Passage Publishing
Category: Publishing
Founder: Jonathan Keeperman (aka Romes)
Check out Align’s interview with Keeperman.
Founded: 2022
position:https://passage.press/
Representative products: “Attention: Must-Read Books by Steve Saylor” (Patrician Edition), “Storm of Steel: The Original 1929 Translation by Ernst Jünger” (translated by Basil Clayton), “Passage Award Volume 2: Rewilding” (Paperback Edition)
At a glance:
- The company takes its name from Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Path, which, in Keepermann’s words, depicts resistance to totalitarian culture and politics as “a wild, untamed forest, where humans (‘forest rebels’, in Jünger’s term) can muster the imagination and moral courage to find a way towards something new.”
- grown Passage Prizeis a literary contest first announced by Keeperman (under the pseudonym Romes) on Twitter in 2022. Entries for the 3rd Passage Prize closed in March 2024.
- A May 2024 exposé on Keeperman by The Guardian revealed that he had earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, and had subsequently worked as a highly-regarded lecturer in the school’s English department.
In the keeper’s own words:
We start from the premise that people’s mental models of the world are broken, or at least deeply incomplete. Their understanding of history has been intentionally limited, with the goal of leading them to very specific conclusions about how we should think and act this year. People carry these narratives around with them without even realizing it. We want to disrupt that. We want to shake up those closed spaces so that a more complete picture of the world can be seen.
[Ernst] Junger is one of the most intelligent and complex writers of the 20th century. Storm of Steel is perhaps the most profound first-hand account of the war experience ever written. Junger’s writings on art, religion, philosophy, and the totalitarian tendencies of modernity transcend the petty ideological games these people ask us to play. No wonder they hate him. Anyone with a soul will find great comfort in and be elevated by Junger’s writings. Honestly, it pains me that those who consider themselves our intellectual superiors have failed so spectacularly and succumbed to such vile invective. They do not deserve to utter the name Junger.
It’s the little things that keep me up at night. There are about a dozen typos and formatting errors in the book that I didn’t catch during editing. It drives me crazy. But it turns out the majority of consumers don’t notice these things and trust that if we make a mistake, we’ll fix it next time (and they do).
