For a long time my books carried someone else's numbers on the back. That sounds smaller than it was. An ISBN is not a sentence or a paragraph or a scene; it is a thirteen-digit string a machine reads. But every copy of every book I had published carried, in that string, the trace of a third party who had assigned it. The press existed in name. The numbers said otherwise.
Then the numbers changed.
I bought a block of my own ISBNs and re-registered every title under Nachtljocht Press. Even if the Light Forgets, Volume I. The Strange Mercy of Listening. An Index of Vanishing, Part One. Each of them now sits in the global registry under Nachtljocht Press.
I also took the chance to redo the covers and the trim. The three books are now a series in the visible sense, not only in the catalogue sense. A reader who sees one will recognize the next. A reader who sees the three together will understand they belong to one shelf, one hand, one imprint.
The trim is 4.25 by 7 inches. It is the format some of my favorite fiction comes in. My copy of Dead Souls is this size. Choosing a trim size is itself a sentence about what kind of object the book wants to be. I wanted these to feel like the books I love.
What I keep returning to is that the craft I care about does not stop at the last sentence of the manuscript. The book is also a made thing. The proportion of the margin, the weight of the paper a reader will hold, the small caps of a chapter opening, the way a title sits on a spine. They are all a part of how the book speaks. To hand that part of the work to someone else, year after year, is to leave a portion of the made object outside your own attention. To take it back is to admit you wanted all of it.
So the books are now the press's books. The ISBNs say so, and the covers say so, and the format says so.
What this makes possible is the part I am most excited about. By next summer I hope to begin publishing other people's full books under Nachtljocht; doing the cover work and the interior design and the small careful labour of turning a manuscript into an object. The press was always meant to hold more than my own writing. And the journal, nachtljocht, Volume I, is coming in August.
Submissions have been arriving in numbers I did not expect, and reading them has been one of the genuine pleasures of this spring. Other people's sentences, other people's strange rooms, other people's hours of attention now sitting on my desk waiting to be gathered into a first issue.
For anyone arriving to my work for the first time, the three current titles are gathered here.
Even if the Light Forgets, Volume I is the novel, a fantasy about memory, love, and what it means to be human.
The Strange Mercy of Listening is my first published book, a novella that came out last November, set in a telegraph office in 1935, ultimately a story of what it means to see and be seen.
An Index of Vanishing, Part I is a German officer's journal from a monastery in Tibet, assigned to a secret program, but it's really about how against all his fear, he falls in love, and has to make a decision.
Each one exists in a new edition now, under the imprint that always should have held it.
The afternoon I uploaded the final files I made coffee and then forgot to drink it. The window was open, an egret flew over the hammock, and I sat with my hands on the desk for a while and did not write anything. The work was, for that hour, finished. Of course there will always be more of it, as there always is, and I am glad for the work, and for each of you here to witness it with me.
