Leaving New York

Offset lithography and phototypesetting transform publishing

In 1953, Albro T. Gaul’s The Wonderful World of Insects, published by the NYC-based Rinehart & Company, became the first book to be entirely typeset using phototypesetters and printed using offset lithography (Gaul 291). Just fourteen years later in 1967, offset lithography surpassed letterpress in usage for book printing in America (PW, Nov. 1970, 14).⁶ Offset is the first important beat in the story we are telling about NYC publication because it reduces both capital and labor requirements for publishing, thereby reducing cost per volume, both making possible and incentivizing larger print runs from publishers.

While literary historians have written about the relationship between literature and other transformations in book production, the broad literary-historical significance of offset lithography has yet to be fully studied.⁷ Here, discussion of its ramifications will be concentrated on the speed and scale of book production enacted by its adoption by the publishing industry,⁸ as opposed to its more systemic reorganization of post-war literary aesthetics, which remains to be discussed elsewhere.⁹

In order to understand offset’s significance, we must understand the technological limitations of what came before. Letterpress dominated book printing in the West from Gutenberg up until the mid-twentieth century. Its speed drastically increased with the advent of “hot metal” typesetting at the end of the nineteenth century, which utilized Monotype and Linotype machines (which devalued Mark Twain’s investments in the Paige Compositor) to mechanize the compositing process. Hot metal typesetting was the standard for trade printing until it was dealt a death blow by the industry’s adoption of phototypesetting or “cold type,” which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a quicker and less labor-intensive method for typesetting. Phototypesetting and the printing plates it facilitated allowed publishers to print longer runs faster and with lower labor costs, causing offset to take over industrial book production (Cockburn; Stein).

Instead of transferring ink from a raised surface onto paper as in letterpress printing, offset lithography uses an inked planographic plate (usually made of aluminum) to transfer an image to a rubber roller, which then transfers the image onto paper. Ira Rubel discovered this process around 1903, but it was not until the 1960s that the method became dominant in both large and small printing shops, largely as a result of relatively affordable, cathode-ray tube phototypesetting machines (whose type quality matched that of metal type) being released to the market, and publishers investing in the technology as way to break unionized typesetters’ power.¹⁰ Industry veteran Frank Romano particularly identifies Compugraphic’s 1968 “phototypesetter priced at about $8,000 [about $78,000 in 2026 dollars]” as the machine that “propelled phototypesetting into the mainstream, hastening the death of hot metal and increasing the use of offset lithography” (Desktop Follies 17).

Put simply, offset printing allows for longer, faster, and cheaper print runs compared to letterpress printing, providing the material conditions necessary for the accelerated growth—and conglomeration—of the publishing industry in the post-war period. Indeed, data presented in A History of the Book in America shows that the period from 1960 to 1965 (the period during which NYC falls below 50% of PS publications in Fig. 1)—the years where offset’s growth was beginning to displace letterpress—saw a ninety percent increase in new book titles and editions, which they argue is a growth greater than any other five-year period in twentieth-century American book production. (Miller, Nord 511 [table 3]).

One of offset’s major determinants over literary production is the fact that the capital investments required by the pre-press stage (i.e., platemaking) incentivizes book production at scale. Johanna Drucker explains that “the costs in all of these [offset’s] pre-press processes are as high for ten (good) copies as they are for ten thousand or more” (Figuring the Word 188). A 1968 estimate by Frank Petersen, then director of the New York and New Jersey based book manufacturing company American Book-Stratford Press, suggested a minimum print run of “7-10,000 copies for a small press, at least 10,000 for multicolor work,” lest offset prove financially disadvantageous (PW, April 1968, 60). Economies of scale incentivized by offset produced direct and indirect opportunities for big and small presses that initially benefited large NYC presses in the 1950s, but that ultimately tilted the geographical scales in favor of publishing outside of New York from the 1960s onward as costs for smaller runs fell. Affordable small runs of trade-quality books meant that publishers and authors could, in theory, succeed with local or national audiences without the need for NYC’s publishing resources.

As the rationalised center of the publishing industry, NYC would be the first to reap the benefits (and suffer the consequences) of any changes in book production.¹¹ A print run of many thousands of copies would have been difficult for small publishers to meet when offset and phototypesetting first became dominant in the fifties and sixties, but feasible for established NYC presses who had the audience and capital to invest in large runs. Moreover, NYC’s major publishers—motivated by the financial prospects of bestsellers and reliable genre fictions—would have been eager to benefit from the economies of scale offered by the printing method. These larger print runs were accommodated by the emergence of book manufacturing hubs designed to facilitate huge offset print runs, such as Bertelsmann’s Offset Paperback Manufacturing (OPM), which opened in 1972 in Dallas, Pennsylvania, and was capable of pushing out “250 million to 300 million books a year” (PW, 26 May 1989, 18).¹²

Although major NYC publishers would have been the first to benefit from the introduction of offset into industrial printing spaces in the 1950s, offset became cheaper for smaller publishers as the technology improved and as offset printers were set up across the nation. Len Fulton, who chronicled decades of small press activity in his annual directories, reports that only 17% of small presses used offset in 1960, using instead a combination of mimeograph and letterpress for printing. By 1974, 70% of small presses used offset (International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses 7). That adoption of the technology by small presses was incentivized by the minimum run size dropping throughout the twentieth century—largely as a result of innovations in phototypesetting that facilitated cheaper platemaking—settling at around 1,000 copies for an economically feasible print run, with POD today being typically used for runs smaller than this.¹³ It also was facilitated by cheaper and smaller offset duplicators released by A. B. Dick and Multilith in the 1950s, with Michael Davidson claiming that “the bulk of poetry published between 1956 and 1985 was produced on duplicators developed by A. B. Dick and Multilith that allowed for greater flexibility in layout and greater speed in publication” (Ghostlier Demarcations 30).

Constrained and encouraged by offset’s run size restrictions, small presses were incentivized to produce more copies of books than they might have with letterpress to take advantage of the economies of scale. For instance, in 1995, Charles Bernstein reported that the “printing bill” (not factoring in the cost of design, editing, publicity, etc.) for a usual print run at Sun & Moon Press, a poetry publisher and little magazine based at the time out of Los Angeles, “runs from $2,600 to $4,000 as you go from 1,000 to 2000 copies,” with 1,000 being the suggested minimum run size, lest the unit cost become too high (Bernstein 35). Here, printing an extra thousand copies reduces the cost per book by 23%, savings that compound exponentially as the size of the print run increases. An extra thousand copies in circulation would have meant a larger possible reading and purchasing audience for a non-NYC press. This is not to suggest that all regional presses aspired to the sort of broad national recognition and circulation that characterizes publishing with a large NYC house. Rather, it is to acknowledge the simple fact that presses were incentivized to increase their print runs in order to benefit from the economies of scale afforded and demanded by offset lithography, and that more books available meant a greater chance that a book published by a small press in, say, Los Angeles would attract readers and writers away from NYC publishers.

For sale: letterpress and (old) offset printers

The growth in offset throughout the 1960s prompted a sharp decline in letterpress usage by industry printers, with major letterpress manufacturers ceasing production in the fifties and sixties. Symptomatic of this transformation, the sixth edition of the printer’s textbook The Practice of Printing, published in 1964, was the first edition to dedicate a chapter of the book to offset printing (Polk and Polk). That same year, Chandler & Price, one of the largest manufacturers of letterpresses in the United States, shut down their letterpress factory. The Vandercook family, who operated another significant American letterpress manufacturing company, followed suit by selling Vandercook in 1968 (ultimately stopping press production in 1976).

While the manufacturing of new letterpresses may have outright ceased by the mid 1970s, the letterpresses that already existed in the United States did not simply disappear. For example, The Chilton Company, a Philadelphia-based magazine and book publisher primarily known for their car repair manuals (and for publishing Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1965 after twenty other presses rejected the book), sold off forty flatbed letterpresses toward the end of the 1960s when they transitioned their book manufacturing technologies to offset printing (PW, June 1968, 82). Whether Chilton’s offloading of their letterpresses led to the creation of forty small presses is impossible to know; nevertheless, as industry printers continued to swap their letterpresses for offset presses, letterpresses became substantially cheaper through the mid-late twentieth century, opening up trade-quality bookmaking for smaller presses with lower budgets. Bernstein affirms that “as offset began to dominate the printing industry in the early 1970s, letterpresses became very cheap to acquire and innovative letterpress printers […] could produce books with little other cash expense than paper costs and mailing” (Bernstein 38). Indeed, woven into the origin story of many of today’s most significant non-NYC presses such as Copper Canyon and countless other smaller printing initiatives like Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, is the purchase of a cheap letterpress, whose widespread availability and affordability was made possible by the transformation of industry printing around offset lithography.

Just as letterpress became affordable throughout the second half of the twentieth century, so too did offset. As newer offset presses and phototypesetters poured into the market on a yearly basis, older offset printers and typesetting equipment were made available at a discount. For instance, the leftist Detroit Printing Co-Op, co-founded in part by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman in late 1969, purchased an old Harris offset press to kickstart the co-op—as well as typesetting equipment from a local defunct print shop—out of which an entire decade of radical publishing emerged from Detroit (Aubert).¹⁴ The co-op had opted for the rather large and unwieldy offset press so that they could print books in addition to the political flyers that characterized the Detroit publishing scene. That foresight led to the publication and proliferation of the first “unauthorized” English translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in 1970, which saw around 7,000 copies printed at the co-op (and another 23,000 with commercial printers once the co-op shut down in 1979) (Aubert 134-5). Offset facilitated the edition’s characteristic inclusion of images—as offset both allows sharper image reproduction and the seamless printing of images and text at the same time—a distinction which the 1967 French edition lacks.

As the co-op’s decision to purchase a larger press suggests, and as the Library of Congress’ acknowledged “weakness” in small press holdings proves, at stake in the adoption of letterpress and offset by a press is the legibility of their publications as “real” books (i.e., clear, uniform printing, quality binding), and subsequently, as objects that could be acquired as American literature by institutions such as the Library of Congress, and thereafter read as literary by historians. Scholars of the small press are familiar with the phrase “the mimeo revolution” as a buzzword to characterize the proliferation of small press activity that emerged in the post-war period following the advent of tabletop duplicators such as the mimeograph and ditto (and later, the risograph and xerox machines).¹⁵ Yet on practical, archival and ideological grounds, these publications have historically been illegible as literary objects, facilitating their exclusion from archives, canons, and literary histories. Practically, Michael Davidson describes “poetry produced on ditto or mimeo machines” as “not made to last but to circulate quickly, the fragility of its paper and the unevenness of its inking limiting both shelflife and aesthetic appeal. Staples rust, card stock fades, paper yellows and begins to flake” (Ghostlier Demarcations 28). Ideologically, rationalized book design (typeset quality print in trade paperbacks and hardcover books) retained and shaped the public image of the literary object, evidenced by Myles’ devaluation of mimeo publications. As letterpress and offset became more available throughout the second half of the twentieth-century, the aesthetic afforded by these methods of production would have been instrumental for ensuring an author’s and work’s legibility (and archivability) as American literature to the Library of Congress, to distributors and booksellers, and to a broader American readership.

Deregionalizing “the small press”

The physical manufacturing of books is just one step in the production of American literature for the archive. Equally important are distribution and cataloging, which were instrumental for ensuring that smaller regional presses could operate outside major metropolitan hubs. Before the advent of standalone distributors, it was common practice for publishing houses to do their own distribution. That advantages bigger publishers who can dedicate the necessary capital and labor to manage distribution and warehousing, but is difficult work for smaller presses, especially those without established relationships with booksellers.

The increase in the productive abilities of printing technologies, and subsequently the number of books in circulation, prompted the development of robust book distribution networks, which publishers both in and outside of NYC used to have their books sold across the nation. Serendipity Books Distribution, later renamed to the better-known (and now defunct) Small Press Distribution, alongside today’s industry giant Ingram, both began distributing books in 1969. University Press of America and Publishers Group West, the two largest distributors in the 1980s, began distributing in 1975 and 1976 respectively (McDowell). These distributors alongside many more played a pivotal role in deregionalizing presses, exposing little known literary geographies to a national market. Even more important for the economics of publishing was the fact that distributors relieved presses from worrying about inventorying and shipping, allowing individuals with little business experience and capital to enter the publishing world.

As running a distribution business requires clear and consistent cataloging, it is no surprise that major distributors cropped up in the United States alongside the introduction of pivotal stockkeeping and cataloging methods, which helped streamline bookselling. Prior to the 1970s there existed no near-universally accepted cataloging standard for books. Standard Book Numbering (SBN) was developed and implemented in Britain in 1967, and emerged as the international standard that we now know as ISBN in 1970. The Library of Congress’s MARC standards and Cataloging in Publication Program came out in 1968 and 1971 respectively. In 1972, Ingram began selling its weekly microfiche catalog: a meticulously standardized list of books for sale that allowed bookstores and libraries anywhere in the nation to reliably purchase the latest publications (Hunt 39-49). These standardizations—by no means uniformly accepted—enabled niche works published outside of NYC to better circulate in a national literary marketplace by making them easy to find and order.¹⁶ They also produce their own unique “semantic charge,” as Craig Dworkin demonstrates in his compelling reading of the ISSN printed in Hejinian’s Gesualdo (“Hypermnesia” 85-6).

Bookselling requires advertisement, be it through word of mouth or through traditional advertising. Throughout the 1960s, periodicals and organizations emerged which documented the burgeoning small press movement across the nation, helping smaller publishers acquire readers and authors. In 1965, Len Fulton began publishing his annual Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, one of the most important records of the small press movement. Beginning as a humble staple-bound chapbook published out of his garage in El Cerrito, California, the publication transformed ten years later into a thick perfect-bound book so as to better accommodate its hundreds of pages filled with small press documentation. As a sign of institutional interest in the small press, in 1983 the industry giant Bowker launched Small Press: The Magazine of Independent Book Publishing, a periodical dedicated to highlighting small press ‘success’ stories, bringing the gaze of big publishing to bear on the small press.

The overall explosion of the small press also caught the eye of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975, the NEA acknowledged that “the economics of commercial publishing has forced major houses to virtually ignore new talent in recent years.”¹⁷ Recognizing that financially supporting “small circulation literary magazines and independent presses” was “crucial to the future of American literature,” the NEA in 1975 allocated $266,095 to “encourage small non-profit presses to publish and distribute chapbooks by individual creative writers” (1975 Annual Report 5). That grant led to the production of over four hundred chapbooks, and of the seventy grants awarded, sixty were given to publishers located outside of New York. The money kept flowing in 1976 when $345,000 was awarded to “independent presses” across the nation to directly support their publishing projects (1976 Annual Report 61). Come 1977, over $500,000 was allocated as “assistance to small presses” to publish volumes that “otherwise would not be possible” (1977 Annual Report 69).

The NEA—alongside corporate philanthropists like the Ford Foundation—further funded the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (now known as CLMP, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses), a New York-based organization which sought to consolidate the energies of the small press movement in order to “secure publicity, growth, and solvency for the ‘littles’” (Uchmanowicz 72). Amidst accusations of being “New York elites,” CCLM sought to “be more democratic” by holding biannual meetings outside of New York, and by intentionally funding and soliciting presses in other places. We will remain neutral as to whether or not the CCLM achieved their goals on a systemic level; Uchmanowicz records much debate in the small press world about CCLM’s purported democraticness, and there remains plenty of skepticism today about the interplay between non-profit organizations, government funding, and literary production.¹⁸ That said, one particular funding case might stand out for many literary historians: in 1972, Sam Hamill won a $500 prize (around $4,000 in 2026) from the CCLM for his editorial work with Spectrum, a journal based out of UC Santa Barbara. He then used that money to purchase a letterpress, from which Copper Canyon Press was born, which has brought forth award-winning books by writers such as W.S. Merwin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown (Westdal 3).

These grants and organizations made possible books and presses that otherwise would not have been. Small presses were encouraged to aspire to larger distribution and increased documentation of their works in the hopes of securing national grants, which, upon being awarded, would have brought more readers and writers to a given small press. At the same time, plenty of individuals and communities were ambivalent or outright hostile to the idea of state and corporate funded literary production, such as poet, professor and publisher Felix Stefanile of Sparrow magazine, who referred to NEA grants as “‘cultural food stamps,’ that induce self-censorship in editors fearful of offending the ‘marble muse’ in Washington” (Lingeman).

Conglomeration, Stagflation, Desktop Publishing

Beyond NYC’s decline in publishing dominance from 1956-77, figure 2 presents an intriguing phenomenon where the number of unique publishers stagnated in the late seventies before skyrocketing in the nineties. Simultaneously, figure 1 shows that the share of archived publishing done in NYC rises from 1978-89 before drastically falling again in the nineties. To account for the stifled growth of the late seventies and early eighties, we suggest conglomeration and stagflation. Dan Sinykin has detailed in Big Fiction and various venues how conglomeration consumed smaller publishers in the 1960s, particularly ramping up in the late seventies, so much so that in 1977 the Author’s Guild requested that the Department of Justice “break up the conglomerates,” with the Senate holding a hearing on the subject in 1980 (Childress). Sinykin further emphasizes 1977—the nadir of NYC publications of American literature in the twentieth century—as a particularly terrible year to be in the book business due to poor economic conditions across the nation (Big Fiction 5-6). As reading American literature is a (mild) luxury—and its production often unprofitable—it would make sense that non-corporate publishers would slow down in bad economies while bigger publishers begrudgingly carry on through the downturns.

The data shows that, come the nineties, other cities and unique publishers are back on the rise. In line with our interest in emergent technologies of book production influencing both output and geographic dispersal, we suggest that this return to dominance by other cities in the nineties and onward is associated with the introduction of desktop publishing and POD to the publishing world.

Desktop publishing is not one technology—it is a collection of hardware and software (the word processor, the laser printer, Postscript, etc.) whose advancements coalesced together around the 1980s to reshape book production.¹⁹ By 1986, desktop publishing software and laser printers were flooding the home market, deskilling the work of typesetting, and moving that labor from large photography and computer labs to cozy homes and corporate offices. Such new, expensive technologies would first benefit well-capitalized publishing in NYC—which peaked in geographical publishing against other cities in the late 80s relative to its late 70s nadir—before they worked their way into diffuse locations by the 90s and 2000s. This is to say nothing of the writing communities forming on Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), and a few years later, blogs and forums across the World Wide Web, which were enabled by increased commercial access to computers.²⁰

Desktop publishing transformed typesetting, but it was the emergence of commercial print-on-demand bookmaking in the late nineties that democratized access to trade-quality, literary books.²¹ As its name suggests, POD uses digital printing and other automated technologies to print books the moment that they are ordered by a customer. That innovation has had many ramifications for literary history, but most important to this argument about the expansion of American publishing geographies is the elimination of the print run and the need for warehousing. With POD, practically zero startup capital needs to be invested into a book before it is published today. Anyone with the ability to bundle together a PDF can publish it as a physical book, make it available for purchase online, and have it shipped to any doorstep in the US within a week. Just-in-time production has led to the flowering of an unfathomable number of presses and publications, demonstrated in the data by the meteoric rise in unique publishers and imprint locations from the nineties onward. And critically, just as publishers using mimeo and ditto professionalized by adopting letterpress and offset in the seventies and eighties, more small press publications could be perceived as literary by trading out the work of the photocopier and stapler—instrumental for the production and proliferation of zines through the nineties and into the present—for perfect bound, digitally printed books.

One significant literary-historical example is Black Classic Press, founded in 1978 in Baltimore by Paul Coates (father of Ta-Nehisi Coates) when he purchased a Xerox machine and began publishing out-of-print and other rare Black literature from his basement. Coates’s production skyrocketed in 1996 when he began leasing a $300,000 Xerox DocuTech, released in 1990 as the first all-in-one POD bookmaking machine. Upon the DocuTech, Coates launched the first Black-American centered POD publishing and printing initiative, which made its name by publishing Walter Mosley’s Gone Fishin’ in 1997.²² It was the DocuTech and the power of POD that allowed Coates’s press to go from publishing twelve to sixteen books annually to three hundred on-demand books a year (Singletary). And that increase is the story of just one press, well before Ingram and Amazon further rationalized POD publishing at the turn of the millennium.

John Ingram saw the DocuTech in action at BookExpo America in the mid 90s, spawning the Ingram Company’s interest in POD. Lightning Source (Ingram’s POD division) printed their first POD book in 1998: galleys of Trish MacGregor’s mystery thriller The Hanged Man, published by Kensington Books. By 2008, Ingram had one million titles in their print library, and had reached fifteen million titles in 2018 (Milliot). Similarly, Amazon entered the POD market when they acquired South Carolina based BookSurge in 2005, eventually integrating POD into their Kindle Direct Publishing ebook service in 2016.²³ In spite of frequently discussed contemporary fiction detailing the lives of writers navigating the New York publishing scene, POD has ushered in a new era of professional self-publication that can be separated from NYC publishing.²⁴