[Photo: Mark and Jamie at Cafe OTO Xmas Fair,
17 December 2023, by Bea Turner]
Our final mailout of 2023 is a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have bought
books and supported us over the past year.
We'd also like to thank our amazing authors, past present and future, and our small production team: freelance designers Tihana Šare, Maia Gaffney-Hyde (who is moving on after five years) and Alena Zavarzina; our long-suffering, eagle-eyed, proof-reader Richard Bancroft; our incredible printers Tallinna Raamatutrükikoda; and our tireless distributors, MIT Press.
It's been an extremely busy twelve months for us, and in some ways a difficult one, in no small part due to our own tendencies to overload ourselves with projects – we just can't help our enthusiasm for strange and beautiful books. But, as a result, we've had a lot of catching up to do, with some titles, for various reasons, running years late, but we've very nearly there and are now mostly thinking about the future.
This year's titles (not including POD edtiions of older titles) have
been:
Death Lines – Lauren Jane Barnett
Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with
Coil – ed. Nick Soulsby
Strange Attractor Journal Five – eds Mark Pilkington &
Jamie Sutcliffe
The Pepsi Cola Addict – June-Alison Gibbons
England's Hidden Reverse (new ediiton) – David
Keenan
Vision of the Hawk – Arik Roper
Catastophe Time – Ed. Gary Zhexi Zhang
Austin Osman Spare (new edition) – Phil Baker
Postcards for Mia – Michael Taussig
Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium – Ed. Adrian
Whittaker
Cabarets of Death – Mel Gordon & Joanna Ebenstein
Subontinental Synthesis: Electronic Music at the National Institute of
Design, India 1969–1972 – Ed. Paul Purgas
Book publishing is immensely rewarding, creatively and culturally, but rarely
financially, and the challenges of keeping a tiny business like
ours afloat are only growing in complexity. Rest assured, we're here
for the long haul, but we need to grow wiser, as well as older. So from 2024,
we're going to be slightly reducing the number of books we publish a
year, in order to give ourselves, and you, our readers, some breathing
space, and allow us to strategise a little more about our future.
And, speaking of time... 2024 marks twenty years (!) since our first
publication, Strange Attractor Journal One, and we're hoping to
celebrate this improbable feat with some special events
– do watch this space.
We'd also like to offer a taste of some of the forthcoming titles we've
got planned for the next year or so:
A monograph on outsider UFO artist Ionel Talpazan; David Toop on Dr
John; Phil Hine and Rodney Orpheus' Pagan News compendium;
Grimdark: A Very British Hell; a revised Lost Envoy and Austin
Spare's tarot deck; a revised Appendix N; Doug Skinner's
Music From Elsehwere; Jennfier Gibbons' lost
novel Discomania; an Ithell Colquhoun reader, edited by Amy
Hale; Gabriel Kennedy's Chapel Perilous: The Life and Tthought
Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson; a new anthology from David
Tibet; a collection of essays by Timothy D'Arch Smith; writings on
Malcolm Lowry edited by Mark Valentine, a new translation of Dreams and
How to Guide Them by Hervey de Saint-Denys, William Fowler's
biography of Anthony Balch, Christopher Josiffe's biography of Eric
Dingwall. And...yes... more...
But first, a rest!
Wishing you a Happy Solstmas, and a strange and wonderful 2024.
Jamie and Mark
Strange Attractor Press