1984

In 1984 Tem Noon had just graduated, moved to Somerville, Massachusetts with a brother, and would soon go to work at Digital Equipment Corporation. Tem's grandparents gave Tem three thousand dollars to start a press.

The press was Gravity Press. It published funny little underground things: the first was a zine typed on an electric typewriter, two letter-size sheets folded in half into a booklet, with lines radiating out from a point on the cover. Samizdat, though nobody called it that at the time.

That folded booklet never really went away. From 2013 gravitypress.org was Tem's notebook blog, Publishing the Precious Cargo in Every Mind: scanned notebooks, page-by-page galleries of handwritten books, the Guide to Consciousness. By 2016 the booklets had come back as notebooks, letter sheets printed with a polar grid on one side and ruled lines on the other, folded, stitched, signed and sold for eight dollars. Image / Narrative Journal. A picture page and a word page, side by side, because a thought is both.

Then the site was lost, and for a while Gravity Press was mostly a name and a domain:

A non-profit that certainly lived up to that without anything other than a .org domain.

The notebooks kept being filled anyway.

A changing of the guard

Now there is software that can make that notebook properly. Tem built LayerPress to design it, ring by ring and line by line, and Gravity Press is opening a store to sell it, printed one copy at a time.

The first thing for sale is the Image Narrative Journal, Gravity-Press Edition. It is an empty notebook, which may be the most important kind of book there is. The editor that made it is free to use, for anyone who would rather make their own.

This is a handoff. When Gravity Press opens to everyone, gravitypress.org will stay Tem's own store, and anyone will be able to point a domain at theirs. It is also a thank-you, forty-two years late, to two grandparents who trusted a new graduate with three thousand dollars and a typewriter. Better late than never.