Small wonders

Published Feb. 3, 2010 at 10:32 p.m.
Quirks of Literature Dept...
The books — a quartet of them, each five-by-five, smaller than a CD case — feel like treasures, handsome little volumes, a different gem of a story in each.

The books — a quartet of them, each five-by-five, smaller than a CD case — feel like treasures, handsome little volumes, a different gem of a story in each. The one by Aimee Bender, sharp surrealist, features a miner, a logger, a bluebird, and a swan. Rebecca Lee's Bobcat details a dinner party and a possible Salman Rushdie manuscript. The sweet-toothed witch in Trinie Dalton's weirdie fairy-tale dates Death and a vampire named Chad. And Sumanth Prabhaker's novella-length dialogue discusses bread pudding and a caterpillar bite.

The series was just put out by the fledgling and Brighton-based Madras Press, founded by the 27-year-old Prabhaker as a nonprofit side project to his production day job at publisher Pearson Education. He started the organization with an independent, even rebellious (in publishing terms), philosophy behind it. "It became clear early on," Prabhaker explains over hot cider in Harvard Square, "that we weren't going to make any money." Madras deals in small batches (only 1000 copies of each of the first four titles were printed), and commits to working exclusively with independent bookstores. Moreover, instead of pocketing the proceeds, each author selects an organization where the money of the sales will go. Bender, for example, chose InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit that conducts writing classes in the Los Angeles juvenile-hall system.

"It just seemed like a nice way to do things," says the soft-spoken Prabhaker — less about making a buck, and more about trimming away a burdensome publishing process. "Since it's this tiny project, it allows the authors to be much more involved. From small stuff like getting into the cover design process to determining where the funding from the sales goes. It seems so much more pleasant than sending a manuscript off and getting a book back two years later."

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