Credo
Gracchi Books aims to short-circuit the trend, especially in institutionalized “open-access” publishing, that seems to renew a pre-Third Estate situation investing those with exceptional means as the privileged voices to be heard. We seek to facilitate the free flow of critical thought and scholarly activities, from those who produce them to those who would like it, from within a selectively bold framework that ensures and demands rigorous, peer-reviewed scholarship.
Through the promotion of radical, innovative and experimental thought, dialogue, patterns of representation, methods of research, interpretive frames and forms of discourse entangled with serious scholarly, academic and collegial expectations and direction, we hope to topple the hoary trees of hierarchies and let research grow and disseminate rhizome-like, in all directions, with no beginnings, endings, constraints or priorities other than rigorous scholarship, critical reflection, novel intellectual propositions, and creative inspiration. We especially encourage the bold exploration of academic paths that have been otherwise closed by the patricians of the mind.
The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were a pair of Roman aristocrats who served as tribunes of the plebs, the people, in the Roman Republic. They attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the elite landholdings among the plebeians. They were vehemently opposed by the Senate and their biological lives ended in tragedy, but their historical lives are re-actualized anew. Today, Gracchi Books takes knowledge and research from the hands of the colossus that was able to stand up only because all of us supported it with our work and makes them free and open for everyone.
Gracchi Books is entirely no-fees open-access and non-profit.
Printing Ethos
The content and aesthetics of the publications drive the operations of publishers. At Gracchi Books, the arguments constructed, the theories and ideas proposed, the evidence used, the historiographical significances, the images and overall paratexts of our published works are all of paramount concern in everything that we do. In addition to the efforts to ensure sound content, we also think very intently and urgently about the material on which these ideas are published and disseminated. We believe it to be a socially tragic paradox that the potential of emancipatory thought is sublimated by the traditional publishing and distribution process, done without any consideration of the actual human, animal, and environmental costs of those efforts. It is not uncommon, for example, for a book or journal to encourage novel social activity, while being printed on paper produced from trees felled in the Amazon, the production of which displaced hundreds or thousands of people, let alone the damage to local food growth and ecosystems.
Therefore, part of our mission at Gracchi Books is to become a fully environmentally sustainable imprint, using for our printed materials recycled and composted products, hemp and other [non-animal] organic fabric to produce our own paper, ink and other materials necessary for printing our books. We are working to ensure that every person involved in the entire chain of our production, from the growers of the plants and trees to the authors producing the content, to the persons delivering our products are privileged to fair labor practices. We fully endorse Fair Trade.
We are still emerging, developing our path, and exploring our real imprint impact on the world, so there is still quite a lot of work to do. We cannot change the entire world, even of publishing, or the Humanities, but we do hope to provide a company model and an intellectual platform for publishing socially fair and environmentally friendly scholarship that is also academically and intellectually rigorous, challenging, and experimental in smart ways.
Gracchi Books 