Books from the Western Disciplinary tradition
I used to run a small publishing company about three years back. I came up with a cheap and efficient publishing method and published eight of my own books, which sold really well because they looked good, were cheap and were based on bizarre and morbid horror themes.

Of the two thousand approx I put together, I have maybe less than a dozen copies. Unfortunately at the time I lost my job, was partially homeless, and ended up just running the company into the ground because I was running it on nothing.

(I set the whole thing up on less than five hundred bucks)

Anyway three years later and this idea has been forming in the back of my head.

Publishing my own novels is all very fine, and so is publishing those of others, but what I’d really like to do is publish a range of texts of different Disciplinary Traditions. Out of texts manuals of prosody, logic, old engineering pocket guides, Latin instruction manuals, some papers I acquired recently on 19th Century Grammar, a 1960s guide to Opera written by Milton Cross, an Old English Saxon-Anglo Grammar, guides to the Bible and the synoptic gospels, works from the turn of the century on archaeology, telepathy, hypnotism. From the book of pseudo-Aristotle (which really put this into focus) the book on palmistry, his masterpiece (16th Century sex manual) old Astrology books, books n the Runes, Medieval Greek



I want to put together a company that puts together small pocket sized disciplinary works, either cheap print facsimiles, or re-prints, and sells them around the ten dollar mark. Each book will be 100 – 150 pages, and where a larger work exists, it will be broken up into smaller, but independent works, or sold in sets.

I think something like this is important, we are growing lazy and complacent in our thinking because of computers and modern society - where as in the past we had to rely on discipline, organization, and personal control in our doings - now we just let computers, credit cards and automated systems run our lives for us, and I think we are losing the mental capacity and the levels of literacy and thought these types of disciplines used to promote in out conduct and ideas.

I was running some figures, I’d need some new equipment, some high powered image processing gear and the like, some initial funds for bookbinding equipment, web site, print cash, glues, shelving, time off from work. I could probably set it up in the Holidays for about $7000, print up about four thousand copies of eight titles and begin distributing them around Sydney, once set up I could run it from home on my days off, and print large quantities of popular titles in the holidays. (Based around sample runs of five hundred once the publication label is established.)

But I don't know, it's probably another pipe dream cos $7000 a lot of money, and I don't see myself stumbaling over it any time soon.