea of
a collaboration between himself and the SFnal "edu-core" band BloodHag, how could we say no? Listening to
him read Mecca: A Vision of the Next Crusade with the ambient background by BloodHag side-project
X's For Eyes is a feast for the ears. Just one of the extras you get with the purchase of our new
Mecca|Mettle release.
Personally, I think Disch is a fantastic man -- insanely intelligent, and sweet as anything. I remember visiting him in NYC several years ago and he took me to his favorite Italian pastry shop in Chinatown and bought several sfogliatelles, which I had never had before, and were excellent. Disch is one of a few writers that I truly hold in awe. He's a superb writer that is comfortable writing in any style or on any subject, and he has done so successfully. But the part that I like about him the most is that he's willing to write material that puts people out of their comfort zone, and moreover, he's does it gleefully and to anyone. No one is safe. He's sort of like the Frank Zappa of the publishing world. He does what he does, and does it well, and gleefully doesn't care who he pisses off. And that seems to turn off a lot of people, but that's what I love about him. And he's definitely respected for it.
Actually, I've worked at the SF Museum since before it opened, developing exhibits for the museum. I've
worked at SFM's sister institution, the Experience Music Project, for nearly a decade before that. My
curatorial work is pretty much independent of my intern position at Payseur & Schmidt. It really just
was a good fit, since P&S's Seattle Office was just opening and they really needed people that knew the
genre and had some sort of background in the arts and literature. It is a funny thing that McSweeney's
opened their 826 Seattle store and have an "outer space" theme -- probably a coincidence, but again,
it's good to have some competition. In any case, I heard early on about the intern positions at P&S
and applied, along with two of my colleague's here at SFM -- Therese Littleton and Brooks Peck. I tend to
do a lot of scanning of images, and photocopying, and answering emails, and fulfillment of orders. Sometimes
our art director, Ruby, lets me do a little pre-press work on Old Pearl, our letterpress that she still
insists on using for many projects. Therese is usually on the 2nd floor poring over the thousands of
submissions that we get every week. She weeds out the chaff and sends the nuggets off to the main
office, where Alice takes over. And Therese cleans the bathrooms. Brooks sends out all the condolence
letters (each hand-written!) and disinfects the keyboards, mostly. The Seattle Office is miniscule
compared to Cauheegan. It's frightening actually.
I do love books as artifacts (and artifice). For me, and I'm sure others at P&S would agree, a book
is not merely its content. The content is important, certainly, but the presentation, at least for us,
is of equal value. It's a hard thing to describe, and even justify. It reminds me of when I was really
into indie and punk rock, and I had a record label. With the punk and indie ethos, it wasn't cool to be
a format snob -- the whole idea was to get your music out to the people that had like interests -- the
music spoke the language, and you used the easiest tools at hand to deliver the message. In the early
punk days, when punk rock was a true underground movement and there was no money-making organization
behind it, the easiest way to spread your music was the audio tape. Why spend money to press vinyl
singles, when you could spread your music via cassette? Get the word out about new and cool bands by
making your own magazines using the new ubiquitous Xerox machine. Screen print or Xerox your own posters
for advertising your band. Since the important element was the music, spread the content and don't worry
about anything else.
This ethos totally influenced my tastes, and I still love the DIY ethos, which is a very vital part of starting a small press. But at the same time (if we transition to the print world), there is something about a book that has been designed with an eye to classic graphic design and perhaps uses techniques like embossing, or screen printing, or letterpress, or other techniques of the past. These techniques and others like classic bookbinding, or incorporation of ephemera, pop-ups, fold-outs, unusual paper stocks, etc., at least for me, have a direct tie-in to the craftsmanship of the past -- to a time that predated the computer, and predated the ability for anyone with a desktop publishing program to "design" something that Adobe says looks good. So really, perhaps my fascination with books as artifacts is really this eternal struggle between these two sides -- the DIY, punk rock, content is king side, and the tradition-steeped, lost-art of the past. But it really is the combination of these two ideas that is important. It's being able to take the lessons and techniques of the past and apply them to the opportunities and ease-of-use of the present, to create something greater than the two. Or whatever. One last note: and this is truly personal taste and no offense to anyone, but SF/F/H books, since the late 60s, for the most part, suffer greatly from having poor production values and low-quality artwork. I'm sure this will piss off quite a few people, but I truly believe it. Prior to this period (and again, this is greatly generalizing), the artists were in general more talented, probably because illustration and design before the computer was a more valued skill set with fewer, but more highly-skilled people in the industry. I'd love to have a more lengthy discussion on this topic, because there are many facets to this, but it's veering into tangent-land a little too much. Here's a few of the many books that I think have cool design, great cover art, or are cool as artifacts. There's no particular order, and please, on the examples that are modern, I hope no one takes offense -- this really is just my opinion.
We have a busy year at Payseur & Schmidt. We're trying to firm up our release schedule and hopefully will have that
soon, but here's a rough idea. Later in 2006, we will have a quasi-memoir by Nicola Griffith complete with a CD of music
that she recorded with her early 80s punk band Janes Plane, a scholarly work by John Clute on modern horror motifs,
and something totally weird and fun by Paul Di Filippo. We're also doing sporadic chapbooks, which will feature
letterpressed covers, ephemera, and other fun stuff, with the likes of Matt Hughes, John Shirley, Therese Littleton,
Brooks Peck, and others. We have some strange stuff that isn't genre-related, like a Japanese children's book,
homages to The Kinks, a history of the guillotine, and various art/music/text projects. Schedules will probably slip
on things, but we're dedicated. We're putting together a mailing list for those that want to keep in the know -- let
us know! Email inquiries@payseurandschmidt.com and ask to be added to our list. Please us small words and simple
sentences for the sake of our webmaster Bongo, who is still on some pretty heavy pain medication.
Jeff VanderMeer's reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The New York Review of SF, Nova Express, and many others. Prime published his non-fiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat?. |
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Payseur & Schmidt has always been a family institution. Of course, in 1912, when Martina Faye Payseur and Hilde
Frauke Schmidt began their venture together, there were no formal job titles, just lots of work to be done. Martina
and Hilde shared editing duties until 1920, when the increased workload (as well as the birth of Hilde's daughter
Maude) necessitated the need for a full-time editor. From here, as far as I can piece together, the
Payseur & Schmidt editorial helm was manned (or womanned) successively by no less than 37 different editors,
most of whom are lost in our records. Some editors of note: Salius Pempe (1934-1935) the Austrian wunderkind,
began his short tenure when he was merely 12 years old, but with puberty, his stellar editing skills vastly
diminished, and he was sent back to his homeland. Rachel Thorpe (1946-1962) was born blind and armless, and
required all manuscripts (in triplicate) to be presented unabridged in Braille. Despite this difficulty, she
maintained the longest editorship at P&S. Harry Stephen Keeler (1927-1931), the famed mystery writer, acted as
editor in absentia at various times during the Great Depression. It was during his tenure as editor that P&S
gained its most notoriety up to that time, with the release of F.R. Laramie's Red Moon Rising. The Keeler-edited
masterpiece was praised throughout the nation as a landmark in publishing. ("F.R. Laramie's Red Moon Rising
is a prime example... of the perverse direction our great nation is taking... ever closer to the
abyss... Publisher Payseur & Schmidt... should be investigated for treason or more serious crimes." -- Saturday
Evening Post review, June 27, 1931)
Porno-Graphics: The Shame of our Art Museums
The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines
The Haploids
 
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