It is no secret that I started Inside the Castle ten years ago simply as an imprint to put on my self-published novel PLATS. I didn’t know any other writers. I had no idea of how to proceed into a world I was not educated in. It seemed important to have the book as a physical object. It had been done for 6 or 7 years already. I published my second book (a book I wrote at work while practicing architecture over a period of about ten years) about a year later because the dean of the school where I was teaching smirked at me for telling him my novel was self-published. I thought that a slightly thicker catalog might legitimize me in other people’s eyes, that it might make Inside the Castle a thing and not just a one-off fizzle. It wasn’t until I had the great fortune of publishing M Kitchell’s HOUR OF THE WOLF in 2016 that I could feel confident enough in myself to make the claim to legitimacy, although I never would feel right describing it a such in the real world. The thing is I never would have met Kitchell or known how to engage with people in the literary world without PLATS first being a physical thing. So Inside the Castle always sits in a place for me of constantly trying to legitimize itself and myself, but legitimacy is an illusion. As I learned from publishing PLATS and the continued dividends that one-off fizzle continues to pay as the foundation for everything we have all been able to accomplish through Inside the Castle (both as a calling-card for me but also as the kernel of our larger project), all that matters is the work. I never imagined, or even intended, for it to go this far, publishing 50 books by 38 of the world’s most fascinating contemporary writers. As such, I was curious about looking back through all of those writers through the lens of the PLATS project, which in essence was to exploit the way a book functions to play out a specific scenario of disorientation and depersonalization. So I asked all of those wonderful people:

What is it about it specifically about the form and function of a book that you find alluring?

The book is a space of performance: not a mere container to collect, but rather a venue that allows disparate elements to speak to one another in order to communicate something impossible to the reader. A text that is nothing more than text does not need the form of a book to say anything; it is happy sitting as a word document on a harddrive, a handwritten letter in a jar, or scrawled on the walls of an asylum. A book might use a text, but it can also refuse it. A book is a form. A book is a gesture, an act. A book is a reminder.

— M Kitchell, author of IN THE DESERT OF MUTE SQUARES and PRELUDE TO TRANSGRESSION

I like the illusion of permanence.

— BR Yeager, author of PEARL DEATH

There’s some nostalgic about the word alluring—synonymous with come-hither, bewitching, beguiling. Its root, lure, adds a sinister dimension. Fairytale trickery, the thing you don’t go towards it you know the whole story. A lure is a term from the practice of falconry; of sending a creature off into the world with a message and hoping it will return. Actually, not just hoping but collaborating with various entities to receive a response. Books are the same. You form them from nothing with no one and then a lure!—a publisher, a reader. The function: to bring you back to yourself.

— Candice Wuehlem author of BOUND

A single book is a portable wealth of information, yet it is all contained in a physical form rather digital, something tactile, it shows wear, it burns and warps, yellows and fades. Most books that are published fit neatly into one of a number of established forms, and so when we find one that deviates strongly from that it is exciting to even look at, and even more so to read, to view, to behold! It is interactive, you can thumb through pages this way and that, consume it in any order. It can sit happily on a shelf, be an intimate companion every day, or read at occasions like a Liturgy. Everyone alive has lived with books their whole life, almost everyone owns at least one. And yet there are so many ways left to make them.

— Never Angeline Nørth, author of SEA-WITCH

To me the book remains the one art form capable of simultaneously speeding way up and slowing way down, while covering an approximation of everything between, for both the reader and the writer/editor/publisher of the book. I mean this in most every sense I can think of.

— Grant Maierhofer, author of GAG and CLOG

I possess in my mind a collection of songs and poems.  I could recite or sing them word for word.  Other poems I cannot remember so precisely, yet I could adumbrate, at least, their shapes on the page.  Though I cannot recall with word-level fidelity any treatise or chapter, my mind stores low-dimensional but useful models of many of these; I remember not Anselm’s words but his “argument.”

Book describes a quantity of text that is sufficiently large and complex that memorizing it is impossible, and in fact any low-dimensional model of it (what it “is about,” what “happens”) would be not just useless but harmful, misleading.  The only thing a book lets you do to it is read it.

— Kyle Booten, author of SALON DES FANTOMES

That any book exists is a direct violation of physical laws, a series of abysses literally unfathomable. How do you understand what another dimension contains. They are autonomous regardless of whether we pay attention. They have their own reasons for making themselves recognizable. Put a few pages together and the space becomes as dangerous as a telegram and/or any other space-time problem we can come up with. Imagine what would happen if there were any more than five words naturally occurring together at any one time.

— Douglas Luman, author of THE F TEXT

A book is a maximally consistent set.

— Maure Coise, author of CULTURAL OBJECT ONTOLOGIES

In my youth, books appealed to my desire for distraction, excitement, and novelty. Now that I am in middle age, what appeals to me most is how little they require in the way of maintenance. Books store well and do not require food, water, or attention. They do not soil the carpet, draw on the walls, or demand to be walked. One can mutilate, discard, or ignore them without consequences. One can hoard a stock of them as if each one contained a singular treasure that could only be unlocked by our tenacity and powers of concentration. Nothing requires that we read them or keep making them, though sometimes we do.

— Jacob Siefring, translator of GEOMETRY IN THE DUST

Books are both my favorite games and my favorite toys. All the books I’ve read, recommended, or just hoarded—In paper, in silico, and in memory—compose a constellation that’s nothing but the tracks of my never regretted language-ludopathy. Also, paper books are dust traps, they have that unique affinity for all kinds of particles suspended in the air despite the continuous use they are subjected to; the passage of the pages, the folds, the thorn fractures, the tectonic randomness of their stacks and collapses.

— Germán Sierra, author of THE ARTIFACT

Books are democratic. Paperbacks are cheap, and second-hand paperbacks cheaper. You can find them in a variety of shops and, sometimes, on doorsteps for free. They are portable. They don’t need a power source. You can pass them on without piracy.

Books are democratic. They require vast infrastructures to be read because you have to be able to read. And that involves education, preferably (if a book is to be truly democratic), free and universal: schools, universities, libraries. A book requires a whole culture. That culture, if a book is to be democratic, must be democratic also.

— Joanna Walsh, author of AUTOBIOLOGY

It often doesn’t feel to me like what I’ve written is ‘real’ or maybe better worded, ‘finished’ until it becomes a book. Maybe due to the kind of dull, unflattering interfaces of Microsoft Word, or hypothetical, schematic presentation of InDesign—the way that things online seem so impermanent or susceptible to disappearance / nonexistence. The objecthood of the book feels so intense and present to me. It accentuates the material qualities of language, places it in the same spaces that we occupy. It turns the act of reading into a task of navigating and interfacing this strange, curated object.

— Mike Corrao, author of SMUT-MAKER and -MANCER

Literary polygamous? Librocubicularist? Tactile eroticism: deckle-fetishism, silked, binder’s cloth, mounted. Book olfactophilia, the breakdown of volatile organic compounds responsible for the sweet and sharp aroma of books, the smells of ancient and contemporary decay: mustiness, vanilla, almond, et al. Chemical degradation is intoxicating. And, I’m certainly stimulated by the idea of copulating with multicursal labyrinths. Books participate and interact in our lives.

Let’s take the form out of the form, though. Not that speaking of materiality is reductionist in this context. In fact, we need it. I’m just more interested in the reciprocal exchange that happens in-between the living and nonliving – that is, I’m partial to what happens in the spaces between the book and the human: liminality as semiotic space; the fluidity to be found in the fullness of emptiness.

In all this varied, graphical complexity, I find that we [[books/\humans]] are symbiotically connected to one another.

— Emily Leon, author of TRIADIC INTMACY

When I open a book, a space is born between my body and the page. To read a book is to visit that space—to inhabit, as witness and participant, a kind of collapsing and refracting of location and time. To write a book, then, must be to visit—again, again—my voice in the transformational site. To go there and to be changed.

— AM Ringwalt, author of WHAT FLOODS

A book is a portal. I’ll never get over the fact that by looking at a series of signs (letters), you make meaning, which can change the course of your life incrementally or as a singular event. An author is in one sense an agent of that change, but the book itself is another. The form of a book enables a transmission across space and time. And a transmission isn’t a singular thing. It could be horror, beauty, a communion with a higher power, or the ever-elusive truth…

— Caroline McManus, author of ANAMNESIS

The book is forever. No one can delete it. You are free to do, with the cover, as you please. Essentially, you are the director, and the book is your camera, actors, cinematographer and everything else. A sort of energy exists, with the physical book. It’s a little mystical. But mostly spiritual. Maybe that’s all the same thing. Working on something that you can then hand to someone IRL is also so satisfying. I really don’t know how else to hype the book. It’s always been my favourite medium. Go out there and make one! There’s literally no excuses.

— Mike Kleine, author of LONELY MEN CLUB and THIRD WORLD MAGICKS

A book contains not only a world, not only the unique voice of someone with something to say, not only a language we can miraculously understand and use to form thoughts, but also a wealth of concentration. A book requires both its author and its reader to focus, to stay with its plot or its logic, to not give in to distraction. In a world where the body and mind are needed to drive a day forward, to drive a life forward, a book proposes a stoplight. Look around you. Everything in this intersection is interesting and knowable if only you take a moment to read it.

— Karolina Zapal, author of NOTES FOR MID-BIRTH

Books outlast their composers and their publishers. Throughout their slow decay, they mostly go untouched and unconsidered. The best of them revel in their obsolescence, with hidden exuberance and flare. They endure as seasons pass and generations turn into soil, ash, and air. They accrue a slew of scents: mildew, dust, vanillic rot, etc. The stain of Time in a repository for future dreams and old epiphanies, a delusion entombed, frozen, and forgotten.

— Logan Berry, author of CASKET FLARE

I’m not sure the premise of the question is valid. Alluring means I’d be strongly attracted to—or that I find a book to have an enticing condition—or mysterious. I’m not one of those perverts who likes the smell of ink on a page—nor one of those sociopaths that cares about such things as books being alluring. Books have weight—they make my fingers hurt when I hold them too long. You must turn the pages—physically flip through them—that’s tiresome. They’re not sensual—they’re not alluring. People shouldn’t want to be associated with them—and to think that someone may actually have an interest—or attraction to a book—is disgusting and repugnant. I won’t tolerate it—that’s unpleasant. Whilst they may have a tactile encounter—an immersive seepage—some sensory discharge—or a visual grab—books are data and are only about the data held within. To have some type of intimacy and connection with a book is for loafers. Books take up physical space—they’re heavy and cumbersome—lack portability—there’s poor skivers out here with visual impairments and disabilities that must wrangle with books—then there’s this environmental impact—they’re inaccessible and expensive to produce and purchase. Books are strictly for debauches. They weren’t suicides contained in the pages—you killed everyone with your high rates of recidivism—the alluring of books is their downfall—a quick death. They’re just data. I hope to be forgotten when my physical body dies—and if the data of my body lives on as books—I hope to be extinguished from those pages as well. We’re so far beyond books. We’ll have to come to some accommodation with these book lovers—but then—we’re going to have to come to some accommodation with a lot of other groups. A book is a thing—and all things are inert—the book that holds the ink is passive—and is no different than the ink blot. The ink on a blank sheet of paper can be read into anything—all those words on the page that are contained in books—all those sentences that appear in those pages can be read into anything—it’s just ink on a page—on a book. So—all the pages of all the books I ever read—all the ink blots I ever deciphered can be inverted and read into anything—it’s all pure and simple ink on a sheet of paper—a book. I’d rather drill my brains out in an aged care facility—slurping on mop water—than commit to finding a book alluring. However—I do like writing them—and reading them.

— Shane Jesse Christmass, author of BELFIE HELL

Sometimes I think about tearing each page and placing it next to another on the surface of a swimming pool, like some people do with black garbage bags to keep the temperature even. I have heard of ultralight hikers using pages they’ve read as kindling or toilet paper. I prefer when a book is large and soft because of the sound it makes – a stretch and then a long flutter followed by a whump, when thumbing the page-side – and when spinning it on the surface of a concrete counter. But books open like pomegranates. You can fold up the insides as origami. You can literalize the allure, but the metaphor is a raw form. It is whatever else it can be.

— Megan Gette, author of MAJORITY REEF

“

Books is some of my favorite people.

Big Book I totem out of and book with.

For a book-span thru bookscapes

to book it at a pace like tunnels.

It’s grand!

And the books bricks of life,

dreaming of active reliquaries

whispering to one another in limitless neurological transpermeations.

Glad to be coursing in it.

“

— Garett Strickland, author of UNGULA and A PLACE BEYOND

I have decided it is nonspecifically the area around or in or thereabouts a book’s arrangement and utility that someone like me, in many regards but not all, would find alluring; but as this someone isn’t me, of course, because they are here pretending answers when I have none, and ‘a book’ is anyway indefinite in a way I like, and like me with nothing specific written inside, I’ll answer in such a way that it’s hard to tell the difference between who is saying what, and what, if anything, has been said.

— Gary J Shipley, author of YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD

Books are war. War is the only suitable solution for any and every problem. Problems are for wimps. Wimps love books. Stop reading books.

— Christopher Norris, author of HUNCHBACK ‘88

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Inside the Castle titles are available through Asterism Books.