They Publish Books By “Women And Weirdos” In Their Free Time

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.