Small is beautiful

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I’ve always been a sucker for a small book, the kind you can read in a single sitting, a pamphlet or a chapbook, so slender, so discrete. That’s why I like Bük America, the Hollywood-based imprint that got its start in 2005 publishing pamphlets (5-by-7, 16 to 32 pages) in curated sets of six.

The point, Bük’s website tells us, is to offer “one provocative essay, short story, portfolio of pictures, collection of poems or other surprising entertainment, readable in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.” The fourth set is just out, and its, er, büks can be purchased individually for $1.49 or together in a nifty little red cardboard “Bükcase” for $11.95.

Of course the Bük idea is a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick that works. Where else would you find, say, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” Dave Hickey’s “Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” or “The Constitution of the United States” juxtaposed against one another, like the jumbled thoughts of the collective consciousness?

Bük’s new set of titles is equally eclectic, featuring Charles Baudelaire’s “Transcendence and Other Poems,” Bertrand Russell’s 21-word illustrated fable “History of the World in Epitome” (“Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The end,” it reads in its entirety) and Peter Hujar’s photo collection “Animals.” Best of all is “The Telephone,” a deft little meditation on technology and style by the essayist Akiko Busch, whose most recent book is “Nine Ways to Cross a River.”

According to Bük, these pamphlets provide a way for busy people to keep their hands in, to find new ways in which to read. More to the point, they seem to fill a gap left increasingly by magazines, which rarely publish this type of material any more. Either way, there’s something smart and unexpected about this project, the way each slipcased set of pamphlets freely mixes the old and new, the classic and the cutting edge. If nothing else, it reminds us that good writing comes in all sorts of packages, and that it never goes out of style.

David L. Ulin