New Frontiers in Publishing
Wherein I take a look at some of the fresh new faces in right-wing publishing…
One of the most exciting aspects of this new age of instantaneous and multifarious communications is the proliferation of new publishing ventures. And that has also meant access to a plethora of new—as well as sometimes old but newly discovered—ideas.
Naturally, this is objectively a good thing. The profusion of ideas is salutary, and is a key component of free speech; any healthy society would welcome this freedom, and any ideology that was truly unassailable and convinced of its divine right to power would have no fear of inferior competitors.
However, living in the third decade of the twenty-first century, one has the distinct impression that society is awakening as from a very long slumber, during which the limits of thought were very precisely circumscribed. The internet, as with so much else, has changed all that; whereas speech was once tightly controlled, and publishing houses were few and the barriers to entry were high—often artificially so, and not only in the measure of quality—nowadays things are different.
The self-publishing tools on Amazon have equipped writers with an invaluable new means of reaching an audience. This has chopped many of the traditional publishers off at the knees, and deservedly so; now, writers with interesting and perhaps subversive things to say—writers like the infamous Bronze Age Pervert, the Raw Egg Nationalist, Zero H. P. Lovecraft, and many others—have a “platform,” as they say, a means of disseminating new ideas that wouldn’t ordinarily have been permitted.
That is, of course, not necessarily a good thing. The growth of access has occasioned a growth of noise—a cacophonous din, really, and it is sometimes difficult to locate the wheat amidst the chaff.
If you doubt me, take a gander at the profusion of “monster erotica” on Amazon, and you may just begin to comprehend my point.
Nevertheless, on the whole, this trend must be considered a great benefit to society. Not only are the new ideas of new authors disseminated, but so is the forgotten work of forgotten authors—authors against whom a silent campaign of censorship has often been orchestrated for many decades.
All of which has begotten new frontiers in publishing, and this is the subject of what I’d like to talk about today. The ferocious conflict we see now, with the likes of Elon Musk—whom I like to consider as something of a joker in the deck of today’s stifled and strait-jacketed society—on one side, and the left-liberal Regime on the other, is but one manifestation of the tremendous societal upheaval wrought by new technology. Twitter was always meant to be a sounding-board and propaganda tool of the Regime—how else are we to understand its heavy involvement in the so-called “Arab Spring,” and at such an early point in its existence?
Now, it seems, Elon Musk has removed that clandestine instrument from the Regime’s extensive toolkit, and is taking steps to move it more securely toward a public forum for free speech. But this is to neglect what I think is a much more profound upheaval: that is to say, the revolution in publishing brought about by Amazon, ebooks, print-on-demand (POD) publishing, and the sudden sprouting of innumerable new publishing houses and ventures like so many mushrooms after a spring rain shower. Many of these have appeared in the right-wing sphere, and this is remarkable, for it attests to an insatiable hunger for new material in this space—the “unmet need” that the liberal economists used always to extol with such fulsome praise.
Right-wing publishers have popped up everywhere, and they are presently engaged in an enterprise that is likely to shape the future in unpredictable ways. They are busying themselves in resurrecting the works and reputations of forgotten or semi-forgotten authors, translating old books into various languages so as to disseminate them to new audiences and countries, and publishing the creations and ideas of rising new dissident voices.
Remember, the revolutions of the world closely follow the growth and emergence of new publishing technologies—first, with the discovery of letters and writing in the first place, then the spread of literacy and the development of papyrus, parchment, and paper media, and finally with Gutenberg’s printing press and the myriad cultural revolutions it spawned. We are in the midst of such a revolution today, and the repercussions are already being felt in the halls of power; the Regime is terrified of the uncontrollable spread of new ideas that are doing so much to uncover its corruption, venality, fraudulence, and illegitimacy, and it is right to be terrified.
So who are some of the pioneers of these new frontiers in publishing? I can name here only a few, but their work has been heroic. For starters, there is Daniel Friberg’s Arktos Media, which was one of the very first. This outfit began by translating and publishing in affordable editions some of the finest work by great right-wing and dissident thinkers—including the likes of French Nouvelle Droite writers like Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, Traditionalist titans like Julius Evola, and veterans of the German Conservative Revolution like Oswald Spengler and Ernst von Salomon—as well as newer thinkers, like Jason Reza Jorjani and the controversial contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.
The folks at Arktos were soon joined by others. Antelope Hill Publishing has been printing quality books for several years, including brand-new translations and the original work of bright new authors—their roster of books includes everything from original fiction, to memoirs of the first Russo-Ukrainian conflict, to anthologies culled from writing contests, to the interesting work of the Raw Egg Nationalist, and much else. Meanwhile, another independent dissident publisher, Imperium Press, which bills itself as “the classics department of the right,” has an impressive catalogue of both new and re-issued works. From the speeches of Jonathan Bowden, the books of Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Friedrich List, to ancient Indo-European folktales, Western touchstones like the Iliad and Beowulf, to new classics of political theory like Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion, or new fictional experiments like Steelstorm, Imperium Press is proving itself to be a force of nature.
This, as I said, is but a sampling of the plethora of dissident publishers that have appeared, and are making waves by challenging the prehistoric supremacy of the old publishing houses that have long guarded the acceptable limits of speech, and carefully curated what ideas could and could not be addressed. There are many others: White People’s Press, The Bizarchives, DVX Publishing, Aureus Press, Counter-Currents, Black House Publishing, Terror House Press, and even certain older esoteric publishing outfits—including the more mainstream, like Inner Traditions, and the lesser-known, like Sophia Perennis—which started the ball rolling by publishing the indispensable works of Traditionalist authors like Julius Evola and René Guénon.
In future issues of this Substack, I’ll be exploring each of these dissident publishing concerns in detail, including the kinds of books and authors they publish, something of their history, and what they hope to accomplish and how they envision the future.
For the nonce, however, I’ll conclude with this: “the times,” as Bob Dylan once said, “they are a-changin’,” and few entities are more responsible for this than the work of the dissident publishing enterprises. The time has come to free ourselves of the blinkered, leftist-dominated thinking that has held back our civilization for so long, and the first step to rediscovering our future is to rediscover the past—with the forgotten or deliberately buried thought of the old sages, and with the startling but often-overlooked ideas of the new.
It has fallen to the Right to trail-blaze the future, and spearhead a much needed revolt against the modern world. So be it; if that is our lot, we are more than equal to it. Penser à rebours, my friends—“think against the current,” at least against the current of today’s thought, and let that be the motto of our movement.
And until next week—au revoir…