This piece appeared in Syntagma several weeks ago.

The New York Times has a rather gloomy piece on how bloggers are dropping dead like flies, apparently overcome by the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

Personally, I’ve not known a blogger who has slumped lifeless over a keyboard (touch wood). I imagine people pass away at inconvenient moments in many professions. Blogging and writing from home must have its share of dicky tickers like any other walk of life.

However, the NYT has chapter and verse :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

From these few examples you would have to subtract the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment. However, a word of caution. Anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms. Journalists are not notorious for their alcohol consumption for nothing.

And try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

Methinks the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote a day or two ago.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

Our advice : drop the Tweets, do the paid work efficiently — a three-hour morning should suffice — then get out of the house on a long Photowalk, or maybe to the golf course or coffee shop (preferably without a Hotspot), and forget about the Labours of Hercules. He was a mythical character and is not one to emulate.

The Hogarth Press was a phenomenon. It was launched in 1917 to produce LITERATURE. Nothing less would do for Bloomsbury. Surprisingly, it was a very modest affair to start with. Its proprietors, Virginia and Leonard Woolf — after months of procrastination — visited the Excelsior Printing Supply Company where they purchased a small hand press with enough type to set up two pages, and an instruction booklet. Their total expenditure was £19 5s 6d. From these unremarkable beginnings the Hogarth Press was born.

The first publication from the press was to be a very slim volume, comprising two short stories, one from Virginia, The Mark on the Wall, and one from Leonard, Three Jews. Each character of type was laboriously set by hand and 150 copies were produced. The sheets were also hand bound, with a few woodcuts by Dora Carrington providing the ornament. Sold by subscription at 1/6d, it must have seemed an amusing trifle, even to the friends, like Lytton Strachey, who bought them. Were the copies well preserved, however, their descendants would be holding a few small sheets (thirty-one pages) worth upwards of £5000 today. They managed to sell 134 copies and reportedly made £7 in profit, through this did not take into account their own labour or royalties. Nevertheless it was a credible performance for the first title from a small press.

Their next effort was more ambitious: a sixty-eight page story by Katherine Mansfield, called The Prelude. Realizing that the labour involved in setting this up would be daunting, Leonard decided to put the work out to a “proper” printer, who produced 300 copies to be sold at 3/6d.

Now Hogarth Press was beginning to take off — artistically, if not yet financially. More titles followed, including poetry by T.S. Eliot, and a sixteen-page story, Kew Gardens, by Virginia. When the latter sold out at 2/-, and a new print run of 500 had to be ordered from a commercial printer, the press was in business as a publisher of note. Today, apart from Penguin, Hogarth Press is the only really collectable imprint on the bibliophile circuit.

John Ruskin also became a self-publisher, using one of his own employees, George Allen — later founder of George Allen & Unwin — to handle the whole business for him. Thus many of Ruskin’s works were published under Allen’s name from his cottage in Orpington, Kent. This approach alienated many booksellers, and even readers, who found his books difficult to obtain. But Ruskin was ever his own man, and in 1887, George Allen announced a profit of £4000.

In our own day, self-publishing by recognized authors is still a feature of the book scene. Jill Paton Walsh and Susan Hill are surprising examples. Indeed, Susan Hill publishes a literary journal from her home in the Cotswolds and has published a volume of her own short stories.

The name that most readily springs to mind, however, is that of Alfred Wainwright, a rather stolid borough treasurer, whose love of the fells bore strange fruit in a long and somewhat isolated life. Wainwright was a one-off’s one-off. His many works, some of them simply maps, explored and commented on the wild hill country of the British Isles, especially Lakeland, where he lived. Contrarily, he developed a caligraphic method which, like Blake’s, completely bypassed the need for typesetting and the compositor’s skills. His particular method, however, was made possible by the advent of offset lithography, which created the printing plate largely by photographic techniques

The plates were far too detailed and complex to be amenable to the hand-work required for each of Blake’s printed sheets. Wainwright’s hand-written spreads employed justified text, roman and italic lettering, as well as a range of heading weights which give a quaint but professional feel to his pages. Naturally, Wainwright was a self-publisher, at least in his early career. Later he was published by Michael Joseph.

Hunter Davies, Wainwright’s biographer, self-published his own guide to the Lake District in the early 1980s. True to form, he collected additional funds by writing and broadcasting about the experience, so the raw data he gives does not present the whole picture of the enterprise.

The cost of printing 10,000 copies of the 200 page title was £6000. A major publisher distributed the book and, presumably on the Davies “brand-name” alone, obtained advanced orders of around 9000. From the gross receipts, however, the author–publisher retained some 13%, or £4000, to cover his own efforts. A poor reward. I suspect even so, that Hunter had a lot of fun doing it.