About Straight Face Press
Straight Face Press runs on two bylines and a short list, and means to keep it that way.
The name
A straight face is what you keep when the material is doing the work. Keeping one here means trusting the reader to reach their own conclusion without a narrator leaning on the scale.
Plenty of publishing does the opposite. The cover tells you how to feel, the copy tells you what to conclude, and the argument arrives pre-chewed. Straight Face Press works the other way around. It sets the thing down, shows where it came from, and leaves the reader room to disagree.
What we publish
Illustrated editions of public-domain work, and original nonfiction. Both lists are short and stay short. Nothing is published to fill a slot in a schedule.
Public-domain source texts are used because they’re free to build on, not because they’re free to copy. What Straight Face Press adds is the edition itself, the work of sequencing the story, pacing it, drawing it, and lettering it. That layer is the work, and it’s what the imprint line stands behind.
Disclosure
Some titles use AI tools in production, mainly for illustration under human art direction. Where that happens, the book says so, in the book and in plain language, up front rather than buried in the fine print.
Two reasons. The first is that a reader is owed an honest account of what they’re holding. The second is that the human decisions are the part that matters, like what to adapt, what to cut, how a page is paced, and which image survives the fifth attempt. Naming the tools makes the judgement easier to see.
The short version
Every title is written, edited, sequenced, and approved by a person. Tools are named where they’re used. If you want to know how a specific book was made, ask and you’ll get a straight answer.
The details
- Founded
- 2026
- Entity
- Straight Face Press, LLC · North Carolina, United States
- Bylines
- R. M. Hume and D. M. Faraday
- Submissions
- Straight Face Press doesn’t accept unsolicited manuscripts.