Bill Caraher |

Like most readers, I’ve been mildly obsessed with Robert McAlmon since I first encountering his name during the breathless revelry associated with the centennial of Joyce’s Ulysses. Evidently McAlmon typed parts of “Penelope” and exerted some kind of editorial influence over its final form.

I encountered McAlmon again in the pages of Molly Rozum’s impressive Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairie (Nebraska 2021) which prompted me to mention his work right here on the NDQ blog.

McAlmon is best known, of course, as an editor, publisher, and bon vivant who haunted the cafes of Paris with Joyce, Stein, and, of course, Hemingway. He edited a short-lived, but influential little magazine with William Carlos Williams called Contact (which is now available via the HathiTrust) before creating Contact Publishing where he published Hemingway’s first book and several other landmark volumes. By most accounts, Contact Publishing was a casual affair characterized by indifferent typesetting and poor copyediting.

(In this regard, McAlmon is a man after my own heart as an editor and publisher. I have long admired the old saying: well produced books are all the same [neatly typeset, well edited, and nicely packaged], but every poorly produced book is terrible in its own way. I think Benjamin develops this in a now-lost appendix to his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or perhaps it was Benjamin Franklin who quipped this at some point. In any event, I think most people can agree that there’s something about a poorly packaged book that emphasizes writing, editing, and publishing as the work human hands and eyes. Of course, not all authors agree with this appraisal and for that reason we strive to maintain the highest level of editorial quality practicable with NDQ.)

With 2024 around the corner, I’m bracing for a wave of McAmonmania as we turn our attention to the centennial of Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (Contact 1924). I decided to pick up a copy of the 1990 reprint and re-edition of Village on the web from some random used bookstore. I was quite surprised when the book arrived to find this little nameplate on the inside of the book.

The name Robert Fleming rang a bell and, sure enough, he was a contributor to North Dakota Quarterly during our peak Hemingway years.

Robert E. Fleming, “Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Man: Hemingway’s Career at a Crossroad,” NDQ 55.1 (1987): 66-71

Robert E. Fleming, “The Hills Remain: The Mountain West of Hemingway’s Island Manuscript,” NDQ 58.3 (1990): 79-85.

Robert E. Fleming, “Communism vs. Community in For Whom the Bell Tolls,” NDQ 60.2 (1992), 144-150.

Robert E. Fleming, “Hemingway’s Chicago: The Iceberg Below the Waterline,” NDQ 70.4 (2003), 81-87.

Robert E. Fleming, “The Death of the Children in Islands in the Stream,” NDQ 76.1-2 (2009), 140-146.

As importantly, he co-edited Under Kilimanjaro (Kent, OH 2005) with long-time NDQ editor and Hemingway scholar Robert Lewis.

It seems more than a coincidence that Robert Fleming’s copy of Village found itself in my hands here in Grand Forks. I’m excited to read and, hopefully, write about in its centennial year!

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Bill Caraher is editor of North Dakota Quarterly.