By Than Saffel
I was on a committee recently that included members from a company based outside the region. At the first meeting, as we introduced ourselves, some of us noticed a trend: nearly everyone on the WVU team had been in their position for 15 or 20 years or more, showing perhaps an uncommon level of satisfaction. I believe that sense of satisfaction is due to the connectedness that comes as part and parcel of Appalachian relationships.
I’ve made a lot of books, and with every book project has come a tightly connected team for a short burst of collaborative activity in pursuit of perfection. That atmosphere creates relationships that last. One of those books is So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979. For the book’s creation, author Shaun Slifer, creative director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum (https://wvminewars.org/), lent a significant archive of Appalachian DIY zines from the 1970s and 1980s to the Press. I scanned them for reproduction in our book, then shared them back to Shaun.
I remember thinking at the time that I was perhaps the last person who would ever reproduce this zine or that pamphlet, with its colored card stock cover and rusty staples—that my scans might be acquired as part of an archive and become the definitive repository of this ephemeral publication. I took extra care to be consistent and conservative with my scans and assessment of their output. The book we produced is one of my favorites.
Fast forward to last December, when SMTBAA author Shaun Slifer (with whom we’ve been discussing a WV Mine Wars Museum book) reached back out to ask whether I might be willing to share digital copies of a stack of e-books relating to the Mine Wars with his Museum team. I was delighted to say “yes,” partly because I was happy to share this resource with our colleagues in Matewan, and partly because I realized that we had a decent amount of significant texts to share—including Shaun’s book.
“Having a digital database of Mine Wars scholarship that our entire staff can easily access has had immediate positive effects on our ability to locate answers we can’t recall, including stats, dates, and family names,” said Slifer. “And we sell all of these titles in our gift shop as well—we’ve been told we have one of the best selections of Appalachian history books for sale, and many of them are WVU Press titles.”
It felt totally natural to be sharing this material as a way of preserving it: redundant storage through human relationships. It feels very DIY, and also very Appalachian—and that really is what I enjoy most about university press publishing: the way we dance around the edges of open source and for-profit distribution models, in service to the sharing of connections. We certainly do live in interesting times.