THE PROJECT
From major museums like the MoMA to art house cinemas such as Film Forum, cultural organizations do not sustain themselves from sales alone, but from subscriptions, donations, benefactors, and grants.
Since benefactors of Peggy Guggenheim’s stature are rare to come by, and receiving large grants from major funding bodies is an infrequent and unreliable source of income, we seek to further our venture through a form of modest support that is within everyone’s reach.
Although renowned, we are an independent boutique press with modest profit margins. In not having university, state, or institutional backing, other forms of sustenance are required to move us into the future.
Additionally, in the past decade, the reduction of the purchasing budgets across the nation of both public and private libraries has had a severe impact upon publishers, leading to significant decreases in sales, thereby necessitating the creation of alternative means of subsistence.
Because many of our books are translations, our desire for proper remuneration is a persistent point of concern. Even when translators receive grants for book projects, the amount is often insufficient to compensate for their efforts, and royalties, which trickle in slowly over years, are not a reliable source of compensation.
WHAT WILL BE DONE
With your participation we seek to offer writers and translators greater compensation for their work, and in a more expeditious manner.
Additionally, funds will be used to pay for translation rights, basic operating expenses of the press, and to represent our writers and translators at book fairs.
If the means exist, we will also create a translation residency, providing opportunities to both junior and more established translators, thereby furthering our cultural efforts.
Through a greater collective and the cultural commons of the world, we can band together to create this constellation and together function as a patron for the writers and artists published by Contra Mundum Press. We hope you will join us in this partnership.
Visit our Patreon page here to participate in this collective. We are seeking to find at least 10,000 supporters per year. Donation levels from $2 to beyond are available, with different gifts for each tier.
OUR HISTORY
Contra Mundum Press (CMP) is an independent publishing house with a global vision. Our primary interest is in international Modernism and the principles developed by the Modernists, though we also publish challenging and visionary works from other eras. Our preference is for writers whose thinking and aesthetics are in opposition to mainstream currents of thought, value systems, or moralities.
Since our inception in 2012, CMP has published translations from Sumerian, French, Hungarian, Italian, German, Turkish, Farsi, Catalan, Finnish, world premiere editions, and several bi- & multilingual books in a variety of genres. In 2020, we inaugurated Agrodolce, our series of unorthodox books on food, further broadening our catalog.
In our art journal, Hyperion, which has an international readership, we have featured yet more translations and published festschrifts on writers. Through these efforts, we have worked to raise the profile of literature in translation.
The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, amongst others, have championed our publications, and many of our writers have received grants and awards. CMP has also staged events and collaborated with cultural organizations in New York, Budapest, Berlin, and Paris, including participating in international film and literary festivals.
Our vision is informed by a poetics of hospitality. As a purveyor of often forgotten or exiled voices, we serve as a home to world culture, welcoming the voices, and so the lives and experiences, of “foreigners.” From Gilgamesh to Syrian Nobel nominee Adonis, in publishing translations from as many different languages as we have, CMP not only welcomes strangers into its house, but presents them to the English-reading public as its honored guests.
With your participation, we can further develop and expand our vision and continue to be a formidable presence in the world of independent publishing.