Subscribing to Everything a Publisher Publishes

Many years ago I found myself in Boston with Catherine Hennessey and we found our way to the New England Mobile Book Fair, which is, despite its name, neither mobile nor a fair, but rather an excellent firmly-held-in-place independent bookstore.

The store, at least at the time, organized some of its titles by publisher, rather than by topic or author, and this proved an invaluable aid to finding books I wouldn’t otherwise find, especially from publishers with a focus on a particular domain or approach to publishing.

I’ve yet to come across another bookstore that organizes books this way, but I’ve recently come across something even better: a publisher that allows you to subscribe to everything they publish.

Portland’s Microcosm Publishing has a BFF Subscription that, for a sliding-scale price, with a recommended $100 US per six months, gets you one of everything they publish:

Do you want us to publish more books that empower readers to change your lives and worlds?

Would you like to receive each new title as it’s published?

Subscribe as a BFF to our new titles and we’ll send you at least ten new titles that we publish over the course of six months!

The 6-month subscription is on a sliding scale, pay-what-you-can-afford fee with postage included. In addition to reading, we try to include any other material that we make.

Microcosm has a fascinating array of books and zines in its catalog; I came across their Bikequity, Bikenomics, and Bicycle/Race at Drawn & Quarterly last week in Montreal and bought all three. I’m looking forward to a regular dip into this well.