Life inks

PAPER BOY (AND GIRL) Marszewski with his wife Rachael at the Co-Prosperity Sphere release party for Matériel and Pr.

Old habits die hard.

For Ed Marszewski, the longtime editor-publisher of the politics and culture zine Lumpen and arch chieftain behind the annual Version and Select arts festivals, the habit that just won’t quit is print publishing.

As he watches other pubs going online-only, shifting priorities toward Web content and blogs, or shrinking formats, Marszewski, 40, is rapidly expanding his niche print portfolio. Two Saturdays ago, at his headquarters, the “experimental culture center” Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport, Marszewski celebrated the release of two new print-only pubs: Pr, an oversized between-issues spin-off of the 11-month-old contemporary arts quarterly Proximity, and Matériel, an image-heavy, black-and-white broadsheet he sees as the design yin to Proximity’s art yang. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, later this month, in conjunction with the release of Proximity’s fourth issue, he’ll launch (Con)Temporary Art Chicago, an annual snapshot of the city’s scene, from unGoogleable apartment galleries (and the under-covered up-and-comers showing there) to institutions like the MCA. The guide will be pocket-size, so readers can embark on self-guided tours. It is, as Marszewski says of all his babies, most useful and rewarding in print.

“I do like new media and Web-based technologies,” he says, “but some of the best information and some of the most beautiful publications out there are still in printed form and not [being] repurposed for the Web.”

Marszewski does maintain an online presence, albeit slight. Digital versions of Lumpen are available as cumbersome PDFs on a site that bluntly states, “We are stuck with this old website. And we are not able to provide any texts online.” The blogs attached to Lumpen and Proximity more often serve to announce calls for festival submissions and Co-Prosperity Sphere–related events than to complement the print edition. Though, to be fair, Marszewski promises the premiere of a “kick-started” proximitymagazine.com site this week showcasing Web-only features, reviews, interviews, and studio visits.

Marszewski’s tepid salute to the new guard and his old-school print loyalism may stem from a sour first taste of what he calls “dot-communism.” In 1999, Marszewski, backed by Elias “Lou” Manousos, cofounder of the once hugely profitable Web company Outlook Technologies, launched Supersphere. The free site prefigured YouTube and MySpace as an ever-growing database of concert videos (many shot at local clubs), streaming music and indie films, supplemented by a log of lefty, alterna-culture zines. In the wake of the dot-com bust—and with many dial-up modem users unable to exploit the multimedia site’s full potential—Supersphere shut down in 2001. Manousos lost the “millions of dollars” he reportedly put into the site, and Marszewski immediately went back to his ink-and-paper comfort-zone, starting art mag Select, which is still released every fall during the Select Media Festival.

Despite his endurance and restlessness, Marszewski’s publishing and festival-hosting endeavors aren’t profitable enough as full-time paying gigs. Such is the nature of niche industries, he recognizes. Marszewski still chips in at his mom’s bar, Kaplan’s Liquors (known to locals as Maria’s), a block up the road from Co-Prosperity Sphere, when he’s not busily laying out the next issue or dreaming up another project.

What keeps him printing? “I dunno,” Marszewski replies with characteristic drollness. “I love killing trees.”

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