The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs threw a launch party at the Cultural Center on Tuesday for a pair of online entities created to serve the local publishing industry. A combination trade paper and PR tool, ChicagoPublishes.com will offer news, an events calendar, stories about books and periodicals, and a directory of publishers. CAR-Literary is a writer-centric subset of the DCA’s massive Chicago Artists Resource site—which already features pages for dance, theater, visual art, and music—offering job and other postings, a forum, links to resources, and articles and essays by and about writers and publishers. Together they may be a boon to Chicago’s small and scattered publishing community, a threat to its independence, or both.
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Publishing Industry Programs is headed by former Poetry magazine consulting editor Danielle Chapman. She says PIP was the brainchild of DCA commissioner Lois Weisberg, who “loves publishing and books” and wanted to support them. Chapman was hired in late 2007, and the first thing she did was set up the Publishers Gallery—a showcase for locally published books and periodicals as well as work by local authors, initially consisting of two nooks, outfitted with comfortable chairs and bookshelves, at the base of the north staircase in the Cultural Center.
Other PIP projects include seminars and quarterly gatherings for the industry, as well as a series of four monthly public events that begins in December with a Cricket magazine holiday fair to be held in what’s now called the Publishers Gallery & Cafe.
And then there are challenges within challenges. Consider the situation in book publishing. The recent history there, marked by game-changing technological innovation and a crippling economy, includes the loss of Ivan R. Dee—a respected publisher of nonfiction that opened here in 1988 and closed its Chicago office last May. But others like Dominique Raccah’s Sourcebooks—now the biggest trade book publisher in the Chicago area—and Chicago Review Press continue to succeed.
“I’ve been doing poetry and literary events for over 20 years,” Laity says. “If we now have a thriving literary scene with an abundance of reading events it’s in spite of the city, not because of it. They’re not doing this for our benefit. It’s more for the city’s benefit. They want to say, ‘Look how we support the arts.’ But there won’t be a story about Chris Drew on ChicagoPublishes.com.”
