Text for Exact Change 20th Anniversary Celebration, Issue Project Room
Last March, I walked down my building's two flights of stairs around 1pm to check the mail, like I do most days. Lying on the floor in the front hallway was a small package from Exact Change. Damon and Naomi are usually good enough to send me a copy of whatever their latest release is, usually music. We go back quite a ways, to the late 80s when they were in the indie rock trio Galaxie 500 and I was in the indie rock trio Love Child - this was a specific era of power trios that in reality weren't all that powerful and that often included a female bass player, which was true of both Galaxie 500 and Love Child. I wondered what they'd sent as I made my way back upstairs, and once inside the apartment opened the package to find a small booklet whose cover was a fake book binding that read "Album Exact Change." The front page carried the subtitle "20 Years of Publishing - An Illustrated History." Had it really been twenty years since they started up Exact Change? I don't think I'd even heard about it until after Galaxie 500 disbanded in 1991. I started flipping through the pages, noting the classically spare cover of the Exact Change mimeo literary magazine, a hand-written letter from John Cage, and a letter from Byron Coley (which brought back memories of the correspondence I had with him while I was still a college student). The page next to the one with Byron's letter repeated the book's front page - odd, I thought. I continued looking and the next sixteen pages were exactly the same as the first sixteen - and numbered 1 to 16. I looked back at the page before they started repeating: there was a kind of a cliff-hanger in the text: "We began to feel the effects - positive and negative - of being part of the larger world of publishing. These were years in the industry marked by expansion of the chain stores Barnes & Noble and Borders, and we watched as one excellent independent store after another closed. Our mailing list shrunk; yet our orders increased. Could it be that we were selling more books through these chilly big boxes, than we had at all those wonderful smaller stores we loved to shop at ourselves?"
Last March, I walked down my building's two flights of stairs around 1pm to check the mail, like I do most days. Lying on the floor in the front hallway was a small package from Exact Change. Damon and Naomi are usually good enough to send me a copy of whatever their latest release is, usually music. We go back quite a ways, to the late 80s when they were in the indie rock trio Galaxie 500 and I was in the indie rock trio Love Child - this was a specific era of power trios that in reality weren't all that powerful and that often included a female bass player, which was true of both Galaxie 500 and Love Child. I wondered what they'd sent as I made my way back upstairs, and once inside the apartment opened the package to find a small booklet whose cover was a fake book binding that read "Album Exact Change." The front page carried the subtitle "20 Years of Publishing - An Illustrated History." Had it really been twenty years since they started up Exact Change? I don't think I'd even heard about it until after Galaxie 500 disbanded in 1991. I started flipping through the pages, noting the classically spare cover of the Exact Change mimeo literary magazine, a hand-written letter from John Cage, and a letter from Byron Coley (which brought back memories of the correspondence I had with him while I was still a college student). The page next to the one with Byron's letter repeated the book's front page - odd, I thought. I continued looking and the next sixteen pages were exactly the same as the first sixteen - and numbered 1 to 16. I looked back at the page before they started repeating: there was a kind of a cliff-hanger in the text: "We began to feel the effects - positive and negative - of being part of the larger world of publishing. These were years in the industry marked by expansion of the chain stores Barnes & Noble and Borders, and we watched as one excellent independent store after another closed. Our mailing list shrunk; yet our orders increased. Could it be that we were selling more books through these chilly big boxes, than we had at all those wonderful smaller stores we loved to shop at ourselves?" I flipped ahead again and found page seventeen and found the next sentence ("It didn't seem possible, and it wasn't"). I figured the little book's Sisyphean design had to be an avant garde literary ruse, to make the reader literally go back to the beginning in order to get to the next phase of their imprint's history. What a great idea for an experimental press' retrospective publication! I wrote to Damon and Naomi to congratulate them on the anniversary and to thank them for sending Album Exact Change, and admitted to having initially been puzzled by the double printing of the book's first half. I asked if it was, in fact, an Oulipo (oo-lee-PO)-style prank. "AAAHHH" Naomi wrote back, "you got a screwed up copy! I am going to kill the printer!" She offered to send a new, corrected copy, which she did, but I am going to treasure the misprint version - I wish I'd thought of it myself.