Every year you can feel the anguish from Kittery to Fort Kent. Maine authors often are crestfallen when Random House and Simon and Schuster claim their first-time manuscripts are so much rubbish.

“Have you tried installing aluminum siding?” editors may as well comment on their infamous rejection notices.

But the writers are buoyed by tales of such heavyweights as James Joyce and Walt Whitman having once published their own works. So, they track down print shops where they pay their money — sometimes buckets of it — and put out the books themselves.

The literary quality often is lost in the sloppy production, but sometimes, like rough diamonds, it sparkles, a welcome change from the Teflon slickness of the Norman Mailers and Tom Wolfes.

“Writing is an art, but publishing is a business,” said Fred Pratt of Hermon, who could have papered his house with rejection slips from publishers who insisted his collection of letters to a dead friend wasn’t commercial enough.

“That means they couldn’t sell 25,000 copies,” said Pratt, an advertising consultant who formed his own publishing business and put the book out under his own imprint.

LETTERS FROM THE HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE (Morning Glen Press, sold at Mr. Paperback and Bookland, 299 pages, $9.95), is unusually well-written and edited. Pratt’s quasi-autobiography, written to a teen-age pal who died in an auto wreck, is personal without being self-indulgent.

Major publishers also nixed a manuscript by Joseph Shubert, a general practitioner from New Portland who eventually hired Augusta publisher Bob Steele to print his first book. Steele agreed to pick up a portion of the costs.

THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PARTRIDGEBERRY (Steele Publishing Co., 18 Elm St., Augusta 04330, or from Shubert, HCR 72, Box 56, New Portland 04954, 381 pages, $12.95), centers on Tom Osborne, a young physician who flees a troubled past and moves near a Yankton Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota. He soon learns that practicing white man’s medicine to native Americans is like mixing oil and water.

Joe Shubert, who worked three years at South Dakota’s Wagner Indian Health Service Hospital, tells of Tom’s growing respect for an Indian named George Partridgeberry, a recluse whose verdant acreage is ripe for a bingo hall. And, you guessed it, George isn’t selling.

EXPERIENCING THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II (available from the author, Frances Robinson Mitchell, P.O. Box 377, Orono 04473, and at area bookstores, 144 pages, $12 softcover, $18 clothbound plus tax and postage), also is self-published, but for a different reason than many others.

“I didn’t want the book to be too formal,” said Mitchell. “That’s why I refused to turn it over to someone else; I was afraid a big publisher would render it unrecognizable.

“The printer, Furbush-Roberts, told me I would never recover my money, but I didn’t care,” she said, content to have her book in print.

She dedicated the rosy story about growing up in a small Aroostook County town, and her later wartime adventures as a lady leatherneck at Camp Lejeune, N.C., to her granddaughter, and “to all young people who may like knowing a little more of our world in the Great Depression and World War II.”

Richard R. Shaw is the NEWS editorial page assistant.