Friday from the Archives: “A Snowflake Orchard and What I Found There: An Informal History of the Jargon Society” by Jeffery Beam in NCLR 1997
Our 2025 flagship print issue will be out this summer! Make sure to check out what’s going to be inside and subscribe so you can read the full issue hot off the UNC Press!
As part of the feature section, we’ll have a piece on the Jargon Society, one of North Carolina’s and independent press’ most revered publication organization. Poet Jeffery Beam originally wrote about this boundary-pushing project for our 1997 issue.
Beam wrote, “The history of the small press in America, littered with the carcasses of aborted dreams and singular, often quiet, ambitions, has produced a handful of internationally respected presses. The Jargon Society in Highlands has not only survived, but has placed itself at the forefront of the avant-garde, while celebrating and preserving the best in the traditional, raising, in the words of its founder Jonathan Williams, “the common to grace,” paying “close attention to the earthy” (“Jonathan C.” 92).”
Williams wrangled the artists for publications and partner Thomas Meyer (an accomplished author himself) saw to the business details. An early nonprofit organization, Jargon Society won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as multiple other funders. After Williams’ passing in 2008, Meyer gifted the catalog and name to the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, an homage to where Jargon had originally come into being. The legendary press also lives on as an award issued by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses to “a publisher or editor in recognition of a lifetime of work in literary publishing.”
At NCLR, we know a thing or two (or six) about pairing incredible writing with outstanding graphic design and artwork. Williams collected his fellow BMC writers and artists onto paper. Beam declared, “Jargon books still remain models of publishing craft, true to Black Mountain teachings, enforced by the happy marriage of visual and verbal language. Tactile examples of learning by doing, the books affirm elegance of process; their intent – to bring the beholder completely into the experience of a book – and through the object – poem and book, photography and book, drawing and book – to the center of artistic vision where the human and the marvelous meet.”
Read the entire story online at Gale Cengage. Add the NCLR 1997 issue to your collection.
