INTERVIEW: Dmitry Samarov and Mallory Smart on Maudlin House's MAUDLIN CLASSICS series

Juliet Escoria talks with Zona brothers Dmitry Samarov and Mallory Smart about Samarov's new series on Smart's press, Maudlin House: Maudlin Classics, classic books featuring Samarov's illustrations.

Dmitry Samarov is an artist, writer, bookseller, former taxicab driver, a columnist for Zona Motel, and a soft-hearted person with a Chicagoan’s acerbicness. Mallory Smart is a writer, publisher, editor, podcaster, an editor for Zona Motel, and a soft-hearted person with a Chicagoan’s acerbicness. The two of them have been putting out a new series of books, Maudlin Classics, on Smart’s press, Maudlin House—except the series isn’t new at all.

These are books old enough to have gone into the public domain, books old enough that you don’t even have to name the author who wrote them. Each text is meticulously laid out by Samarov and features his expressive, wild illustrations. Moby Dick came out last May, and Winesburg, Ohio is coming out this month. Babbitt, The Jungle, and The Sound and the Fury will be published at some currently undefined point in the future. There might be more. Smart and Samarov will continue publishing them until they exhaust the desire to do so.

We spoke over Zoom to discuss the publication and design process, Samarov’s hatred of Ingram and working with publishers, and how Maudlin Classics hopes to brings these works to a new audience.

Juliet Escoria: How did you guys start decide to do this project, like what came first, second, and so on?

Mallory Smart: Well, it started with Moby Dick. Dmitry had discovered in an article about public domain—

Dmitry Samarov: Yeah, there was this article on, like Slate or one of those places, that burbled across my screen. It was about these tech bros showing off how much money they were making by publishing cheapo versions of classics in the public domain, and how they’re making millions, and making YouTube videos about how to teach other people to make millions, and they were really annoying. But it planted this seed of an idea of “Well, I could do that, but make them nice, and I can make it really labor-intensive for me and probably not make very much money.” I’m really talented at coming up with projects that take a lot of time and don’t make me much money.

The other inciting incident, aside from YouTube tech bro opportunists, was the 2024 election. I needed a project to disappear into, something really immersive. I started looking around in this public domain thing, and at the top of almost every list is Moby Dick, arguably the best American book ever. I was spared reading it in high school. Somehow the first time I read it was as a 30-something going through a divorce, and it spoke to me. It’s a book about failure, and a kind of hubris, and, you know, fragile male egos. That seemed to be a thing to address.

Illustrations from Moby Dick

MS: Moby Dick came out in May through Maudlin House. I had no idea that Dmitry was going to keep [making more].

DS: This whole project was my experiment of doing the opposite of everything I’ve done before. What I did before with my self-published books was have them offset printed, the best quality I could find, and signing and numbering them and making them basically only available from me. So a lot of obstacles. I had boxes and boxes of books that I have to get rid of, so I burned out on that, and needed a different challenge.

When I started this public domain project— [these books] are available to everyone. So my version should be available everywhere too. I had to bite the bullet and enter the—you know, I always call Ingram the Death Star, it’s just so horrible, and it’s a monopoly, and like some of the worst customer service I’ve ever seen.

MS: Bookshop.org still has no image of Moby Dick.

DS: Amazon has it. Other places have it. But there’s no way to fix it, for no fucking reason. There’s no way to reach them. A week or two later, some poor schlub from India, will write you a poorly informed answer that’s just read off whatever is in the training manual. But because they’re the only game in town, they can do that, because they don’t care.¹

Anyway, I had a good time with Moby Dick, and then I just kept going. And then I had this idea of doing a contemporary book, because the writer Bruce Wagner put out his book, The Marvel Universe, into the public domain after a dispute with his then-publisher. And I reached out to him—I know him a little—and he gave me his blessing, and I did an illustrated version of that, put it out myself, and he liked it enough to introduce me to his current publisher, Arcade. I made a deal with them for two books. They put out an updated version of The Marvel Universe with a different cover, and then a book from the 1800s called The Suicide’s Grave: Being the Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is this kind of strange, proto-Gothic Horror that influenced Robert Louis Stevenson and a bunch of other people, and apparently only people in Scotland know about it.

The Suicide’s Grave: Being the Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Moby Dick, Babbitt, The Marvel Universe—all these books, more or less, are about the ego of maniacs and monsters, and so is The Suicide’s Grave, which is about these two brothers, one of whom feels like he’s been slighted, so he decides that God gives him permission to do whatever he wants and he goes on a killing spree.

The Marvel Universe

JE: Mallory, how do you feel like these books fit in with Maudlin House?

MS: I feel like with Maudlin House, I’m always trying to redefine who we are. Lately, I’ve been trying to push for literature that doesn’t behave well, if that makes sense. And Dmitry has just been picking out excellent books that refuse to be silenced, and they really need to be highlighted.

JE: So, what about Winesburg, Ohio, felt timely, or is it just a book that you love?

Winesburg, Ohio

DS: It’s a book I love that I’ve reread a bunch of times. And after having illustrated four novels, I think I wanted to try a different form. It’s also bringing it near, because while it’s set in Ohio, a lot of it apparently was based on his time staying in a rooming house in Chicago.

I think of all of them, [Winesburg, Ohio] fits best with the name of your press, Maudlin House. This should be the flagship book, because he knows how to write a bummer. All these people are miserable and they want to get out of their town, and they don’t know how to do it.

MS: That’s why Sherwood Anderson called the opening section The Book of the Grotesque. That’s why I had to release it in February, because that’s when people are most miserable in Chicago.

Babbitt

JE: If you were a drug dealer, how would you get your client to use Winesburg, Ohio?

MS: I would say that it came free with the drugs.

DS: You’re there on the corner, grinding. Come on, Mallory.

MS: I’m just gonna be hanging outside like, the Jackalope or something, and be like, “Come on, gang. Do you feel miserable in the Midwest? I have a book for you.”

JE: At the beginning of each book, you note the font. I love it when books do that, but is there any sort of specific thought in terms of the font that you used?

DS: That goes back to when I started publishing my own books, which was like, seven or eight years ago. I’ve had a very bizarre publishing history. I started at the top, and have been stumbling downhill since. My first book was from University of Chicago Press, which is a very prestigious university press. And you’d think that you could get an agent or some kind of commercial publisher interested after that. In my case, no, I did not succeed.

My second book was published by a horrible Chicago indie press, which was run by a criminal—that’s been written about. This was followed by about five years of not being able to be published by anybody.

One of the horrors [of my second book was] that the designer, who allegedly is some kind of award-winning designer, mangled the interior of my book so badly it took three of us to disentangle all the words that looked like one compound German word. I don’t know what the fuck he was doing. So I said, “Well, you know, I’m an artist. I can fuck up my own book at least as badly as this.” So I kind of taught myself how to design books. And for a bunch of years, I just put out books myself.

MS: Did you just decide that I was inherently trustworthy? You don’t really like publishers.

DS: Well, I’ve had bad experiences. And, yeah, people are not trustworthy. I mean, I’ve gotten dummy contracts from publishers, and everything’s about to get going, and then, poof, it was all make-believe.

I think you [Mallory] and I were just texting one day. I was telling you about what I was doing, and you seemed interested. So it just went from there and like anything, you’ve got to find people you trust and you can work with—that’s been few and far between. But yeah, it’s been great so far. I don’t know how Mallory feels, but—

MS: He’s one of the divas, very hard to please. I’m not sure if I follow everything in your rider or whatever...

DS: Like the Green M&M’s?

MS: Come on, it’s got to be only the brown ones because there’s probably less food dye in it.

But honestly, the reason this works is because he cares deeply about the work, and I try not to get in the way of artists when they’re following something they believe in. That balance is important to me as a publisher.

Dmitry just occasionally texts me an update, and I’m like, “That sounds cool.” One thing I added to these—and Dmitry ran with it—was the introductions, because a lot of people haven’t heard of Winesburg, Ohio. I was like, “Oh shit, I need to figure out how to bring this to millennials and Gen Z,” or anyone who hasn’t just randomly come across it. It’s such an underrated book that’s been overshadowed by other American authors like Faulkner, and I wanted voices that felt more relevant, who would actually draw people in. So for Winesburg, my choices were either Adam Gnade or Kevin Maloney, and Kevin jumped at it.

DS: The problem with some of these classic books is they’re put out in editions that are hard to read, and then it’s this brick of a book, so people get intimidated. And I just tell people, you can read [Moby Dick] the way you read short stories or articles. It’s not a straight narrative, and all the tangents are the best parts of that book. If you break it into little chunks, it’s a lot more manageable.

JE: I feel stupid because sometimes I’ll pick up a classic book, and the font will be really small, and I’ll not want to read it because it’s unpleasant to read. Just the way a book is presented sometimes can make a big difference, at least to me.

DS: And having the illustrations breaking things up has been really helpful for people.

I like old books a lot, but I don’t want these to look like they’re antiques. I want them to look contemporary.

JE: I don’t know if this is like when somebody asks me where I get my ideas for a book, where I don’t even know how to answer this question—but how did you decide exactly what to illustrate? And if that’s a dumb question, then you don’t have to answer it.

DS: It’s not dumb. But it’s totally intuitive. I’ll read a few pages until something occurs to me. I really prefer to draw or paint from direct observation. Obviously, I can’t do that here. So I do an image search for something, where I can find either a landscape or a costume that somebody wore. It’s rare in my illustrations that some big action scene will happen. It’s more for a reader to pause and have a feeling of being there. That’s the effect I want.

MS: In Winesburg, Ohio, [Dmitry changed] the map and did a much better version.

JE: I saw yours and wondered if a map was in the original book. I pulled out my copy and yeah, there was a map in there, but yes, your map is better.

DS: I think that map is not in every edition [of Winesburg, Ohio], but in a bunch of them. I like that idea, but I thought, “Well, if I’m drawing stuff, I’m just going to draw my own map.” It’s a way to have a conversation with these old books and try to make them hopefully more accessible to contemporary readers. I can make these art projects, rather than having to think about actually writing another book.

JE: Do either of you have a favorite illustrated book, or just one that you like a lot?

MS: Mine is actually what’s holding my computer up right now. I have a complete collection of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Two of Mallory's favorite illustrations from Grimm's Fairy Tales

DS: Gustave Doré did a bunch of illustrations for Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Those were bedtime stories in my house, which might clue you into why I turned out [this way]. Those were super influential. And many Soviet-era children’s books were illustrated. People like Maurice Sendak are pretty big for me. I really love books with pictures. I’ve never published one without pictures.

JE: I like the note you had in Winesburg, which said, “Others may include but not be limited to,” rather than a definitive list.

DS: It’s weird to project stuff into the future. I’m not a good planner. I feel things along and a couple of feet in front of my face is about as far as I usually look.

MS: We’re pretty knee-jerk people.

DS: We may call it off after these four, or we may go another 10. I don’t know. It’s surprisingly refreshing to be working with a publisher again. I didn’t know if I ever would, because [I know how I] want things done, and once you learn how to do all the parts, you wonder why you need anybody else involved at all.

MS: I think that’s why this works. I don’t like to get too restrictive in anyone’s process.

DS: After a while you have to find people that you can actually stand to work with. I hate that this was such a like a later in life lesson [for me]—that it’s all in who you know. It’s making connections, like “networking.” I would never call it that, but that’s what it is. You meet somebody, and you strike up a conversation, and then you’ve got some kind of project going. That’s how the whole world works. I assume I got included in Zona Motel because you, Juliet, and I had some kind of tenuous connection through Scott [McClanahan]. I don’t know if you remember, but I met you once.

JE: Yes, Scott had told me about you, and then I met you in like 2014. So then I was like, “Oh, he would be good [for Zona Motel].”

DS: Yeah, but that’s how everything works.

MS: And then [Dmitry] told me about Zona Motel, and that’s why I’m in Zona Motel now.

DS: In school or wherever, when you’re younger, they feed you these fairy tales about how if you do good work, the cream rises to the top. And it’s just not true; it’s the opposite. So many books and art take decades to get any kind of recognition, and then stuff is forgotten so it has to be periodically reintroduced. Everybody who wants to be a writer should read Winesburg, Ohio. It’s fucking great.

1. I complained to Bookshop directly and they finally added a cover. Only took about eight months! -Mallory