The Art of McSweeney's

The Art of McSweeney's is a curious document. Although the art itself (in a literal and categorical sense) is very much on display -- it's a classic coffee table book in some ways, right down to getting published by Chronicle Books, and there's a gratifying overview of the antiquarian book arts that have always been in McSweeney's DNA -- it's also perhaps the closest McSweeney's has ever come to actually explaining itself.

And that begins to happen right in the opening 1998 email from Eggers, in what amounts to the volume's preliminaries and copyright page. But, as Zara Dinnen points out in this review, it's the sense of the process behind McSweeney's work -- something that oral history is particularly good at conveying -- that maybe gives the most insight:

One of the highlights of Art of McSweeney's is the chapter on the publication of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume tome critiquing the history of political violence. The stories told by the editor, Eli Horowitz (at the time new to McSweeney's, now head of publishing), and the various interns-turned-fact-checkers, as well as Vollmann himself, weave a great tale of achievement against-all-odds (in a classic American way, but with a geeky bent). This section is only a few pages long, but the descriptions of fact-checking, of interns haunting the Berkley libraries all hours of the day, of whole volumes going missing, awry, or just going right before the deadline—these stories really convey the excitement, and the validation, of being part of an independent publishing house like McSweeney's. It is in this section, one that is only text and that is almost exclusively about text, that I experienced most strongly a connection with the book—with books.

I don't think it's accidental that it's RUARD in particular where the process resonates. In its own way, that book -- unwieldy, "unpublishable," wildly over the top -- reflects the notion of McSweeney's voiced in that first 1998 email, as "a place where odd things that one could never shoehorn into a mainstream periodical, and might be too quirky for other periodicals, might find a home."