After three years, it becomes apparent this is an existentialist website.

Existence precedes essence.

Opened to view in 2018 with only a confused notion of what it might do, it hesitated – its contributors waited, or busied themselves with other things. (Good for them.)

But it’s now clear it’s a website in the process of becoming a repository for whatever we want to use it for.

Basically, it’s the (not very) public face of Open List Publishing, a rather ramshackle and loose association of several persons charmed by the utopian possibilities that freedom of access to a worldwide audience appears to offer – but decently skeptical of the manner in which that access is largely exploited, and unwilling to play the game.

You won’t find us on Facebook, you won’t find us on Twitter. You’ve done well to find us at all.

I can’t remember, was it George Orwell or William Burroughs who explained that the purpose of power is power? Was it Marshall McLuhan who said the purpose of publicity is publicity? Well, at Open List we’re more concerned with things that aren’t ends in themselves – like dialogue.

I said dialogue, not chat.

This isn’t a soap-box, we’re not looking for a crowd. If you stop reading right now, that’s okay. We were talking to someone else.

If you’re still here, the rest of this page (by no means the most interesting on the site) offers a brief rundown of our publishing history. Our first venture, in 2014, was:

Several of us here at Open List have long enjoyed browsing and burrowing among books, but we decided to opt for print-on-demand. It’s not that we weren’t thrilled by the idea of trying to sell crates of unwanted books for years to come, but we couldn’t afford the crates.

Is a book that hasn’t sat on a shelf, waiting for its buyer, really a book? We think so.

We used a group called FeedARead, and, though one or two small wrinkles are less than entirely ideal, were largely pleased with the results.

They held up their end, the book is available, and it looks just as good as we hoped it’d look. 

The Insulted Trilobite is also available for download on Kindle. For free.

In 2018 we finally got around to publishing

But there’s no accounting for taste. A very brief excerpt (not altogether typical) may be found here. Make of it what you will.

In accordance with the author’s wishes, it’s available as a book, only a book, sorry.

2018 was when we set up the website, and it’s also when Open List supervised the digital re-issue of The Denboro Collective’s all-but unobtainable three-album set,

The Big Front Yard Sale (24 tracks, 157 minutes)

It’s a big selection of fuzzy science-fiction soundtracks, fizzy ambience, and quiet pieces willing to accommodate the humming of refrigerators or the passing of airplanes. 

Some of us like records, some like cds, but the old farts who make the decisions were told, “nobody buys cds anymore” – so they took the easy way out and used bandcamp as a way of providing downloads, because they liked the look of it.

The second volume of The Big Front Yard Sale, 

Mond Z (15 tracks, 97 minutes)

(subtitled “a Suite for Raymond Z. Gallun”) followed in 2019. It’s the re-issue of a double album. More of the same, though with some curious metallic percussion on several tracks. 

There have also been a couple of three-track singles, “Trick or Treat” (2018) and the prophetic “No Rights Reserved” (2020).

A third book,

A third Denboro Collective album,

Private Spaces (8 tracks, 79 minutes)

was also released in 2021—a rather more disparate collection including cocktail music of the spheres and radio collage, along with the usual whines and howls.