Your donations, no matter how small, make an enormous difference to us and help keep this project going. Encyclopedia is an “economoddity” to borrow a term invented by Robert Kocik. An economoddity is a commodity for an odd sort of economy, such as a gift economy, or any economy that isn’t very economical, so to speak. The Encyclopedia Project, which runs in the red; is rather hard to find, use, or understand; has maintained editorial independence from institutions; and despite never making a profit has never become a nonprofit, could, before it manifested, have been a candidate for Kocik’s “Annotated List of Various Missing Social Services and Omitted Agencies” in which he coins the neologism economoddity to describe those communitarian objects athwart capitalism, things non-monetized, things for whom market value is stubbornly not the final rationalization, things that circulate as material through which other values may be tended, stoked, proposed, animated, and wagered.

We are wagering on, among other things, archiving out of print and neglected works and lineages; on the practice of feminist process and consensus in our meetings and decision making; on explicit commitments to anti-canonical aesthetic registers not solely geared to pedagogical or commercial utility; and on selecting experimental writing and art with an emphasis on work by of color, female, and queer writers and artists to create a proactively inclusive, intersectional “training in a circle” – enkuklios paideia in the Greek. Treating the politicized fractions of affirmative action as poethical formal constraint, we have aimed for reparative proportionality – a numeral accord which we have tried to live up to, though we have not succeeded on, so to speak, every count. Art is long; ethics is longer. Politics and aesthetics are inseparable. The above practices and commitments have allowed us to curate our books richly and productively, though we have struggled to circulate our economoddities to the extent our contributors truly deserve. It is a joy to announce, therefore, a long overdue partnership with a publisher. Before long, second editions of all three volumes of Encyclopedia will be available in soft cover and POD from Publication Studio. In the meantime, we seek financial support to produce the third and final volume of Encyclopedia.

Thank you for supporting this labor of love!