Through the Alice James archives, we’re sharing our stories.
We invite you to take a deeper look at the press’s generative roots and how we’ve become
who we are 50 years later.


First looks, first books

 
 
 

“Although all other Alice James titles have been printed in commercial shops, the interior pages of this first pair we printed ourselves on an ancient press at MIT that was available only when classes were not in session, after six o’clock in the evening. That September, once we had hired a printer for the covers and bought cartons of paper, we nervously pasted-up poems we had typeset. Again and again we checked the alignment, the page sequence, the folio placement. Then, once the boards were photographed and the negatives stripped-in, we settled down to the tedious task of discovering each imperfection and blotting it out with opaquing liquid. Night after night we bent over light tables. Our backs ached. Our nerves frayed. Many days we saw the sun rise. When at long last, with the help of the press operator, the plates were rubbed-up and set in place, we heaved a collective sigh of relief. But when we fed our paper to the rollers, the giant press balked. It stained our sheets with black blotches. Or chewed the paper to confetti. Or printed far too lightly. We adjusted the ink flow. The press operator tinkered. Hours passed. We cursed. Were we facing defeat? No. Beautifully clear and readable sheets finally rolled off the machine. A miracle. We cheered. We had printed these poems. In January, after the books were bound commercially, we mailed out review copies and press releases. One thousand copies of each volume sat in cartons in our small office.” –from Alice James Books: The First Decade by Marjorie Fletcher

 

Formative Letters between members show the development of a close-knit, supportive community of poets in prosperity and growth.

1980 Letter from Beatrice Hawley while on Vinalhaven Island, ME

 
1977: Letter to Ruth Whitman from Kinereth Gensler

1977: Letter to Ruth Whitman from Kinereth Gensler

 

1981 Cooperative Letter to Miriam Goodman

1975 Cooperative Letter to Kinereth Gensler

 
 

What would Membership at a Cooperative Look Like?

 
 
 

Group Shots Then & Now: A Few Moments From AJB Gatherings Over the Years

 

1980: A Gathering of Alices

 

Alices Janine Joseph, Matthew Olzmann, Mathew Neinow, Jamaal May, and francine j. harris

 

Alices Shara McCallum, Sumita Chakraborty, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Jeffrey Thomson with AJB Director, Carey Salerno in Philadelphia, PA

 

2014: An Alice Potluck at Suzanne Matson’s

 

Alices Anne Marie Macari, Ellen Doré Watson, Monica Hand, and Shara McCallum at AJB’s 3rd Annual Kinereth Gensler Awards Book Launch

 

Friends and Alices celebrate the launch of DiVida by Monica A. Hand at the Langston Hughes House in Harlem, NY

 

Early News & Features Reveal a Growing Press in a Changing World

 
 
 

December Featured Archive: Alice Asks… Betsy Sholl, November 2009

 

Epistolary Emblems from Alices

 
 

Early Forms of Feedback, Alice Style

A Questionnaire Completed by Alice, Robin Becker

 

AJB Questionnaire Completed by Jane Kenyon with Correspondence from Marie Harris

 

Peg & April Shoutout: A Decade of Prosperity & Growth, 1998-2008

YOU GET HOOKED

“At Alice James you get hooked. It's a really wonderful press, a different one. Being a cooperative, it's just different: It's run by a bunch of poets. I found it irresistible, and I've seen it happen over and over to board members and staff. You get hooked and you care and you work really hard on its behalf.”

–from Q&A: April Ossmann’s Alice James Fix, Poets & Writers, Mar/Apr 2009

FRUITFUL ARTICULATIONS

“Consensus in a cooperative is not one member bullying another into submission. It is discussion. It is sometimes arguments, and we do have them—but they are always fruitful articulations of what they see a poet doing and achieving….[even if] the style was not what one or more of them would have chosen as a writer; as editors, they saw and heard and felt the power of the poetry.

-from Alice James Books: Accounting for Taste

 

Tell Me Again About Alice James…

Alice James Books is named after the sister of the philosopher William James and novelist Henry James. She lived a largely confined and isolated life. Alice’s education was haphazard, reflecting her father’s belief that “The very virtue of a woman… disqualifies her for all didactic dignity. Learning and wisdom do not become her.” Keenly self-aware, she started a journal in 1889 as a way of recording her own understanding of herself.Alice James has since been known as a feminist icon, in recognition of her struggle for self-expression within the repressive Victorian notion of gender and femininity. She was born in 1848 and died of breast cancer in London in 1892.