Means of Books
Greetings, thank you for being who you are and finding your way to this form. 

The info submitted in this form will not be shared with anyone in detail or specificity, but some elements may be aggregated anonymously to illustrate the current conditions of our community for educational purposes. 

If you've received this link directly from a member of Means of Books, it is meant for you specifically, and is based on the trusting conditions of a relationship with you. If you came across this link through our website or social media and are here because you think you're a good fit, please fill out the form and Means of Books will review and get back to you. This form is used to shape the support systems for connecting members in the Means of Books network, currently being developed by For the Birds Trapped in Airports. 

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Means of Books is a network of publishers, bookmakers, and other interconnected creative labor workers sharing resources with one another. We support one another's care-focused work in order to affirm our collective humanity and continue our work amidst an industry that normalizes and rewards white supremacy culture.

Together, we possess everything we need to sustain all of our work. This interdependent support system allows us to lessen and ideally relinquish the ever-tiring financial dependency on extractive institutional relationships that consume our physical, mental, and emotional labor.

For the Birds Trapped in Airports possesses 100% of the equipment and production resources needed to produce mostly any kind of book edition (within a certain labor scope), and offers the Means of Books network studio access and sliding scale pricing for these resources based on each financial situation. There are several other members of Means of Books who are also book producers and have book production resources. 

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IMPORTANT NOTES BEFORE SUBMITTING VIA THIS FORM: 

—Means of Books is not a handout or a gift, it is an invitation to maintain a symbiotic relationship to the members of Means of Books and your like-minded peers, to act in our aligned work alongside one another with tangible reciprocity and care. The intent with participation should begin with wishing to support your peers and being in conversation with them, detailing in this form how you can support. While FTBTIA (and other production bindery members) will serve a primary role of providing sliding-scale production resources to this network, we will need your support, as well. 

—If your press has a predominance of whiteness—in that it is white-led, your roster includes predominantly white artists, or your work is done in predominantly white spaces—your participation in the Means of Books network requires you to meet regularly (once every 1-2 months) with FTBTIA and the other presses who fall into this category, to discuss the harms of whiteness within our work, read texts about the harms of whiteness, and create collective action plans to eradicate any centered whiteness within our creative work. 

—The Means of Books network is managed and directed by all of its contributing members and will change over time as we learn to develop and adapt this support system. 

Email *
Name of your Press / Entity *
Describe your project in two to three sentences.  *
Who makes up your team?  *
What is your favorite part of doing what you do?  *
What is your least favorite part of doing what you do? (i.e. you wish someone else could do it or help you with it) *
What are the greatest strengths of your press/entity?  *
What primary hurdles do you face for your press/entity to continue existing/sustaining?  *
How would you describe the current sustainability of your project?  *
What would your press/entity thriving look like? What would have to change?  *
What kinds of resources can you tangibly offer your trusted peers (select all applicable) *
Required
Is there a tangible resource you can personally provide that is not listed above? 
Is there a resource you need help with that is not listed above? 
Consistently discussed among peers, the most common experience to sour our work is experiencing white supremacy culture and its harmful conditions when attempting to produce something with other institutions/entities/people. 

Have you read White Supremacy Culture in Institutions written by the Centre for Community Organizations?

For us, it has provided a clear path for identifying when a project is going to lead to harmful situations and setting up contracts to be able to cancel the project when we reach these points. 
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Our desire in developing the Means of Books network is to ideally remove a lot of these harmful experiences from our work so to lessen the stress in order to sustain, as well as develop a more healthy and affirming experience in conducting our work collectively. 

Do you feel that there is more / other practices that we can introduce collectively to further protect one another from these common atmospheres in institutions? 
Are you interested in being a part of the Means of Books network?  *
Are there any other publishers / creative workers / entities that you believe would be interested in both giving to and receiving from the Means of Books network?
Anything else you'd like to add? 
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