Holly Melgard is a poet, book designer, and writing professor teaching at Columbia University and Baruch College. Her most recent book, Read Me: Selected Works, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2023.
Melgard is also one of the founding members of Troll Thread, an independent self-publishing platform hosted on a Tumblr site. Troll Thread offers its publications as a (free) PDF, with the option to get a printed book made for you via the print-on-demand (POD) site Lulu. The idea of self-publishing her work for free, Melgard writes, freed her from the feeling of having to write for the gaze of the publisher. Cutting out the middle man completely (and in this male-dominated literary world, we know that it is most often actually a man), Melgard writes of feeling liberated to make whatever sort of work that she wanted to make. This was incredibly freeing, and allowed her to experiment with conceptual projects that “nobody would want to buy,” but could live online as a PDF. And, it turns out, I think that lots of people did end up buying them through Lulu.
For example, Melgard’s project MONEY, which she published under the name MAKER. Aptly featured on the website Library of Artistic Print on Demand, Melgard’s MONEY consists of scans of 368 hundred-dollar bills, with guiding lines for cutting them out. The title page ambiguously states: “poems for MONEY by MAKER,” alerting us that this is, indeed, a book of poetry. The copyright page cheekily contains a statement on TROLL THREAD’s compliance with the Counterfeit Detection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-550, in Section 411 of Title
31 of the Code of Federal Regulations, stating:
TROLL THREAD PRESS does not make money, has no money for a lawyer or a
binding lawsuit, and thus interprets its compliance with the law to be legally just . For
more information regarding the legal identity of MONEY’s maker as it technically
belongs to the poetic contingencies of its printer, contact:
the Public Affairs Office of the
United States Secret Service at
(202) 435-5708 or visit their
website at www.secretservice.gov
To download or purchase MAKER’s MONEY, click here.
