♥ Portable Document Format ♥

We have integrated PDFs in our publishing practice since we began making art and publications together in December of 1998. PDFs are essential to us for spreading ideas in an accessible and affordable manner. We wrote the following text in 2014 in the publication Publishing In The Realm of Plant Fibers: 

The PDF is a format that was developed for documents to move easily across operating system platforms and devices; it was not intended for viewing on any single device. Because of this compatibility, we prefer making our digital publications as PDFs. 

PDFs have amplified our printing in surprising and significant ways. Early on in our publishing, we would photocopy about 200 copies of a publication at a local print shop. We would then fold and staple them by hand to save money. One photocopied booklet, Why The Exhibit Was Cancelled, was first printed in 2001. Interest in this booklet exceeded our expectations and once a PDF was placed on our website, it was downloaded thousands of times. In 2012, over a decade after the first printing, curator Lauren van Haaften-Schick featured the booklet in a traveling exhibit titled “Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures.” Funding from this exhibition was used to make another thousand copies of this booklet—this time using offset printing. It’s ironic that the number of people who have seen the booklet Why The Exhibit Was Canceled far exceeds the number of people that would have attended the exhibit itself. 

We enjoy the ways in which a PDF can amplify modest publishing efforts, and we are interested in other aspects of how PDFs can be used. There are archival formats of PDFs that are intended to help preserve the digital documents as computing technology undergoes significant and rapid change. In this way, archival PDFs avoid the problems that apps or ebooks have, where current versions do not work on older (or newer) digital devices. PDFs are flexible and can be enlarged to create large print books. They can be used with software that reads aloud to dyslexic or visually impaired persons.

Using a common digital scanner to pirate a rare artist book, or any other book, can give it a new life. A PDF can become an undead version of the book and proliferate endlessly—ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! A PDF can also promote and help restore interest in the work of authors and publishers that may no longer be alive or in business, and therefore are unable to keep their works and pages available for new readers. An undead PDF can also break down the gate keeping of rare book dealers, academic firewalls, and those whose approach creates exclusivity and scarcity. Pirating an expensive book will not diminish the value of the printed original. By setting its ideas free into the commons, more people will be able to access, assess and enjoy the material.

We prefer books to PDFs, but if we cannot find or afford a book, a PDF will suffice. A PDF is not as “alive” as the book from which it is ripped. Its flesh is barely there, clinging to this world; it needs the body of an electronic host to inhabit. We encourage you to find rare books in state and school library systems, to check them out, copy them and unleash them into the world of the living! We welcome transgressions of copyright and control that exist to only protect monetary benefits. Art and ideas should be free flowing: no one should have the right to keep them hoarded away for private enjoyment at the expense of a more full, open, robust, and democratic discourse.

We see making PDF copies of books as an extension of our publishing efforts. With minimal effort, we can distribute and share our publications, and build audiences. Having made over one hundred books and booklets, it is impossible to keep everything in print and we’d rather use our resources to make new things. It is freeing to be able to create digital access to our older work, reprinting the past only when there is a strong demand. Approximately two thirds of our publications are currently available for free download at temporaryservices.org.

We have a bunch of PDFs available for purchase or for free on our web site. Some are listed below. You can see all of the PDFs that we offer here: https://halfletterpress.com/pdfs/

NEW PDFs:

SONIC MEDITATION PDFs:

FEATURED PDFs:

FREE PDFs: