For a while, a book lives inside a small circuit: writing, selecting, cutting, revising, designing and printing. Almost everything can still be brought back to the table and changed.
Publication changes that scale. The book enters an envelope, passes through other hands, reaches a shelf the publisher does not know and meets experiences that were absent while it was being written. A secondary passage for the writer can become the centre of somebody else’s reading.
Circulation is therefore more than physical movement. A book circulates when it creates unforeseen relationships: an image meets a memory, an argument meets disagreement, a question reaches another field of experience.
For an independent publisher, this passage belongs to publication itself. Finishing a file or producing an object is not enough. Publishing also means creating the conditions for a work to leave the place where it began without controlling what happens next.
Publication, then, does not close the work. It closes only one stage of control. The rest begins when the book is read by someone who was not at the table.