Art & Creativity Quote by James Laughlin

The line reads like a modest operational note, but it’s really a quiet manifesto for how literary culture gets made when money isn’t the main metric. Laughlin isn’t describing an acquisitions process so much as a chain of trust: one writer vouches for another, affection becomes infrastructure, and a press follows taste instead of trend. That “discovers” does a lot of work. It frames writers not as competitors in a marketplace but as scouts in a shared ecosystem, locating voices that a larger institution would miss because it’s too busy running spreadsheets.

The subtext is a rebuke to industrial publishing without ever naming it. “We then take that book on” is deliberately plain, almost domestic language: not “we acquire IP,” not “we position a product,” but a kind of guardianship. The “very close relationship” isn’t just emotional warmth; it’s a workflow. Smallness here is a technology, not a handicap: fewer layers, fewer committees, fewer reasons to sand down the weirdness that makes literature worth reading.

In context, this is Laughlin channeling the New Directions ethos: modernism, translation, and risk-taking driven by personal networks and aesthetic conviction. The line hints at an old truth about the avant-garde: it rarely arrives through official gates. It arrives because someone with cultural capital says, simply, I like this - and because a small institution can act on that liking before the world catches up.