You had to look fast to catch the Chicago Publishes interview with indie publisher Gabriel Levinson earlier this month. The first in a series spotlighting the scrappy independent arm of the business, it went up on the CP website—the city’s nerve center and support system for the industry—December 5, and vanished December 7.
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But when Levinson went back to the website the day after the interview went up, he noticed something odd. A few sentences of impassioned marketing advice had disappeared, along with an important paragraph in which he described struggles he was having with the city while hawking his company’s first product on the street.
The book, A Brief History of Authoterrorism, is a palm-friendly little hardback collection of eight short stories by the likes of Andrei Codrescu about the extremes to which an author might resort in order to reach an audience. The cover, by Jay Ryan, features a T-shirted terrorist about to toss a flaming book bomb titled Read This. Levinson is editor as well as publisher, and he dug into his own pocket for the roughly ten grand it took to put it together and print 1,000 copies.
In a phone interview last week, Chapman said she wanted to clarify: the cuts were made not because the city regulates what the website can publish, she said, but because she made “editorial decisions.” She took out Levinson’s marketing advice because it contained profanity, and she “didn’t think a discussion of his court case was appropriate” for the website. “It was a long discussion about peddling,” she said: “I did not think that fit.”
