Cryptid History 1 – The Cryptid Press

It is difficult to construct an exact timeline of all the events in Cryptid’s history. Each date soon finds itself superimposed over another, only later to be slightly cured to opacity by the discovery of an e-mail from 2018 or a handwritten note tucked into the folds of a cardboard box. What we can affirm with absolute certainty is the fact that the origins of the first Cryptid text long predate Josh Glasman’s publication of Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant-Jésus in 2020. 

Ashley Benson formed the Cryptid Press in 1998, during the second year of her M.A in Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan. Benson had encountered numerous difficulties in her attempts to have some of her more experimental academic work published, including a long, bizarre piece about the sinking of the Lux and Nyx in 1567, a piece which wove together plain text, hand-made drawings, a small answering-machine tape, and instructions for a complex, multi-continental scavenger hunt. Though her work was not published until 1999, Benson began publishing her fellow students’ texts in 1998, starting with Megan Wicks’ Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jésus. Wicks, a precocious student in the University’s Comparative Religion department, began writing the Regards as an associative exploration of the relationship between the concept of space in Olivier Messiaen’s music and Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology. What began as notes for an essay evolved into a set of twenty poems, a “fallen image of the body of music” (Wicks, undated letter). The poems were deeply personal, obtuse, and unmarketable. The explosive and unpredictable character of their author, who at times would speak with no-one for days, only to be found, mere moments out of the chrysalis and still flightless, at the foot of a stage, heckling a band with beer-soaked gestures, was poorly matched to the predictable, suave, and concrete personages of the Michigan poetry scene. 

Benson and Wicks met over a puddle of vomit, which Wicks had conjured up while screaming along to a cover of the Pixies’ Something Against You. Benson stepped in to offer help, Wicks declined, Benson was not to be deterred, and the two walked back to campus together. Somewhere there is an account of this interaction, in a cast off diary or webjournal, an account that settles all the split off possibilities that hover around those moments like vultures, waiting to claim their recession. Somewhere, but not here: all we know is that the two almost immediately began work on the publication of the Regards. They received a small amount of funding from a now defunct endowment administered by the university’s English department, which they used to coax a local chapbook publisher into finding space on their presses to accommodate a short run of their text. In early August, 1998, Wicks and Benson picked up the first, and likely only, box of printed copies of Vingt Regards. We don’t know much about the appearance; in their letters, neither of them seem particularly focused on the aesthetics of the text, finding much more animation in discussions of the contents and their frame. Wicks had insisted that Benson retain the original intention of the text through a subtitle: “Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jésus: An Essay”. Glasman retained this subtitle in his own publication of the material, perhaps due to a somewhat skewed sense of propriety. The books were made available at a number of bookstores on and around campus, and eventually every copy of the book sold out. Benson used this momentum to publish the press’ second work, her long, convoluted piece on the sinking of the Lux and Nyx, in October of 1999. The whole venture, however, was lacking the same energy produced through her collaboration with Wicks, who had recently moved to Oxford to pursue an M.A in Medieval Studies. The presence of this void was made painfully apparent when, due to complications in printing, lack of promotion, and mounting personal distress, Benson failed to sell a single copy of her second book. By the early months of 2000, Benson had shuttered the press and began working in a data-entry position at General Motors, a job she would keep until Wicks’ death in 2006.

What possessed Josh Glasman to steal this manuscript? Though evidence is somewhat scant, we can conjecture, from some of the activities he was engaged in at the time, that his life had taken on that tinge of desperation which any person who has breached the barrier between the conversational and the psychotic knows well. At the time of his theft, Glasman had started to inhabit a digital reality that was beginning to noticeably skew his perception of the real. He found correspondences in between this psycho-apparational universe and certain naive interpretations of parareligious principles that can best be described as a mixture of Valentinian Gnosticism, animal magnetism, spiritism, and theosophy. Though he was never one to espouse any of these theories, especially not publicly, they shaped a less-visible aspect of his personality which only really came to be revealed in the text of his suicide note. One can detect, at the centre of these revelations, a conceptualization of the external which is deeply influenced by omenistic thinking, or a species of panmanticism. In this sense, Glasman’s theft was not subject to social or legal strictures, since it belonged to a series of actions and consequences which were “guided by a greater hand” (E-mail to Carson Merthe, 2020).

It may be that, as this series progresses, we will gain a better insight of exactly who Josh Glasman saw himself to be, how he understood the foundation of this deception, and its place in his wider vision of the universe and its inhabitants.