Farewell from and to Chômu Press

It has been some time since there has been Chômu Press news. Now, sadly, the news is that, after much exploring of avenues and much agonising, we have finally made the difficult decision to bring Chômu Press to an end. This is necessarily a brief statement, in order to give our readers as much time as possible to buy the books before they go out of distribution. However, we would like to say thank you to everyone who has worked with, taken an interest in and supported us over the years, especially the readers—those far from ordinary people who have been adventurous enough to take their imaginations into the under-explored territories where the Chômu authors have beaten their highly singular paths.

In just over ten years, we have released 28 extraordinary books, with which we are proud to be associated. We have been especially gratified to be able to put out the bubbling and provocative laboratory-mix of very different talents that makes the Chômu catalogue so dynamic, and we have been fortunate to have had so many strange treasures submitted to us to make this possible. We hope that they will not long stay out of print.

Chômu titles will be removed from distribution at the end of January (there might be separate announcements concerning the Dadaoism anthology), so you still have almost two months in which to buy up any titles that you have not so far collected.

At a later date, I hope I will have the necessary distance (and the time) to write more fully about what has been such an important part of my life. For now, let me write simply that I hope that readers, writers and others who have had anything to do with Chômu, will have fond memories. If I may, I would also like to take the opportunity to express the hope that the relatively brief activity of Chômu has helped to demonstrate that Print-on-Demand books, far from being disposable, can and do become collectable. A Print-on-Demand book is a limited edition whose limitation we don’t know until the end.

With best wishes,

Quentin S. Crisp