For Tunglið, how you publish is as important as what you publish. Named after the Icelandic word for the moon, the tiny publisher prints its books in batches of 69 on the night of a full moon. So far, so weird. But keen readers must also buy their books that same night, as the publisher burns all unsold copies. Weirder still.

Why? While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – “uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.”

The masterminds are writer Dagur Hjartarson and artist Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson. Three years ago, the pair were discussing some promising manuscripts that they knew were languishing unpublished, and started to formulate a plan to make these books appear. But doing so, they decided, would also “have to involve making them disappear”.

Precisely why the latter was necessary is hard to discern – but nonetheless, Tunglið was born.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson (left) and Dagur Hjartarson. Photograph: Lilja Birgisdóttir

Hjartarson and Ólafsson asked to be quoted as a “dual entity”, joking that they must toe a “party line”. Jokes and not taking publishing too seriously seem integral to Tunglið. Asking about their anti-profit business model, I am corrected: “Tunglið is not a business, so there is no business model.”

[We] use only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames.

Is this all a satire, then, of publishing and capitalism in general? Not really; Ólafsson and Hjartarson’s “aim is not to make any point … We tend not to take the rules of the game too seriously so in that way, it might seem satirical.”

One topic they do take (somewhat) seriously is the artistic nature of their book burnings. At their sole incineration outside Iceland – in Basel, Switzerland – they had a difficult time persuading the locals that this was “a poetic act, not a political one”.

They assure me that they burn books “with a lot of care and respect, using only first-grade French cognac to help to fuel the flames”. They claim the burnings “have nothing to do with history, censorship or politics”. Instead, the procedure has to do with the politics of the book itself. Unsurprisingly, they describe their publishing list as “unconventional” – books that are hard to classify. They want to keep these challenging books available, whether it be Icelandic poet Óskar Árni Óskarsson’s Cuban Diary from 1983 or Ólafsson’s own Letters from Bhutan. “The printed book is a democratic object,” they argue, but one being “pushed to the margins” as some publishers are trying to save the book “by turning it into a luxury item”; a desirable object prized for its commercial value rather than its contents.

But aren’t Tunglið’s small print runs and book burnings undemocratic, because they limit who can access their books? “Democratic,” they tell me, “doesn’t mean limitless abundance or unlimited supply – but it should mean fair process.” Their books are cheap, cannot be pre-ordered and no one can jump the queue at their events – fair, in other words. “Everyone is welcomed,” they stress – but they do acknowledge that making their books scarce is fundamental to what they do.

“This might look like a contradiction,” they continue. “If so we are sorry, but not sorry. We just try to do what feels right, funny or beautiful, or preferably all three.”

The core question still remains: why? “There’s a contradiction at the centre of things,” they tell me, “and so it is with Tunglið”. They both love and hate that books “strive for permanence”, and how we attempt to “reconcile ourselves with impermanence by making permanent things”. Writing a book is, for some writers, a deluded attempt at immortality. Tunglið saves its authors from this delusion.

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What it provides, they say, is a kind of liberation. “The energy of the act of publishing is condensed and amplified. A lot of waiting, doubting and worrying, self-promotion and plugging is simply eliminated,” they say. This still doesn’t quite explain Tunglið – but if you don’t get it, Hjartarson and Ólafsson aren’t about to help. “We try to stay true to a certain logic,” they say, “but this is the logic of a poem, not of prose.” And it’s hard to hold a poem to account.