Archive for July, 2011

We’re moving offices here at WLU Press. It’s an internal move, so our institutional address stays the same, but we’ve been in the same offices for more than twenty years and we have accumulated a LOT of junk. I mean stuff. I mean valuable archives.

We’re packing up said archives and deciding which will come with us, which can be stored off-site and which are ok to recycle/shred. Printouts of emails that say “let’s have a meeting tomorrow at 2″ can probably safely be discarded.

Sometimes you come across treasure, though. Yesterday I was moving author files from the file cabinets to the moving boxes and a postcard fell out. It’s from Stan Brakhage, the late American experimental filmmaker. In 1999, WLU Press released The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson, by R. Bruce Elder. The postcard from Brakhage was to thank us for his complimentary copies. The message shows a man full of grace and gratitude for the attention paid his films, and I reproduce it here:

I am very appreciative of the extraordinary insights into my film-making which Bruce Elder has provided therein, and deeply grateful to Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press for extending these insights to the public-at-large. The book is beautifully balanced in the hand, IS a beauty on sight, the print exactly right (it seems to me) … the whole FEEL of it, from paper to cover, of an excellence rare today. In short, I am overjoyed and meaningfully honored.

What a joy it was to find this in the files! I’m going to keep it in mind as we slog on and hope that more treasure like this comes our way.

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