Salt Publishing came up with a brilliant campaign to keep their struggling publishing company afloat last year – the “Just One Book” campaign.

Essentially, it was an effort to make us all feel guilty for not actually stepping forward and putting a little money down to support contemporary literature from smaller presses.

And it worked. “Just One Book” became a minor cause celebre (I myself bought Mark Salerno’s Odalisque – a collection of sonnet-like poems celebrating a noirish image of Los Angeles; as a poet who once lived in that great city, myself, I rejoiced to see Salerno so wonderfully capture part of that place’s magic).

Now it is back with “Just One (More) Book.”

They make it clear that this is not just a shameless plug by their marketing folks, but a true cri de coeur by a lit lover who fears that this tragic wreck of economy (thanks a lot, George W. Bush! no – don’t worry, we’ll clean up the mess for me) will crush a small shop like Salt.

The phrases they rattle off sound pretty dire: “sales are now 60% down on last year” and “wiped out our grant and our cash reserves” and – worst of all – “we’ve less than one week’s cash left.”

I went for Ron Silliman‘s Tjanting (ironically, inspired by Seth Abramson’s smackdown of Silliman’s painfully tendentious “School of Quietude”). I constantly read Silliman’s blog, but my shelves are painfully bare of any of his books. But not anymore – or at least not anymore in a couple of weeks, what with shipping times and all.

Please consider making July “Poetry Month” and supporting Salt Publishing.