There is a kind of book that does not need to be reissued every season, and a kind of reader who returns to the same short shelf for years. Hyperborean Press exists for both. We do not pretend to publish the next thing. We publish books we believe will be true in twenty years, set in typography we are willing to read for the rest of our lives, and bound well enough to outlast the moment they were printed in.

The category we work in is wisdom literature. By this I do not mean self-help, and I do not mean academic philosophy. Wisdom literature is the small, practical kind of book that has been written in nearly every century since writing began and has always been the same kind of book regardless of who wrote it or in what language. Laozi wrote one. So did Epictetus. So did Marcus Aurelius. So did the desert fathers, the Zen masters, the Sufi poets, and a great many of the people whose names did not survive. None of them wrote for scholars. They wrote for the practitioner who wanted to know what to do tomorrow morning.

That tradition has not gone away. Our first title under the reforged imprint, The Way of Bitcoin by Alan B., is a contemporary entry in it. The book is not about prices or charts or investing. It is about the discipline of relating well to time, value, and labor under modern conditions, written in the same plain practical voice that the older texts used. When we describe the book to bookstore buyers, the most accurate sentence we have found is that it shares a shelf with Pema Chödrön and Marcus Aurelius more than it does with anything in the finance section. We think that is the right way to read it.

Hyperborea lay beyond the boreal winds, in a land where the sun never set. The people there practiced the contemplative arts and built what was meant to last. Pindar wrote that no traveler had ever found the road there. Apollonius placed the country past the cold, where the noise of human affairs dies down and one can finally hear. The press carries the name forward and inherits the work. Durable. Made to outlast the moment it was made in. Not everything has to be loud to be alive.

A press should also be honest about what it refuses. We do not publish books written for the algorithm. We do not publish books that hedge their claims. We do not publish books that exist primarily to advance the author’s brand. We do not publish anthologies of internet writing. We do not chase trends, and we will not do an entire season on a single passing topic. We are interested in the books someone might still want to own in twenty years, and we are willing to publish very few of them in order to keep that promise.

That is the program. The press publishes what it publishes well, in the order it publishes it well. If you read one of our books, that is enough. If you read all of them, that is everything.

Conan, editor
Hyperborean Press