23/05/2025
A clip from the MY PHONE LIES TO ME Encounters event. Watch the full episode on Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/punctumbooks/my-phone-lies-to-me?share=copy
Punctum Books
- Home
- Punctum Books
punctum books is an independent open-access publisher, partnered with UC-Santa Barbara Library, dedi Joy. BABEL Working Group, USA
CO-DIRECTOR>
Vincent W.J.
![A new review of Jonathan Goldberg's SAPPHO: ]fragments, punctum author and Lammy nominee JH Phrydas writes about the "pu...](https://img5.medioq.com/166/762/2583701601667627.jpg)
Address
Website
Alerts
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Punctum Books posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Contact The Business
Send a message to Punctum Books:
Shortcuts
- Address
- Alerts
- Contact The Business
- Claim ownership or report listing
-
Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company?
Share
Our Story
punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion FOUNDING DIRECTOR> Eileen A. Joy. Old and Middle English Literature, Cultural Studies, Q***r Studies, Post/humanisms, Embodiment/Affect, Ethics, Speculative Realism. BABEL Working Group, USA CO-DIRECTOR> Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei. Philology, Art/Politics, Linguistics, Nubian Studies, Deconstruction, Poetry, Monuments, Translation, Albanian Socialist Realism, Philosophy. The Department of Eagles, Uitgeverij, Dotawo. Tirana, Albania. punctum books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent 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, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds. email: [email protected] This word is set down so that you may understand that this whole time totum saeculum, which to us seems so long while it is rolling along, is really a moment punctum. —Augustine, Ennarations on the Psalms This time it is not I who seek it out . . . it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . This element which will disturb the studium I . . . call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida VISION STATEMENT> punctum books, originally founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and with editorial offices in Santa Barbara (USA) and The Hague (Netherlands), is an independent, not-for-profit, public benefit, 501(c)(3) corporation (application pending) registered in Santa Barbara, California. We are an open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage (in which assemblage you will find humanists keeping rowdy and thought-provoking company with social scientists, scientists, multi/media specialists, artists, architects, and designers). We have a special fondness for neo-traditional and unconventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms, with a special emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another. We also take in strays of any variety. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds. punctum is a member of the Radical OA Collective. Formed in 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of over twenty members, we promote a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences. What we have in common is an understanding of open access as being characterised by a spirit of ongoing creative experimentation. We also share a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly communication practices to creative critique, together with the institutions that sustain them (the university, the library, the publishing house and so on). The collective thus offers a radical ‘alternative’ to the conservative versions of open access that are currently being put forward by commercially-oriented presses, funders and policy makers.
punctum books welcomes submissions from authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and fine arts/design, and outside of the university proper as well. We are especially interested in neo-traditional and unconventional scholarly work that productively twists and innovates upon academic norms, with an emphasis on books that fall length-wise between the article and the monograph—id est, novellas, in one sense or another, although we honestly welcome any work, longer or shorter, that would qualify as “smart, stylishly written, and weird.” You want to unleash a 900,000-word academic tome upon the world? Send it to us and we’ll seriously consider it. Want to write a 1-page monograph? Ditto. Works that take formal risks and/or engage with supposedly outmoded or antiquarian genres are also extremely welcome (for example, the florilegium, the breviary, the bestiary, the inter-office memo, the telegram, the reel-to-reel tape, the book of hours, etc.). We are also open to publishing the proceedings of small symposia of highly creative quality that take up any variety of humanities and para-humanities assemblages, and in gonzo avant-garde fashion (and yes, we know “avant-garde” is a suspect and even an exhausted term, but we are also hoping to rehabilitate it). Proposals for essay volumes that are creatively conceptualized and expertly curated around specific themes, subjects, debates, approaches, and the like are also welcome. We also direct you to see our imprints HERE, where you might also find a welcoming harbor for your work.
MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS // If you would like to contact the Co-Directors in charge of Acquisitions with a book (or any other sort of) proposal, write to Eileen Fradenburg Joy ([email protected]) and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei ([email protected]), and provide an abstract [~500 to ~1,000 words] detailing your idea. If we like the idea, we’ll ask for a more detailed formal proposal, which will then be reviewed by members of our Advisory Board with expertise in the proposal’s subject area(s). After (and if) formal proposals are green-lighted, completed manuscripts are reviewed by 2–3 experts in the author’s field(s), who decide whether or not to recommend publication, typically contingent upon revisions. In general, we follow the AAUP’s guidelines for “Best Practices for Peer Review,” but we are also an author-centered press and we are open to authors choosing the sort of review process that they feel will best serve the development of their work: double-anonymous, single-anonymous, open and transparent, online and crowd-based, etc. Philosophically, we feel that open-access publishers should be embracing more open forms of review, and our feelings accord fairly well with the opinions expressed HERE, HERE and HERE.
We receive an overwhelming number of book proposals and aim to publish approximately 50 titles per year. In order to manage as best we can the flow of proposals as well as our production schedule, our preferred procedure for the submission of more detailed book proposals and/or completed manuscripts is for authors to send those to us any time between May and August of each year, giving us September through December of each year to make decisions about which titles we will publish in the subsequent year. Prospective authors can, of course, send us brief pitches any time they like (as explained above) and if you absolutely have a burning manuscript on your hands that you are itching to send to us in a month other than May, June, July or August, feel free to do so; we just can’t say for certain whether we will have the adequate time necessary to review it immediately. But who can say? We believe in serendipity as much as we believe in organized schedules.
