Learning that you can just buy ISBNs is like learning that you can just walk into a high-end designer store and touch things. It seems like there should be a more rigorous process to filter out the grubby-fingered like me, but there isn’t. Apparently you can just buy ISBNs online.
“It's actually so weird. You go on a website called bowker.com, which is like an independent entity, and it costs like $200 to buy 10 ISBNs,” Mabel Capability Taylor told me. Taylor and her business partner, Madeline Porsella, joined me for a live recording of Try Hard back in October as part of On Air Fest’s monthly residency at Ludlow House. Taylor and Porsella are the founders of Mandylion Press, which “unearths lost literary gems written by women and weirdos in the (very) long nineteenth century.”
I first discovered Mandylion when I found their copy of The Morgesons in a bookstore and was entranced by the cover design and jacket copy, which admonished the reader to “open carefully.” The book was also wrapped in plastic, which I assumed was some kind of statement about its exclusivity and preciousness as an object, but which I later learned was just to protect the pages during shipment.
The two met in graduate school during a tutorial about chairs. “And then one day, Mabel emailed me and said, ‘Can I have your phone number? I wanna text you something.’ And I said, ‘I thought you'd never ask.’” Now, Porsella is getting her PhD in art history, and Taylor works at the Met, so they work on Mandylion Press before and after regular work hours.
The pair find books on Project Gutenberg and re-release them in new editions that have been recontextualized, with new forewords written by Porsella and Taylor, visual glossaries with images of art and artifacts referenced in the works, and new cover art and jacket copy.
For this bonus episode of Try Hard, I’m talking to Porsella and Taylor about how they met, why they started Mandylion, and whether they still have time to watch Real Housewives.
You can find an episode transcript here. You can listen to Try Hard wherever you get your podcasts: RSS here, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify (if you must). Send me voice memos of the things you're trying at podcasts@defector.com or message me on Instagram @alexlaughs.
