Cryptid History 2 – From Press to Edition (2)

We know, as far and with as much resolution as possible, that it was a member of the Autacoid subreddit that shaped Glasman’s peculiar, literary ambitions. One prostaglandin_22 had posted, in an adjacent group chat, the story of Sir Macklemore de Heem, a British noble of Dutch descent whose interest in publication began after a number of critical failures in his attempts to determine a path for himself (one of these ended with his lover drowning during an impromptu, promotional regatta). De Heem had published, as his first text, a long neglected set of devotional poems composed by the Italian poet Guittone D’Arezzo, as translated a century earlier by the English polymath Bertrand Bellte. The effort was a complete failure, the demand for devotional literature having been in sharp decline in the period following the Grand Seigneurial Schism: De Heem’s venture managed to traffic a mere sixteen of the four-hundred printed books. He died penniless and with no family months after launching the venture, from a particularly virulent form of tuberculosis likely contracted while scouting cheap printing-houses in France.

It was 2015 when Glasman experienced his first literary rejection; he had fallen in with a superficially literate crowd by function of their connection to his then-partner, Teresa Di Pulcinella, a PhD student at York University. He wrote his first few poems, encouraged by Teresa’s boundless empathy and interminable creative activity, during the second half of 2014 (none of these have been preserved among the material currently in our possession). The reaction to these seemed to be mostly positive and his self-estimation began to find new shape as it enveloped this modest swell of favourable opinion: 

“I have perhaps discovered the source of my endless, empty winding— an undisclosed centre, drawn out by years of neglect into core, written over with the rough, varied voice of topography. With the unbreakable support of a living diamond I have penetrated crust after crust, endured the concentrate of flame that endlessly eats through essence into violence, sunk below coast and mass, into the pure, unmarked infinity of soul. Here it is, marking my body and vision— I shout in black, endless phrase, and am answered with light. The mountain path descends.” (E-mail to Meniere Polk, 2015)

Two weeks after he submitted a poem entitled “bees” to Tightrope Books’ short-lived online magazine, he received the following response:

“Dear Josh,

While we appreciate the effort and candor that has gone into creating this poem, we unfortunately must decline to accept it for publication in our upcoming issue. We encourage you to continue working on your craft and hope to see another submission from you in the future.

Regards,

Karley Mann”

Everything after this was a digression. What once was a way forward became tangled with doubt and disorder. Soon after this e-mail, Glasman ended his relationship with Teresa, left the writing groups he was a part of, and began to work on what he repeatedly referred to over the next few years in e-mails and IMs to friends as a “grand philosophical system”. There is little to no evidence that this “system” really existed. This is not to say that Glasman had no engagement with the problems of existence, medicine, religion, literature; but to call any of those investigations systematic would be needlessly generous. A document found on Glasman’s hard drive, last edited in 2021, shows that he was still working, a few months before his death, on a response to Karley Mann’s e-mail. Is this the system he spoke of? Likely not.

Whence Cryptid? Or whither. Prostaglandin_22’s post had come at a fortuitous time. Glasman had just finished seasonal work at the Mondelez factory on Gladstone and was feeling encumbered by the palpable, near-material worry of his parents. One night he was sitting with his father in their living room, which faced west into a nest of trees and houses. The final representatives of the living day were making the space into a solemn, golden graveyard; Josh was reading the Autacoid subreddit on his phone and messaging a woman from Australia whom he had never met. He had carried the conversation on, by himself, for two years. His father was, unusually, the one to break the silence, asking Josh what was new in his life, if he had any leads on work. He replied, simply: “I actually just started a publishing house with a friend.” And that was it— two days later, after downloading a trial version of Adobe InDesign and sending a series of messages to Andrew Murphy, Cryptid Editions was born.