I Started A Publishing Company
And you can order our first book today!
Today I’m opening up preorders for my very first literary zine, Thirty Cabins.
Thirty Cabins brings together thirty writers to reimagine a century-old book of vacation cabin blueprints. Inside, you’ll find 30 vacation cabins, each with its own short story. Plus a comic! You can preorder here: thirtycabins.com
Anyone who preorders between today and August 31 will receive a special-edition notebook, or GUEST LOG, a place to collect your own cabin stories. All preorders ship at the end of August.
The zine is a revival of Sunset’s Cabin Plan Book, a classic guide to designing and building vacation cabins, first published in 1918. That book lists plans for thirty wildly different types of cabins, sometimes with whimsical names (“here is a CABIN THAT GROWS”). I came to think of the book as a collection of abandoned cabins, and I wanted to reinhabit them.
So I invited several fiction writers each to select one cabin to write about, including many writers who are here on Substack, like Ed Park, Rachel Khong, a. natasha joukovsky, Lincoln Michel, Isle McElroy, and Eshani Surya. These writers have imagined themselves into forgotten cabins, uninhabited for over a century, and brought back stories of secret doors and strange machines, of fugitives and murderers, of lovers, new and old. In their stories, time slows down and speeds up. We are in one place when we think we’re in another, or we’re talking to someone who is not who we assumed they are. The first aid kits are expired. We sleep on the porch and listen to the owls. Leave desperate notes in the guestbook. Sometimes the cabins aren’t even finished at all.
The zine itself is a limited-edition run of 500 copies. The lettering on the front and back covers is printed in gold foil, and the cabin floor plans are printed as endpapers. We’re even included illustrations from the original book’s “cabin miscellany” section.
Did I mention there’s also a comic by Lena Moses-Schmitt? It’s printed across four pages in black and yellow ink. Lena even hand drew her cabin’s title and page numbers. You can catch a glimpse of it in the video.
Thirty Cabins is the first publication released through my very tiny publishing company, Random Width. I hope to publish more small projects (and possibly another volume of Thirty Cabins) through this small press in the future.
Click here to order your copy of Thirty Cabins
Congratulations! 🥳