Bacchus Editions is une maison d’édition privée, assembled from a love of bookmaking, translation, and creation on our own terms. What began as a small untamed project now unfolds across a handful of working ateliers in the Pacific Northwest, including a forested island on the coast of British Columbia.

Among moss, ink, and machines, our play moves through a mix of old and new. Vintage presses. Hand-binding tools. Silkscreen tables. Risographs. Digital systems used without reverence. The work passes fluidly between spaces, tables, forests, screens, et whatever else becomes necessary.

We are learning as we go. The processes are learned slowly, sometimes stubbornly, fait main, fait à nous. The craft is not separate from the pleasure of making, it is the whole point.

We print what we want to encounter. Books, broadsheets, zines, journals, translations, fragments. Our own writings, and the projects of others whose sensibilities move in affinity with ours, not alignment, not agreement, but something more volatile, more alive. We are drawn to the edges where thought and art refuse to behave. Anti-civilization critique, egoïste and other anarchiste currents, avant-garde atmospheres, expressionist hauntings, surrealist gestures, dadaist ruptures… Not as categories, but as atmospheres. What matters is intensity and presence.

Alongside contemporary writings and original projects, Bacchus also works with fugitive texts, forgotten journals, deteriorating pamphlets, scattered correspondences, et other materials surviving at the edges of official literary memory. Some are translated, restored, reformatted, or quietly brought back into circulation through facsimile and archival editions.

We are not neutral. We do not aim to belong. There is no interest here in professional publishing, bulk circulation, or markets that require softness. Our things are made, sometimes traded, and released in small runs simply because it insists on being made. When things move outward, it happens through affinity, with distros, other presses, and with individuals and spaces we respect. Never under obligation. This is a press for the insoumis, the extravagant, the hors-cadres. For those who create without permission and without the need to be understood.

Bacchus is expanding, slowly, with more space, more tools, and occasionally more hands. We are glad you’re here. You are welcome to join us in play. For the continuation of what compels us!

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On scale, cost, circulation

Bacchus Editions operates outside the economies that make mass circulation inexpensive. Many presses benefit from substantial subscriber bases, heavy contributor involvement, institutional infrastructures, volume printing, and distribution systems capable of reducing costs dramatically across thousands of copies. That is not the terrain here.

Bacchus is sustained through the broader texture of life surrounding it: seasonal growing, shared meals, local exchange, friendship, correspondence, and the kinds of small, tangible economies that rarely appear visible from within institutional culture. The press is not separated from ordinary life, but woven directly into it.

We produce small-run editions shaped through a slower, more intimate mode of publishing, where autonomy matters more than scale, and where the material presence of the book still matters. The work moves through a comparatively tiny infrastructure, without mass circulation, commercial or mass collective backing, or production at industrial quantities. The result is that our books occasionally cost more than publications produced through larger networks or bulk economies. This is not a gesture toward exclusivity or luxury, but simply the material reality of independent publishing at this scale.

Much of what appears through Bacchus involves immense stretches of writing, research, translation, restoration, correspondence, editing, layout, and production carried by a very small constellation of people. The press will remain deliberately small, not from limitation, but from a desire to keep the play close to the hands and minds creating it.

Particular projects here still trade directly, and exchange letters and mail art, as time permits. Much of Bacchus continues to move through affinity, conversation, friendship...

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Publishing / Stocking Inquiries

We publish as we feel it, with no regard to time or system.

Ergo, there is no submission pipeline, no open call, and no formal process to being published by Bacchus. Work arrives through affinity or it does not arrive at all. What draws us cannot be reduced to criteria, but it is felt immediately. Writing that unsettles, seduces, or endures.. art that lives in tension with the world rather than seeking placement within it.

It should be noted that there is no interest here in ideological performance, identity frameworks, moral instruction, or language that seeks approval. Nor is there any appetite for programs, prescriptions, or declarations that ask to be followed. What holds is what resists domestication, and what breathes outside management.

If your work belongs here, it will already feel that way. If so, write us.

As for stocking, we will stock others’ works from time to time. There’s a few out there we adore and look forward to carrying. As for wholesaling or stocking your store with our things, we are not interested, but thanks for the interest!

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Contributing to Journals and Anthologies

Distinctively Dionysian and some of the other related projects are open to contributions, but not in any conventional sense. We invite writing that provokes, ignites, or disappears mid-sentence. Essays, fragments, translations, détournements. Form is secondary, intensity is not. Check with each project to see about contributing.

Note that there is no interest here in political posturing, therapeutic confession, religious yammering, ideological groupthink, or performative signaling. And no patience for language that arrives already explained, already justified, already obedient. Bacchus Editions is only interested in that which refuses to settle, resists capture, and carries its own voltage.

Contributions that belong here do not announce themselves as relevant. Send in what you like, if it moves, unsettles, seduces, or cuts, we’re probably into it. If you wish to offer something, write directly and send in the project, or speak toward it. If it resonates, we might desire hosting it, selling it, and or printing it and you will hear back. If it does not, silence is the answer.

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Shipping / International Info

For more information shipping, see: Shipping and Circulation