Adam Bellow is a publisher on a mission. As co-founder of The New Pamphleteer he wants to revive the pamphlet and overthrow apathy. Gal Beckerman of CJR Daily spotlights Bellow in a pithy and lively Q&A. Beckerman prefaces the interview by saying “Bellow believes the Internet has become the central arena for intellectual debate in America.” Through New Pamphleteer he plans to edit and print material collected from the blogosphere as:

“a series of 4-by-6 inch, $4 booklets with an average of 60 to 80 pages each . . . to create an affordable forum for presenting ideas.”

Asked why the pamphlet, Bellow, says they’re cheap, portable, and can be a good little business for hell raisers:

“All the great social and political and scientific and religious revolutions in Western history were accompanied by, and indeed instigated by, pamphlet wars, from the Reformation to the Enlightenment,” Bellow said.

There’s more in the interview about Bellow’s role model, socialist publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, whose popular 1920s series, The Little Blue Books, inspired the St. Louis Post Dispatch to call him the “Henry Ford of publishing,” according to the Wikipedia entry.

New Pamphleteer is co-sponsored by PajamasMedia (I blogged about them two years ago) . Adam Bellow he is a son of novelist Saul Bellow. I stumbled across a reminiscence written by the son shortly after his father’s death in 2005. It is titled, Meanwhile: Saul Bellow, the father that was never there.”