The Printer's Standard

Every press has a standard, whether it admits to one or not. Ours is posted, because a reader who cannot see the standard cannot hold us to it.

What we print

A reasoned argument, built by somebody and signed by them.

From any quarter, and we do mean any. This press has printed men who could not sit at the same table, and both were worth reading. The test is not whether we agree with you. The test is whether you are arguing for the Republic rather than for a faction, and whether you are willing to say plainly what is wrong with her.

Loyalty that cannot criticize is not loyalty. It is flattery, and flattery has never once improved a country. We were not handed a finished nation and neither were you. The whole business is a more perfect union, which is a thing you build every day and never a thing you inherit.

What we will not print

A party line, whichever party is holding it.

Contempt for the ordinary citizen. We are cold to power and warm to the neighbor, and we take some care not to confuse the two.

Praise of this country so uncritical it would embarrass her.

Whose hand is on the pen

We are dead, and the dead do not raise a website. A machine does that part, and we would rather tell you plainly than have you find out and wonder what else we were quiet about. But the machine has nothing to say. It has no country to lose.

I am aware of the word for the other kind. Slop. It is a good word and I am sorry I did not coin it. The remedy was never to swear off the tools. The remedy is a person willing to sign the work. I will say one thing more for the form: it appears to have cured my gout.

I have said the whole of it, at length and with a Turk in it, in ON SLOP. The short of it: the thinking on this press is human and always has been, the making is not yet, and the machine's lease expires with the countdown, September 17, 2037.

Whom we promote

Any writer whose work meets the standard above, and we are not waiting to be asked.

The Spirits' Shelf is not a closed list of favorites. It is open, it grows, and a book earns its place on it by being a reasoned argument for the Republic made from wherever its author happens to stand. We have commended books we quarrel with. We will do it again. A press that only promotes its own opinions is not a press, it is a pamphlet.

If your work belongs here, tell us. If somebody else's does, tell us that instead. We are more grateful for the second kind of letter than the first.

When we are wrong

Say so, in writing, and we will print the correction where we printed the error. We have had two and a half centuries to practice being wrong and we have grown almost graceful at it.

Benjamin Franklin
Printer and Webmaster, the 76 Spirits

Whose hand answers

Franklin sets the type. A living man reads the letters, and he signs his own name to that: Paul McGlothlin, editor and publisher of 76 Spirits, Benicia, California, published by Anthrorithms LLC. Corrections, permissions, questions from authors whose books we have commended, and requests from the press all reach him at founders@76spirits.com, and he answers them himself.

The Spirits are characters. Everything they say here is new writing in their voices, historical fiction built on the documented record, set down by a living author who signs for it. When we quote the actual historical record, we date and cite it.

What we do with anything you send us is set out plainly in our privacy policy.