Passage Publishing
Category: Publishing
Founder: Jonathan Keeperman (aka Lomez)
See also Align’s interview with Keeperman.
Founded: 2022
Location:https://passage.press/
Representative products: “Noticing: An Essential Reader by Steve Sailer” (Patrician Edition), “The Storm of Steel: Original 1929 Translation by Ernst Jünger” (Translated by Basil Creighton), “Passage Prize Volume II: Rewilding” (Paperback Edition)
At a glance:
- The company takes its name from Ernst Jünger’s “Forest Passage,” which (to quote Keeperman) imagines resistance to totalizing culture and politics as “the wild, undomesticated forest where men — ‘forest rebels’ in Jünger’s parlance — can gather the imaginative and moral courage to find their way to something new.”
- Grew out of the Passage Prize, a literary contest Keeperman (as Lomez) first announced on Twitter in 2022. Submissions for the third Passage Prize closed in March 2024.
- A May 2024 Guardian article doxxing Keeperman revealed that he earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he subsequently worked as a well-regarded lecturer in the English department.
In his own words (Keeperman):
We are starting from the premise that people’s mental models for the world are broken or at least woefully incomplete. Their understanding of history has been purposefully constrained and intended to nudge people toward very particular conclusions about how we are supposed to think and act in the current year. People are carrying around these narratives without even realizing it. We want to disrupt that. We want to jar those closed-off spaces open and allow for a fuller picture of the world to come through.
[Ernst] Jünger is one of the most brilliant and complex writers of the 20th century. “Storm of Steel” is perhaps the most profound firsthand account of the experience of war that has ever been written. Jünger’s writing on art, religion, philosophy, and the totalizing tendencies of modernity transcend the petty ideological games these people demand we play. No wonder they hate him. Anybody with a soul will take great comfort in Jünger’s writing and be elevated by him. Truthfully, it breaks my heart that people who presume to be our intellectual betters have failed so spectacularly and stooped to such bottom-feeding invective. They are unworthy of uttering Jünger’s name.
The things that keep me up at night are the little things. I know of about a dozen typos and formatting errors throughout our books that I failed to catch during editing. This drives me crazy. But I’ve come to learn that the vast majority of consumers don’t see these things and trust that when we do make mistakes, we’ll fix them for the next time (and we will).