Atlas Press and how they changed my life :)

In 1994-ish I worked at Magers & Quinn Bookstore a couple days a week in trade for books. My job was to unpack and sort big palettes of books in the basement that the owner had bought at auction (or however he got the books). It was a lot of fun and I would put books on long tables and sort the multiple copies of books into stacks and Denny (the owner) would go down the rows with post-it notes and put the price that they would sell for. Just manual labor and I could think my thoughts while I worked. I loved books, so I would look for cool cutouts and discounted academic books from Verso, art books from Taschen, and so on.

If I saw something I liked I would put it in my box and then go to the checkout at the end of my shift and trade my labor for books.

At the same time, I had a regular old day job at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in the surgery scheduling office putting cases on the board and tracking surgical equipment to make sure a c-arm or whatever was needed was available for a case and that there was enough staff to cover the cases on the schedule.

During my lunch breaks at Abbott, I would go to the medical library down the hall from our office and sit and read books or just close my eyes for a minute. The library at Abbott was where I discovered the internet. I was friendly with the librarians and they showed me how I could look things up online and then print articles out.

These two things, the bookstore job and the internet simultaneously led me to my discovery of Atlas Press and ‘pataphysics. I think I first stumbled upon a book called The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck when I saw it at the bookstore. I noticed it had a section on Erik Satie, whose music I played on piano. I was initially especially fond of the Gnossiennes by Satie but then I became enamored of everything he did, musical and otherwise. The Banquet Years was not an Atlas Press Book but it introduced me to Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry and Henri Rousseau—every one of whom would be either published by or about in publications by Atlas Press.

The section in The Banquet Years on Alfred Jarry introduced me to his invention/discovery (these amount to the same thing for Jarry) of Pataphysics, which he called the science of imaginary solutions. He also called Pataphysics “The Science” and wrote that it held the same relation to metaphysics that metaphysics holds to physics. Heady stuff for sure, but part of the beauty of each of these four artists was their humor, intentional or sometimes unintentional. This specific type of cabaret humor and hoaxes fed the early Avant-Garde. The humorist, Alphonse Allais wrote for the Chat Noir newsletter and was a big influence on many of the surrealists and other avante-garde artists. Famously, Marcel Duchamp bought an anthology of Allais’s writings the day he (Duchamp) died, and was very excited to have finally found the collection.

Anyway, I don’t want to drone on here but one of the first things I looked up on the internet was Roger Shattuck to see if there was anything else by him out there. The search took me to a “webpage” (I had never heard of these at that time) which was more like an index or table of contents at a college he taught at. I think maybe it was in New Hampshire or something. The website had the Evergreen Press Review #13 about ‘Pataphysics in a scanned format and a bunch of translations from French from The College of Pataphysics. It was incredible stuff for me to have stumbled upon on my first internet outing! It changed my life! The librarians would let me print out these crazy writings because librarians are always awesome and only asked that I not abuse the privilege and use up all the paper. :)

At the same time as I was figuring out the internet, I came across a bunch of Atlas Press books at the bookstore. The first couple of books I stumbled upon from Atlas Press were Caesar Antichrist and Days and Nights by Alfred Jarry. I put them in my bookstore barter box, along with everything else I could find published by Atlas Press: Andre Breton, Phillip Soupalt, and my favorite of all, Raymond Roussel. In fact, I even named my musical group after a play written by Raymond Roussel, Dust of Suns.

A very small selection of my Atlas Press/London Institute of Pataphysics collection :)

I don’t know how Magers & Quinn wound up with this palette of Atlas Press books. Maybe they got damaged or lost in shipping. It was a bizarre and wonderful coincidence for me, and soon I was sending mail to Atlas Press in the UK. They sent me a catalog, and I subscribed to various series, and to this day I look them up online because now of course they have a website! They also publish writings by the “London Institute of Pataphysics”. I still order everything they publish. : )

Here is a little something from wikipedia on Atlas Press:

Atlas Press began publishing in 1983, and specialises in extremist and avant-garde prose writing from the 1890s to the present day. It is the largest publisher in English of books on Surrealism and has an extensive list relating to Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, the Oulipo, the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, Vienna Actionists among others.

Chief editor is Alastair Brotchie, German-language and series editor is Malcolm Green,[2] French-language and series editor is Antony Melville, and copy editor and annotator is Chris Allen.

Atlas Press is also linked to the Secretariat of and is the publishing body of The London Institute of 'Pataphysics,[3] whose President is Peter Blegvad. (Hi Peter!)

If you are interested in any of these isms or anti-traditions, you really must look them up! It’s a world unto itself…I live there.

Very sadly, Alastair Brotchie, one of the founders and chief editor passed away just this year. I loved his introductions to some of their publications. I truly looked up to him as a scholar of obscure writings and I’m genuinely grateful to him for all he brought into the world (sometimes BACK into the world) by doggedly following his own obscure interests.

I will put links to some of these things below! I hope this wasn’t too long or boring. Atlas Press shaped the way I look at the world and how I make art. If you like the Dada Duende Record Club, you have these guys to thank for its existence. :)

My top 3 publications/translations by Atlas Press and The London Institute of Pataphysics:

1) Euphorisms, Julian Torma (included in 4 dada suicides)

2) Last Will and Testament by Dr Irenee-Louis Sandomir included in A True History of the College of Pataphysics (I think)

3) All of the Journal of the London Institute of Pataphysics, Number 10

Many of these books are available at the Book Arts Book Shop in London. This will be the first place I go when I go to London someday! :)