Scenes: Twisted Spoon Press: An Interview with the Publisher

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• ScenesTwisted Spoon Press: An Interview with the Publisher

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

We were founded in 1992, in Prague, which at the time was still in Czechoslovakia. It came out of a chance encounter the previous year with Lukáš Tomin on a crazy chartered train to a Warhol exhibition in Medzilaborce, in eastern Slovakia, that had been organized by some newly founded post-revolution cultural association. I mentioned to Lukáš that some of us expats were thinking about putting together a magazine of writing, maybe a one-off, maybe a few issues (we really had no concrete conception). He said, "Why don't you do books," and I was naive enough to say, "Sure, why not." So the first two titles we published (in 1992) were his novel The Doll (a new edition is forthcoming) and Kevin Blahut's new translation of Franz Kafka's Contemplation (first time in English as a discrete volume), with some wild illustrations from my roommate at the time, Kip Bauersfeld. We had no distribution, anywhere, so went around ourselves to bookstores in Prague asking them to carry the books, which thankfully they did, albeit skeptically at first. And to our surprise, enough copies sold just in Prague that we could start [End Page 166] thinking about putting out another book or two. From there we eventually developed a program to publish English-language translations of writing from the neighborhood at large, that is, Central Europe. And along the way we've had to learn how to make books. There was a steep learning curve for sure, and sometimes we still don't get things quite right, that is, the end result doesn't exactly match up with what we had imagined. It's easy to make a nice book by throwing money at it. Some publishers can do that, we can't. So it requires some inventiveness to produce quality books while operating with rather limited resources, but figuring this stuff out is what makes it fun . . . mostly. And we've had a lot of help with this "figuring out" from Czechs in the publishing profession—without a doubt the most resourceful folks I have ever met.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Innovative. Humorous. Exuberant. Sometimes goofy, but goofy with a purpose. Manic. And, most of all, imaginative.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

Our audience? C'est nous. We publish the books we would like to read and hopefully designed in a way that if one of us were to walk into a bookstore and see a Twisted Spoon book we would be interested in picking it up. In other words, while our tastes are not mainstream, they are not sui generis either, and I believe there are plenty of others who have similar tastes, certainly enough to keep a small press such as ours viable. It's just a matter of connecting with them. And therein lies the rub. We try to reach potential readers in the usual ways, and I don't think it bears repeating. But the main way is to keep publishing interesting books and getting them, to the best of our abilities, into bookshops, physical and virtual both. And of course recommendations, from anyone anywhere, are helpful. I'm hugely appreciative of anyone who has ever had a good word, or just a word, for the work we do.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

I don't mean to be dismissive, but I sincerely don't know what "publishing scene" means, or is. I prefer to think of what we do in terms of ideas, since that is what drives us. For me, the press has always been an intellectual [End Page 167] and creative journey, and though that might sound clichéd, it's true. If it were not, I wouldn't be doing it. It's certainly not the pension plan, and attending book fairs is definitely not a perk. So I don't know if I can speak about it in terms of playing a "role," but I do think the translations we produce from this...