This week for #SmallPressSaturday, we are delighted to feature “a literary press in the frozen north” based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with a passion for the physical book at its core: Hingston & Olsen Publishing. Best known as the publishers of the Short Story Advent Calendar, Hingston & Olsen was founded in 2015 by author Michael Hingston and designer Natalie Olsen, according to their website, “as a means of finding out just how far an untested idea could be taken.”

As it turns out, it could be taken pretty far.

Since launching with the very first Short Story Advent Calendar in 2015, Hingston & Olsen has published one every year for a total of six editions. Each one has included a carefully curated selection of writing spanning time and genre, and each has been a beautifully designed object as well… an anthology of unusual form, each box containing 25 unmarked and individually sealed booklets, a daily literary surprise to celebrate the holiday season.

Released in limited numbers every year, and since 2018 in an additional even more limited “Limited Edition” with custom painted box, these unique editions celebrate the book as a physical object in the most intriguing way.

Now if you’re interested in adding one to your personal collection, I have some sad news. Hingston & Olsen recently announced that the 2020 edition of the Short Story Advent Calendar was to be their last. At time of publication of this post, the Hingston & Olsen website listed only their 2017 edition as still being available for purchase, so if you’re lucky you might be able to pop over there and pick one up on sale!

But fortunately there are other offerings available and in the works.

In 2017, Hingston & Olsen expanded their catalogue with the first in their three volume Ghost Box series, a similar box-and-booklet format anthology but this time on a Halloween theme. In a brilliant editorial coup, after seeing that Patton Oswalt had tweeted about their Short Story Advent Calendar and knowing of his love of the horror genre, Hingston cold-contacted Oswalt to ask if he would consider editing their planned Ghost Box. Apparently fortune does favour the bold. The first Ghost Box was released in October 2017 edited and introduced by Patton Oswalt, and later won second place in the limited-edition category at the 2017 Alcuin Society Book Awards (Ghost Box II won third place in 2018).

Oswalt went on to edit all three editions, again with only one of which – Ghost Box III – still being available for purchase at the time of publication of this post.

Let me interject here a thank goodness for libraries, so if you aren’t able to acquire copies of your own, fear not if you’d still like a chance to experience these literary works of art first hand. One option would be for you to plan a trip down to the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta, where they have most, if not all, of the Short Story Advent Calendars and Ghost Boxes in their collection, including several donated out of the Butterflies & Aliens collection, and more to come.

More recently, Hingston & Olsen launched their Permanent Record Series to preserve longform non-fiction in book form. Thus far, they have released two volumes in the series, Fear on the Family Farm by Jana G. Pruden and Jerry and Marge Go Large by Jason Fagone.

These limited release, beautifully printed and produced volumes have been designed and made available intentionally as collector’s items, to deliberately encourage their safekeeping where their digital or newsprint originals, in the words of Hingston & Olsen, “disappear just as quickly as they arrived—whether in the churn of the social-media cycle, or a magazine being thrown away when the next one is delivered.”

To further enhance this collector vibe, Hingston & Olsen also released, exclusively at the in-person launch event for Fear on the Family Farm, a broadsheet edition of The Misery Beat, a speech on the ethics of true crime writing that Pruden delivered to the University of Alberta’s Peter Lougheed Leadership College. So not only are they preserving more ephemeral print by ‘re-performing’ them in a more permanent form (see my earlier post on books as performance for more on that idea), they are preserving literal performances as high end print ephemera for posterity.

Hingston & Olsen’s latest offering is Projections, a return to the box-and-booklet format of the Short Story Advent Calendar and the Ghost Box, but this time delivering twelve science fiction short stories that predicted present day life, edited by renowned rare-book dealer Rebecca Romney. I especially loved that this volume included a separate card on which was printed a colophon describing its “risograph-printed box wrap and thermography (raised ink) by Colour Code Printing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Risograph ink is made from a combination of soy oil, water, and pigment. Resin powder is added to the wet ink that melts after being exposed to high heat, creating the unique raised effect.” This level of detail is, unsurprisingly, greatly appreciated by all of us here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library.

So while the Short Story Advent Calendar might be done, this small press certainly isn’t. We look forward to seeing just what surprises come next from these two “stubborn, true believers in the power of the physical book.”

For more information, and additional detailed photographs, of all their work, do go check out the Hingston & Olsen website.

Happy Exploring!

– Winston