In 2014, on a Friday night just before Christmas, the US government released a heavily redacted, non-searchable, virtually unreadable document–likely hoping that it would go unnoticed in a wash of liquor and festive parties.
The staff at Melville House Publishing took just 19 days to transform that Senate report on the CIA’s rendition and torture programme and publish it, both electronically and in print. In a freezing warehouse, where the heating was turned off at 6pm, they worked around the clock; locals started sending them food, and volunteers from other publishing houses trickled in when they heard about the project. They “crashed” the holiday with the report.
Later, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and even Daniel Jones, who had authored the document (later portrayed by Adam Driver in The Report), would all give their thanks for Melville House’s efforts retyping the document, allowing it to be searched electronically.
Today, Melville House is in a better warehouse (they have heating now), and they’ve just released two new reports in the US, with both following in the UK in the next few weeks: a print and eBook edition of the Jack Smith report—the summation of an investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election—and the Tulsa report, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) report reveals that the massacre—in which up to 300 black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were killed and 10,000 were made homeless, was not mob violence or a riot (as the government had claimed at the time)—but a systematic and coordinated military-style attack by whites on Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street”.
In January, days after the report was released by the Civil Rights Division (a branch of the DoJ), Trump effectively closed down the division by ordering it to halt a majority of its functions. Dennis Johnson, who founded Melville House with his wife Valerie Merians, suspects that the Tulsa report won’t be available on the department’s official website for much longer.
When I spoke to him last Friday, Johnson said the report was “the only official book about this horrific event... and it’s also a document of the government criticising itself, which I think is unprecedented. The government did do a Tulsa report back when the event happened, and it was a whitewash, a literal whitewash, and this now sets the record straight.”
Melville House have published Supreme Court decisions and government investigations throughout multiple administrations. Now, Johnson is hoping that the Jack Smith report “will remind people who the president is. He’s a felon.
“I lived through the decades of the intensity of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s into the 1970s… and [Trump’s election] is such a setback.”
The president recently threatened a $10bn lawsuit against Penguin Random House for allegedly publishing defamatory books about him. Johnson thinks the major publishing houses are “nervous about upsetting Trump”. Melville House, as an independent publisher, doesn’t face all of the same constraints. “We’re not a big international conglomeration whose prime mission is to make more money every quarter.”
Even so, Johnson and Merians are still feeling vulnerable. “We’ve had presidents with shit lists, and we’re worried about being on one.”
Johnson wants to have a “more permanent version of these documents out there”, in libraries, houses and schools. He recalls hearing a talk by the head of the Library of Congress, who said that “the basement of the Library of Congress was littered with lost culture”, meaning obsolete forms of digitisation—reel-to-reel tapes, Betamax, cassette tapes, 8-tracks.
For the first time, the reports will be in print, hopefully attracting a wider readership. “It’s good these things exist on the internet. But I don’t know how many people really are going to look up a government website and then do the deep dive to find the documents there.
“Whereas you can still read the very first books printed by Gutenberg, they still exist and they still convey the information within. I saw the second Gutenberg Bible, and it still is completely functional. The spine still works. [The] pages are still legible…”
Determined not to let this stage of American history become “lost culture”, the publishers believe that old-fashioned print is still the best way to preserve for the future. Censorship is only going to get tougher, Johnson thinks, but it doesn’t seem like these reports will be the last to be printed by Melville House.
“We stand,” he says, “at the ready.”
