SPONTANEOUS ACTS OF SCHOLARLY COMBUSTION

Support & SubscribeBrowse
Punctum@Amazon

Recent and Forthcoming Titles

Ballads

Originally published by eth co-director David Hadbawnik’s habenicht press in 2012, Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the ...

Unless As Stone Is

The sestina is a form in which words repeat regularly, intricately, appearing and reappearing in new contexts with new meanings. Sam Lohmann’s Unless As Stone Is emerged from a few years of living with Dante’s sestina, “Al ...

snowline

“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” François Villon’s most famous line is a kind of translation, a variation of the old “ubi sunt” trope: Where are the things that used to be? But Villon specifically ...

Cotton Nero A.x: The Works of the “Pearl” Poet

Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton’s library: busts of historical figures atop shelves provided the organizing principle, such that one found this ...

punctum books is an independent open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

Latest News

Read the Directors' blog

Testimonials

Democracy … is not an established reality, nor is it a mere ideal; it is rather a permanent struggle for democratization. Can open access be understood in similar terms: less as a homogeneous project striving to become a dominating model or force, and more as an ongoing critical struggle, or series of struggles? … Certainly, one of the advantages of conceptualizing open access as a process of struggle rather than as a model to be implemented would be that doing so would create more space for radically different, conflicting, even incommensurable positions within the larger movement, including those that are concerned with experimenting critically with the form of the book and the way our system of scholarly communication currently operates. … In fact if, as we have seen, one of the impulses behind open access is to make knowledge and research—and with it society—more open and democratic, it can be argued that the existence of … dissensus will help achieve this ambition.

Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, "The Political Nature of the Book"