During the summer of 2004 I was at the helm of a publishing company only barely getting traction in the larger book ecosystem. The company was called Bleak House Books and it was run out of the first floor of a dear friend’s Victorian house in downtown Madison, WI. The other propulsive power behind Bleak House Books was Mynks (iykyk) and the two of us spent our days believing anything was possible in ways an older Ben LeRoy–even having gone through the experiences that followed–would wave off as impossible and who would encourage the younger version of myself to do something different.
A year later the company was gaining a reputation for being a cool independent publisher from the Midwest with punk rock sensibilities. Reputation doesn’t pay bills so I relied on credit cards and went without health insurance because the industry wouldn’t trade care for clout. The hard truth I had to accept was that all of our cool points and street cred were destined to make an altar once the whole operation had to shut down.
One day, while the company was on life support we went out onto the front porch of our one room office and we engaged in fanatical thinking and in search of a metaphor we could strip for parts. There was a stick on the porch, we picked it up and came to the conclusion that the stick would give us the insight that would solve all our problems.
Probably not or maybe because of the stick, I don’t know, a few days later I got an email from a guy up in Neenah who wanted to know if we’d sell Bleak House Books to him because he was buying publishing companies to combine into one big publishing house. There wasn’t a lot of money offered, but there was the promise of a salary and health insurance going forward which, at 29, was like winning one of the lesser prizes in the Powerball drawing, but a lottery triumph just the same.
From there we’d run Bleak House under the auspices of Big Earth until leaving the company in 2009 to start over again, this time without a stick. The result was Tyrus Books and I’ll talk about that some other time. Bleak House died with Big Earth Publishing a few years after we left. Tyrus Books was acquired by Simon & Schuster in 2017 as part of a larger deal.
I want to go back to the stick and what the stick represents to me in this current moment.
Personally, the state of the world feels like the state of Bleak House in 2005. I say that realizing with the exception of one other person, this metaphor doesn’t stretch. Personally. Things look hopeless and on the fritz. The systems and structures we’ve relied on have proven themselves more susceptible to taking on water than we’d hoped.
In a word and without relying on a pun – things look bleak.
Where is the stick of this era? Of course it isn’t still a stick. Perhaps it’s a book. A penny nail. An egg roll. The leftover gel in the bottom of the wash bottle. Somewhere there is the plain thing that probably doesn’t summon dawn, but maybe does, waiting to be discovered on the porch.
Holding back the darkness.