The Literary Mosh Pit

Gary Hustwit was never much for reading. In fact, if you perused his shelves as recently as five years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find a single book.

Now, however, “Books have taken over my life,” says the San Diego State dropout.

That’s an understatement: He oversees Incommunicado Press, one of the West Coast’s hottest new independent publishing houses.

As the owner-publisher of the San Diego-based imprint, Hustwit has shepherded an eclectic band of derelict writers, poets, performers and misfits onto the printed page, amassing a catalog of unconventional, often mind-blowing work--from the weary, roadburned prose and poems of songwriter Dave Alvin (“Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You”) to the true-confessions-style ranting of novelist Jimmy Jazz (“The Sub”).

The company’s e-mail address is severelit. Believe it.

In October alone, Incommunicado will publish four titles, including “Scream When You Burn,” a poetry anthology of work from Caffeine magazine and “Armed to the Teeth,” written by erstwhile San Francisco musician Blag Dahlia with illustrations by former L.A. attack artist Marc Rude (who now resides in New York), described by Hustwit as a “sci-fi punk rock detective story.”

With edgy prose and cutting-edge packaging, these trade paperbacks are unconventional by design. Hustwit says Incommunicado’s approach to books is merely an extension of the punk rock ethic he grew up with in Newport Beach and at college, where he promoted concerts and managed bands: If you want to get anything done, just do it yourself.

Thus there’s no room for agents and obsessively crafted proposals here. Hustwit merely reads a manuscript or listens to a pitch; if he likes it, he publishes it.

“Punk rock definitely affected the way I put out books,” says Hustwit, 31. “The creative process is very similar, but the distribution and marketing is a lot harder. There aren’t literary scenes like there are punk music scenes. Everybody buys records but it’s a little bit tougher to sell books to people for some reason.”

He laughs at the understatement. His best-selling title thus far has been Alvin’s book, released last fall, which has sold 4,000 copies.

The streamlined protocol is appreciated by writers, says Nicole Panter, who authored “Mr. Right On and Other Stories,” and edited an anthology of California fiction, “Unnatural Disasters,” for the imprint.

“It’s a lot different from the grown-up world of publishing, where you don’t shake hands with the publisher until after your agent has given you a contract to sign,” Panter says. “I’m very happy with what they’ve done for me.”

*

Incommunicado’s origins are very much a punk rock fairy tale. While doing distribution and marketing for Lawndale-based SST Records in 1990, Hustwit developed a how-to manual for bands who wanted to cut a record, which he initially “published” (hand-bound and copied would be more accurate) as “Releasing an Independent Record.”

At first, he sold the book by placing classified ads in local music rags. “When I’d get a check, I’d go down and cash it and Xerox a copy at Kinko’s and send it out,” Hustwit says. He ultimately sold his 1965 Plymouth Valiant for $1,500 to bankroll a proper press run. And it’s still going strong: “Releasing an Independent Record” has sold 25,000 copies and is in its sixth edition.

The book’s success led to the formation of his first venture, Rock Press, which now has a catalog of eight books encompassing myriad facets of the industry.

While in Austin promoting Rock Press at 1994’s South By Southwest Music Festival, Hustwit ran into writers Panter and Pleasant Gehman, who were performing and hawking self-published poetry books. “I had been toying with the idea of putting out literature, and when I saw them, I said, ‘Why don’t you send me some stuff when we get back to California.’ ”

It was that simple. Five months after their encounter in Texas, Panter’s “Mr. Right On and Other Stories,” and Gehman’s “Senorita Sin” were Incommunicado’s first two books, among 10 issued during its first year of business.

“It was a really spontaneous creation of this press,” Hustwit says of his chance meeting with Gehman and Panter. “I didn’t even have a name for it at the time.”

That came soon thereafter, when Hustwit was channel-surfing one night and stumbled upon a PBS program about William Carlos Williams.

“They had some old recordings of him reading his work,” he remembers.

“Wow, I thought. He’s saying a lot of cool words so I began writing them down and one of the things he said was ‘Incommunicado.’ ”

Although the company has experienced the usual growing pains associated with a small house, it wowed the publishing establishment at the 1995 American Bookseller’s Assn. convention in Chicago, attracting the attention of national wholesalers and distributors who had never seen the books.

“People were pretty enthused and it led to a national distribution deal,” says Hustwit. Which means you can now find titles by San Francisco guerrilla novelist Peter Plate and Gehman’s newest collection of lurid tales and debauchery, “Princess of Hollywood,” at your neighborhood Barnes & Noble.

“Gary’s come really far really fast,” says Panter. “Part of it is because the books have been beautifully presented.” Hustwit usually designs the covers and does the layout himself, although the cover of “Unnatural Disasters”--a juxtaposition of a baby doll’s head and the ubiquitous California palm--was chosen from entrants in a contest of Cal Arts students.

When it comes to writers, though, Hustwit says he has no particular aesthetic: He merely knows what he likes, and lets his authors do the rest--a trade-off, perhaps, for the minuscule monetary reward. “The writers pretty much have complete control over what goes in. I just help them smooth it out and catch as many typos as I can,” he says.

Hustwit’s guidelines are simple: If the material sounds good performed, it will also read well.

“I saw Jimmy Jazz perform his fiction, doing it like spoken word, and I decided to publish him before I saw him on the page,” he says. “Every person on the label can perform and pull it off.”

And the boundaries are ever-widening, both geographically and conceptually. Poet Beth Borrus, author of “Fast Divorce Bankruptcy,” lives in Newark, N.J.; and Barry Graham, an ex-pat from Scotland who now lives an Arizona, is writing a novel for Incommunicado. Meanwhile, Plate’s “One Foot Off the Gutter” is the recipient of movie treatments, and the label has even put out a pair of spoken word CDs.

Will success spoil Incommunicado? It couldn’t hurt, says Panter. “It’s been great because you have a lot of freedom in this kind of situation,” she says. “The problem with a small press is money--there isn’t any.”

Given the copious number of indie presses and faux indie presses popping up, it seems Incommunicado needn’t worry about selling out. Instead, people are buying in. “I’ve seen major publishers coming out with punk imprints and a lot of start-up publishers along the same lines, kind of urban fiction and music crossover,” Hustwit says.

The copycat trends don’t worry him, though; he never paid much attention to them anyway.

“Most people in publishing have studied literature and they’re very in the know about literary trends and different new authors, but I’m completely the opposite of all that. To me, it’s just records, but on paper.”