“…all poets are outlaws.” 

—Stéphane Mallarmé, The Evolution of Literature (1891)

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Beautiful Outlaw is an independent award-winning design and publishing house.

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The importance of the small press has never been more acute. In an age of accelerated corporate consolidation along with continued attacks against independent booksellers, a healthy community of independent presses is key to the ongoing publication & dissemination of new and important works.

 

It is essential to recall that Johannes Gutenberg was not only a typesetter & designer but also the printer & publisher of his seminal Bible, which “marked the start of the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’ and the age of printed books in the West.”

 

This is why, amid the unabated homogenization, weakening, and erasure of cultural benchmarks set out by our forerunners (Plain Edition, New Directions, Grove, Divers Press, City Lights, Origin Press, White Rabbit, Les Éditions de Minuit, Black Sparrow Press, Shakespeare and Company, Burning Deck, Granary Books, Letters, Olympia, et al.) the role of the small-press publisher is central to the germination and survival of our most cherished works. These writings are often born at the margins and are seldom widely read, sidelined throughout their creator’s lifetime in favor of middle-of-the-road trade publications sold to us as masterworks. It is against this tradition of mediocrity that Beautiful Outlaw continues to publish literature that is in solidarity with the unrecognized brilliance of the Elsewhere Community that pervades us.

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