A new annual celebration is coming to the city on the 28th and 29th of November this year: The Dublin Small Press Fair, a festival honoring the smaller publishers of Ireland and beyond. Organized by UCD fellow Tim Groenland and University of South Dakota professor/poet Éireann Lorsung, the fair will take place in the Pearse Street Library and host over 30 different small presses over two days.
While there is a network of small press fairs through much of Europe like Amsterdam, Ghent, Paris and Berlin, including a handful in the United Kingdom, there are none in Dublin.
“I love the way that small press fairs can remind us that actually, literature can be produced wherever you are,” Lorsung said. “I mean, my books are published by Carcanet [Editions] and Milkweed [Productions], so very mainstream in indie, nonprofit publishers, but also I can make a book myself, it’s a real sliding scale.”
Small presses, according to Groenland, are technically classified as having five employees or fewer, but the two are less interested in applying that definition as, as Lorsung puts it, “seeing what’s out there.”
Small press can also be different from mainstream press by funding mechanisms and objectives. Rather than producing profit, they are focused on producing books themselves and are funded by organizations like the Art Council.
“That’s what small presses do better than commercial presses,” Groenland said. “The driving impulse with commercial presses, very often, is how can we publish something that’s very similar to something that’s been published before? And you know, with a press like Skein, they’re coming at it from the opposite angle.”
The event will feature two headlining panels as well as readings from literary journals. Part of the intent of the fair is to encourage connections between small press and those interested in it and to foster rich and diverse connections among and across literary magazines, small publishers, writers, bookmakers, and others whose work intersects with writing, reading, small/independent publishing, and book arts.
The opening event on the 28th includes a reception complete with a panel on independent publishing featuring Will Dady from Renard Press, Eimear Ryan from Banshee Press and Brendan MacAvilly from Holy Show.
And to close out the fair, Skein Press and Poetry Ireland are putting on Young Blood: Class x Masculinity in Contemporary Poetry, aiming to bring class discussions into the public as well as the arts.
Vendors include stalwarts like the Lilliput Press and The Dublin Review, the teen and young adult literary journal Paper Lanterns, Sans Press, a Limerick-based indie press, with a love for stories and short story anthologies, with strong influences from speculative fiction and magical realism, the connecting platform for indie writing Leabharlann Beag, and The Pigs Back – a literary prose journal operating out of Letterkenny that publishes short fiction and essays.
Participants also include Little Island, the Cork based writing and illustration publishing house for kids and young adults, Plaintext Distro (Purveyors of fine low tech, anti-capitalist, bitsyfolk, game-making and cultural zines), Swan River Press, Written Off Publishing and from the U.K, Scratch Books.
Lorsung first became interested in fairs like the Small Press Fair when she began a small press out of her kitchen at 30. Being introduced to what she calls the “confluence” of literature and hand-made art inspired her, from trade publications to fine arts work to postcard-esque works.
“It was just so invigorating and to be in a room where there are all of these different definitions of what a book can be,” Lorsung said. “For me, from about 2012 or whenever the first small publishers fair was on, the work of making books, for me, has always been tied to then being in rooms with other people who also make books.”
The fair is also a way to have publishers speak to each other to solve the issues they face, such as getting books into bookshops and gathering attention for their releases—generally being heard above the “corporate noise.” Despite the many great books published by small press every year, Lorsung said, they don’t get noticed as much.
Groenland pointed out that while there is readership for Irish authors in Ireland, many of them are actually published in London. In some sense, he said, all Irish presses are “small” compared to the houses in London like Penguin and Random House.
Both were surprised by the response from international presses, as some of the attendees are from the U.K., and look forward to the relationships the fair will form. Part of the fair is to encourage readership, people to come in off the street whether for half an hour or two hours.
“The support of Dublin City Libraries allows us to have this beautiful library in the city center,” Groenland said. “It’s this really bright space, high ceiling. It’s going to be, it’s really a place where we can have this in town. People can walk in off the street. It’s more accessible.”
Dublin Small Press Fair takes place on November 28th and 29th at Pearse Street Library, D2.
