The SuKuLTuR Years E-Book

Marc Degens

• Herausgeber: SuKuLTuR
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Schöner Lesen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 17

Beschreibung

We gave the firm a selection of chapbooks for them to test in their most lucrative machines for a period of four weeks… In Berlin-Wedding, of all places, we thought apprehensively. But our fears were groundless.

Leseprobe

Marc Degens

The SuKuLTuR Years

SuKuLTuR 2013

O ur Faust was The Knob, a sixteen-page story about my ganglion cyst. I wrote the narrative and Torsten designed, typeset, and produced the small chapbook. Outwardly, the first Schöner Lesen (Better Reading) chapbook resembled the Reclam Press’s Universal-Bibliothek series: it had the same format, the same yellow paperboard, a similar typeface. At first we also used points to indicate the price and black bars on the cover. Our chapbooks were just thinner with lower quality printing.

Torsten and I were as poor as church mice. Sometimes the publication of an issue hung on thirty euros— that’s how high production costs ran. Before Torsten and I called this chapbook business into life, we had already produced another chapbook in the same format, a wild punk fanzine called Sex und Kotze (Sex and Vomit) that we distributed for ‘free despite the fee.’ Torsten had laboriously cobbled together two display cases. One was set up in the Berlin comic book store, Grober Unfug, and Torsten shipped the other to me so that I could find a worthy spot for it in the Ruhr district. I decided on the comic book store in the Bochum city center. I asked if they would be willing to set up our display and offer our chapbooks for free to anyone who was interested. “Sure,” one of the employees answered. I gave him the case and a stack of chapbooks and I left.

I went back a month later and neither the display case nor the chapbooks were anywhere to be seen. The owner said that, well, the chapbooks seemed very dubious to him and he didn’t want to distribute them. That’s too bad I answered, and asked him to return them and the case. They were back in the stockroom somewhere, he explained, or maybe he’d even already thrown the whole lot out. I was angry and disappointed and every time I passed the store after that, I felt rage rising again.