Books on vinyl records: alive to the pleasures of rabbiting on

A new publisher is distributing fiction on highly desirable vinyl records. It’s the perfect antidote to the iPod, says Sukhdev Sandhu.

What goes around: the  sleeve of the Underwood label's first release is by comic-book artist Jordan Crane
What goes around: the sleeve of the Underwood label's first release is by comic-book artist Jordan Crane

Nathan Dunne is either a very brave or a very stupid young man. At a time when a) the MP3 has supplanted the CD as the most popular format on which to listen to recorded sounds; b) literature as a physical artefact is coming under attack from the rise of iPads, Kindles and other digital reading devices; and c) the short story is as tricky to sell to publishing houses as it has ever been, Dunne has set up a new imprint called Underwood, whose remit is to produce 33rpm vinyl records featuring writers reading 20-minute short stories aloud. “Candidly, it’s an experiment,” he admits.

The first release from Underwood, which takes its name from a Fionn Regan song that alludes to another largely obsolete piece of technology, the typewriter (“I’m changing the ribbon in this old Underwood”), is a lavish affair. Designed by American comic-book artist Jordan Crane, whose stylised bucolic cover picks up on themes on the disc’s two stories – Clare Wigfall’s Along Birdcage Walk and Toby Litt’s The Hare – it’s presented in a four-panel gatefold sleeve so beautiful that it’s easy to regard the artefact as visual art as much as a record.

“When I was growing up there were labels like Argos and Caedmon that brought out records of writers speaking,” Dunne recalls. “When James Joyce was reading aloud from Finnegans Wake it was like reggae to me; I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, but it had a lyrical and a melodic quality that absolutely made sense.”

For Dunne, the current emphasis on the portability and ease of circulation of recorded sound rather than its sonic properties corrodes the intimacy of the listening experience.

“The MP3 has an alien digital gloss. It’s streamlined, corporate, like a mainline train station. Listening to a short story on vinyl is the purest antidote to that. It’s more immersive. It heightens engagement.”

A former art historian, Dunne wrote part of his PhD about John Latham, a British conceptual artist famous for inviting his students to chew pages from Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture and then distilling the resulting pulp into fermented liquid. It’s arguable that publishers in this country have pursued a similar policy of book destruction: long accustomed to putting out brittle-papered, indifferently designed volumes, they are now endangered by the emergence of consumers who, unaccustomed to regarding books as tactile, covetable objects in themselves, think nothing of pirating and freely circulating individual titles.

The Underwood discs, scheduled to appear twice a year, represents part of the growing resistance to the dematerialisation of art. By emphasising tactility, scarcity (each issue is limited to 1,000 copies) and physical beauty, it offers something that can’t be digitally replicated.

It also offers a new creative outlet and challenge to writers. Toby Litt says of his recording: “It’s a very emotional piece for me, because it’s partly about the miscarriages my partner had before our first child was born. I felt I was able to read it better, to put more of myself into it, when there was no audience there watching.” Litt also argues that the record makes demands that audiences will welcome: “Buying an LP of a short story is like making a promise to yourself that you will take a brief holiday from all the gabble. Once the record’s playing, you’ll give your attention to it. I think a lot of us are looking for that kind of self-discipline.”

For more about Underwood, see www.underwoodstories.com