About us

Pitzilein Books is a Mexican publishing house that gathers vignettes, poems, photos, diary entries, (pseudo)encyclopedias, to make sense of our contemporary mindscape. Pitzilein uses art to understand droughts, kidney stones, the passing away of pets, nostalgia, the dangers of urban bicycling, posthumanism, the splintering of desire, and so on. Founded in 2016 by art historian and novelist Idalia Sautto, Pitzilein books is averse to contemporary doom and gloom, to neuroticism and high-brow stiffness. Rather, it’s a playground where writers, visual artists, designers, and scholars toy with the concept of the book as an art support, pursuing both leisure and clarity, joy and analysis.

In the spirit of Renaissance guilds, each collaborator may take up different roles during each project, from pitching an idea to operating the printing machine, from designing the cover to touting the catalog at the book fairs. Working hand in hand with larger institutions, Pitzilein pieces together ample bilingual anthologies about philosophical subjects, and, alternatively, can materialize quirky volumes from scratch, using scraps of paper, during an afternoon’s creative frenzy at the workshop. This multiplicity of subjects and formats, of participants and procedures, has spawned a catalog that is cohesive in its innermost purpose, but externally diverse and unpredictable.

Pitzilein sets out to counter our contemporary culture’s malaise with joyful, flamboyant books. We frolic on the ruins of romantic affect, of academic knowledge, but know when to salvage a chunk of ancient beauty found along the way. We don’t strike trivially adversarial poses. We shun escapism. Reality is here and we want to witness it. Even, perhaps, revel in it. This means that we harness the creative power of our editors and collaborators to conceive books that address and rattle our surrounding reality and our ideas about the world. Sometimes ideas can materialize in a heartbeat, from a funny phrase, from a quirky anecdote, and turn in to a physical chapbook in the same day. Sometimes the ideas need to wait for the material circumstances to come along. These imaginary books are filed in a computer folder called “incubator.” There they wait safely for the moment to see the light.

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