For thirty years, the small independent publisher Black Ink, run by Nikolai Vogel and Kilian Fitzpatrick, has been creating a proliferating analogue and digital world in which Rilke’s elegies can be found alongside their own experiments. How can such a feat succeed?
What is permanent? “There is nowhere to stay”, wrote Rainer Maria Rilke a century ago in the “Duino Elegies”. And yet this is a story about staying, persevering, moving on. It’s a story about two students who once founded a small publishing house and three decades later still fill it with life, texts, passion. This is not a matter of course in a fast-moving time and book industry. It’s a work of art.