Dreamer of Books

“A book,” Franz Kafka wrote, “must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” In these terms, Douglas Messerli, owner-operator of Sun & Moon Press, runs the sharpest grindstone around. From his compact office on Wilshire Boulevard, he publishes a startling 50 volumes a year of cutting-edge poetry, prose and drama, an eclectic flow that ranges from translations to new American writing to reissues of avant-garde classics that push openings in one’s awareness of the 20th century.

Never heard of Velimir Khlebnikov or Steve Katz? They’re in “50: A Celebration of Sun & Moon Classics,” a recent anthology of 50 writers Messerli favors. Khlebnikov is a Russian poet who died in 1922 but whose revolutionary urge for social equality remains as palpable as a beating heart. Katz is an American novelist (“Swanny’s Ways” is his latest) whose screwy humor and warm intelligence bear beleaguered witness to the ideals of the 1960s.

Sun & Moon is a nonprofit press that pays its writers little and rarely sells more than 3,000 copies. But success comes in various forms. The books are generally well-distributed, and some of the press’ authors, like Russell Banks and Paul Auster, move on to commercial fame. Others, like Fanny Howe, whose darkly lyrical novel, “Saving History,” imagines a trade in human body parts on the U.S.-Mexican border, find freedom away from mainstream pressures. “Earthlight,” a recent Sun & Moon book of Andre Breton’s poetry, won a translation award from the PEN Center in New York.

An Iowa-born former Temple University literature professor, Messerli abandoned academia to print his first volume--short stories by Djuna Barnes--in 1979. He now has three staffers to help him do everything from picking manuscripts to designing covers. With a neat, gold-streaked, whitish beard and soft pink cheeks, he dashes through book-lined hallways, very serious and very cheerful. “He’s Liberace!” chimes Howe, laughing. But the figure the 48-year-old publisher claims as his institutional muse is another gregarious, if more aristocratic, cultural stylist, Gertrude Stein: “Like her, I’m both a dreamer and a very hard worker. I have a sort of missionary fervor about keeping this going in times when commercial publishers are publishing fewer literary titles.”

With 300 titles to his credit, he prints more new ones a year than most independent presses to which he can be compared, like Black Sparrow Press (12 a year) or New Directions (30 a year). Sales combined with foundation grants and help from individuals and the National Endowment for the Arts provide capital to grow--which Messerli plans to do even as the NEA fades.

“The only thing that worries me as a writer,” Howe says, “is that he does so much himself. He does a book a week now. You feel like a child when her mother starts to have more children: You panic that you’re a forgotten child.”

“My relationship with [Messerli] is more that between writer and writer than between writer and publisher,” says Charles Bernstein, a pioneer in the proudly abstract Language Poetry movement, noting that Messerli is a much-published writer of poetry, prose and drama.

“The reason I publish with him,” says Katz, “is that Doug keeps all the books in print and available. It just seems that, with commercial publishers, the book often goes straight from the printer to the shredder, with a short stop in between.”

Tim Davis, an editor at New Directions in New York, expounds on Messerli’s role in literature as if describing Charles Lindbergh’s gift to flight. “I’m a younger poet myself. I’m 25, and I can tell you that he publishes a good deal of the best experimental writing of our time. That’s where I’d hope to have my work published someday. I know he’s dyslexic, and that’s why the proofreading sometimes has problems. But he works with it.”

When Davis, who has never met the happy monarch of Sun & Moon, is asked how he knows all this, he explains: “People know. Among those interested in the avant-garde, there’s a whole community that owes him a great deal.”