Raconteur Charles Wehrenberg (born 1944, St Louis, MO) lives and works in San Francisco. Solo Zone Publishing & Design took shape in 1995 with thirty years of intellectual effort crystallized into a design concept, several books, and a web site to pitch them with simple animations called Jumpies. Times were changing. The internet and nascent mobile devices seemed destined to reshape thinking. Having fiddled with software design since working for NASA in the mid-60s, Charles Wehrenberg did not hesitate to embrace the programming required. To him writing code is simply another keyboard art like writing a novel, a story or an essay.
Clearly thoughtful design was not to become anachronistic. There is nothing quite like sitting in a well-designed chair when you want to write something, or want to read a good book even if that means staring at a little mobile phone screen to read it. Effective design is a perennial. However, the classic bookstores and other showroom-based businesses are dinosaurs. It is not surprising that once solid book sellers are now fighting for their very existence as our world embraces the Internet Of Things, thereby becoming ever more virtualized, mobilized and otherwise layered and hyper-contextural. So while communication ways and means were to change dramatically as time left the 20th century behind, art would remain a matter of rendering an aesthetic point of view effectively and Living Outloud!
Jump forward to 2019. Cell phones rule! The mobile transformation now dominates everything, especially the Internet. The long-standing, truck-based, book distribution paradigms which demand over shipment and generate massive returns have become more than anachronistic: They are no longer sustainable. Fortunately, these saturation-based marketing strategies are no longer required. The 21st century view is Why not buy online?
Solo Zone Publishing believes small press publishing is an important part of a free society. Given our brave new world, SZP plans to concentrate on making our titles available online and suitable for ebook readers whether a smart phone or a dedicated device.
![[at 23]](CW1967.GIF)
![[at 31]](CW1975.GIF)
![[at 50]](CW1994.GIF)
