Apt. 9 Press: Happy 15th Anniversary

Image description: two handstitched chapbooks with cream covers. TEXT: 1. SOME SILENCES, Notes on Small Press/Cameron Anstee; 2. APT. 9 PRESS/2009-2024/A Checklist]

Image description: Through a window, a large audience is listening to Justin Million read in front of a microphone inside a bar. The awning reads “Heineken/Woody’s/Heinekin”. Photo taken by Charles Earl in August 2009.

What I most enjoyed about reading “SOME SILENCES” and “A Checklist” was Cameron’s sense of community, and the idea that by trying to write, by trying to put things out there, either as a publisher or a writer, one is part of this community.

There’s such an approachability and a friendliness inherent in the chapbookery/broadsidery/folioery of Cameron Anstee. I sat down with the latest beauties and imagined I was drinking tea, too lazy to make any at that time and wanting to plunge in to Cameron’s musings on small press resilience and community.

Apt. 9 Press has been making beautiful, handbound, fascinating and wondrous chapbooks for 15 years. 15 years? How in the heck? Where does the time go?

This is what Cameron looked like 15 years ago:

Image description: a young Cameron Anstee in front of a microphone. Photo by Charles Earl

I do not have a photo of what he looks like now. You should come to the next ottawa small press book fair on November 16 to find out.

His sustained practice of folding, stapling, printing, stitching (apparently over 4000 books in the last 15 years), publishing, disseminating, engaging with authors, writing his own work…it’s necessary and enriching work.

I always tell this story, but here I go again. When I was in ICU on my near-death bed, Charles would read to me. My various important numbers of blood pressure etc stabilized. Many people in the literary community, both local and further away wrote me letters and sent me gifts. Cameron sent chapbooks, including Ben Ladouceur’s The Argossey, freshly made in October, 2009, just a month before my health crisis.

Image description: yellow flowers on a white, handstitched chapbook. Below the flowers: The Argossey/Ben Ladouceur.

When I got home from the hospital, I was frail, fragile, unable to do much. I read “The Argossey” for myself. It is the Odyssey retold from the point of view of Odysseus’ dog. Something about this tale about finding home again after a long absence was exactly what i needed to hear after my own odyssey from healthy to suddenly near death to wandering through delusions that had me asking to go home.

“come home —/ I will sing for you and the gibbous moon only//give your heart/and dark legs to my heart.” book xiii

“thank the gods for so many/blessings and for pain//paths to dark places/lovely, silky dark” box xxi

Even now this work thrills and resonates.

I am combing through all of my copies of Apt. 9 Press titles and want to talk about all of them, but this will have to suffice. I have William Hawkins’ Sweet & Sour Nothings at my side and I intend to reread it soon.

I consult the Checklist and realize I have almost all of the Apt. 9 Press publications until 2020. I am not sure why I do not own the complete set. If you are someone who collects or comes from a history of collection, as Cameron does, having a father who faithfully collected the works of Beat Poets, it makes sense that this Checklist exists. I’m glad of it. I can be a completist. I have all of Vic Chesnutt’s albums (on MP3 only alas) bar one.

I’ve become a bit of a space curmudgeon, not wanting to fill up my apartment beyond its spacious means. But when I return to Sandra Ridley’s “Rest Cure,” inscribed to me with a mention of the place where the reading was held: Woody’s, and I pick up Christine McNair’s :”pleasantries and other misdemeanours” including its inscription from the reading at Raw Sugar in 2013, a charming cafe that no longer exists, when I hold these beauties in my hands and enjoy the softness of the covers, marvel at the work that went into all of that stitching, then I start to read…I remember…

Image description: many chapbooks spread out in clock shape on a beige wall-to-wall living room carpet. The Argossey is at the centre, replete with pink post-it notes.

Thank you, Cameron. Happy Fifteenth, dear Apt. 9 Press.

Thank you to those who have supported my efforts via a paid or free subscription or by buying me a coffee.