Albuquerque, New Mexico                                                                                                                         © Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

In 1988  Gus sends his friend Stanley Crawford’s memoir Mayordomo to UNM Press, where it is published and wins a Western States Book Award. He reissues Crawford’s 1977 novel The Log of the SS. The Mrs. Unguentine, the first under his Living Batch imprint. From the bookstore’s newsletter, Living Batch News:

“LIVING BATCH ENTERS PUBLISHING . . . The first two [books] are Stanley Cavell’s This New Yet Unapproachable America and Stanley Crawford’s classic and long-unattainable The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. Reasons for the press? To make some of what we believe in available and to produce at reasonable prices and in typographically handsome (readable) formats lost (and original) books of lasting interest. A simpler reason is enthusiasm. When I read Cavell’s lectures on Wittgenstein as a cultural philosopher and Emerson as finding and beginning the founding of American culture, I felt that if I ever wanted to publish, here was an opportunity not to be missed.  For years I have tried to interest publishers in printing Crawford’s novel. . . . With Cavell as foundation and Crawford as the first couple of bricks I had more than I needed to move on. I trust such conviction will continue and the little wall of books will stretch like a new course of masonry, brick by brick, book by book, until we have a foot or so of our own choosing on our and others’ shelves.”

THE LIVING BATCH EVENT FLYERS