Chance Press

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Presenting the first book published under our new imprint, Chance Press Research: Abel Debritto’s Too Powerful a Thing to Reject: Charles Bukowski’s Transition Years, 1945-1957. While a book on Bukowski, perhaps the most widely-published and prolific poet of the 20th Century, doesn’t immediately align with Chance Press Research’s goals of exploring forgotten or underappreciated literature, the early years of his writing career are almost universally misunderstood, due in no small part to Bukowski’s own self-aggrandizing myths (especially his “ten year drunk,” during which he supposedly did no writing at all).  Debritto, a noted Bukowski scholar and bibliographer, has done more research than many knew was possible on this subject, and he delivers an authoritative account of Bukowski’s years of transition from literary obscurity to literary celebrity.  Excerpted and adapted from his Doctoral dissertation on Bukowski, this material is made available to the non-academic public for the first time in this release.

Ordering

The first edition is limited to 90 copies for sale and 19 copies for the publisher’s and author’s use.

Trade Edition (50 copies): $7.00 (includes shipping)
Signed Trade Edition (25 copies): $14.00 (includes shipping)
Signed Hardcover Edition (15 copies): $28.00 (includes shipping)

To order, please head over to our ordering page.

Edition Details:

Too Powerful a Thing to Reject is a hand-sewn single-signature chapbook.  The trade edition covers are Gocco-printed onto cardstock wrappers, and the text is on Hammermill heavyweight color copy paper.  The endpapers are laser printed on bright white vellum, and the signed trade edition copies feature rounded corners and heavier-gauge black Irish linen thread.

The deluxe edition is hand-bound in boards covered in Italian Canapetta bookcloth, with a Canson Montval Gocco-printed cover pastedown.  Interior pastedowns are on Fabriano Murillo, and binding is sewn with black Irish linen thread.

*Note: all signed copies (signed trade and signed hardcover) are signed on Gocco-printed bookplates tipped inside the rear cover.  The plates are printed on two stocks – Canson Montval for the trade copies, and Arches 88 for the hardcover copies.

Here are some pictures of the extra-fancy publisher’s copy of the Serafini 2nd edition.  Because this is our first hardcover release, and since I’m pretty proud of the essay inside as well, we wanted to do up a really nice copy to keep in our collection.  So, while the deluxe edition for sale has blue Italian bookcloth and a Canson Montval pastedown, we upgraded the publisher’s copy to green Japanese Asahi cloth and an Arches 88 pastedown with a deckle edge.

But, perhaps the best, and most blog-worthy, upgrade is the interior pastedowns.  We recently invested in an Epson Stylus R2400 inkjet printer, because we want to incorporate the technology behind fine-art prints into our work.  This is the most affordable printer that uses Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks, which are used in pretty much any fine art print or high-end photography print that you see, and you will see elements incorporated into our future deluxe editions that are made possible by this printer.  Because of the cost of the ink (and the time it takes to print), the bulk of our printing will still be on our trusty Lexmark laser printer, but the Epson gives us a lot of new capability – and the deluxe editions of the Larding book will be the first ones to truly show off what this baby can do.

For the Serafini book, however, I wanted to experiment a little with the printer, so I found an iconic image from the Codex (a deer’s head planted in a pot, with tree branches for antlers) and laid it up on a sheet to create a pattern.  I printed out the pattern on Canson Infinity Mi-Teintes paper and pasted it down over the original interior pastedowns, creating a really beautiful effect.

I thought about adding these endpapers to the deluxe editions, but there are a few problems – first, these books are already going to be relatively expensive, and I don’t want to add to the cost by having to recoup expenses on paper and ink (which is not cheap and is used up faster than in a regular inkjet printer, due to the vibrancy of the colors).  Second, I don’t own this artwork, and so I don’t want to “sell” Serafini’s work, even though I’m sure no one would ever find out.

So, unfortunately, no copies with the “upgraded” interior pastedowns will be available to the public.  They do look great, though, don’t they?

The debate about what constitutes a small press bears about as much fruit as debating “what is art?”  Really, anyone who does anything to publicize literature could be considered a small press, from someone that runs a blog like Gloom Cupboard or Zygote in my Coffee to someone that painstaking hand-sews letterpress-printed pages into leather-bound deluxe editions.  You could draw the line at “press = paper,” but I really think that there’s very little difference between a publisher who copies and pastes a manuscript into Wordpress and a publisher who copies and pastes a manuscript into a document that is submitted to a print-on-demand service that makes books that are then sold directly on Amazon, all without the publisher ever touching a copy.  The line is always going to be arbitrary – do you have to sew the binding yourself, or can you use a stapler?  Do you have to employ manual methods of printing, or can you use a laser printer?  Does your paper have to be handmade?  How about your ink and your glue?

So, to avoid bloating the term “small press” into uselessness by claiming that it encompasses every word published by contemporary DIY culture, I associate it with some basic concepts:

• Self-printing: this could mean Xerox, laser, inkjet, by hand, letterpress, silkscreen, woodblock, etc.  As long as YOU, the publisher, did it, and not a service that returned the printed pages to you.
• Self-binding: staples, thread, animal hide, paper covers, hardcovers, cloth covers, etc… again, as long as YOU did it.
• Self-fulfilling: meaning, literally, fulfilling orders yourself.  Packing, mailing, stamping, trips to the post office, etc., instead of warehousing your copies at Amazon and running all your payments through them.

Now, to reiterate, this is just my idea of what the small press is, and it is formed by my experience so far with the above categories.  (You know you’re always free to call me an exclusionary bastard in the comments section.)  This encompasses a fairly wide range of outfits as well, from zine-makers with a Kinko’s card and a stapler to experienced book binders with Teflon bone folders and stainless steel scalpels.

My guiding light as a small press publisher, as I stated in a recent post, is to make our publications justify their existence in print.  And this is where I encounter the crossover between the small press and the fine press.  At both extremes, there are books that are simply ridiculous – on the small press side, you have poetry books that are hastily stapled, poorly printed, and just plain ugly to read.  The publisher of a book like this will say that he or she only cares about the writing, man; apparently, all other concerns about form only serve to distract the reader from the author’s genius.  On the other hand, you have books that cost thousands of dollars, even though they only print five lines of a poem by a 16th Century Frenchman you’ve never heard of.  The publisher of this book insists that it’s not just about the writing, kind sir; it is about the craft of bookmaking, the interplay between the delicate grain of the paper, the hand-tooled Moroccan goatskin cover, the custom-formulated ink on the Vandercook press, the handspun slik headbands (are you bored yet?)…

But, there is value in looking at the fine press and emulating what they do while running a small press.  We can’t charge $250 and up for every book we produce, so there’s no way that we can create books that rival those put out by well-known fine presses (such as Whittington Press, Janus Press, Barbarian Press, Sherwin Beach Press, and Kickshaws, just to name a few).  However, these presses are the ones that hit the home runs, when they produce books that strike the absolute perfect balance between engaging text, elegant printing, deluxe materials, and beautiful (but still purposeful) binding.  Whittington Press’s annual deluxe edition of Matrix is a good example of the “perfect book,” in the context of this balance.  But it’s a rare thing, and almost impossibly difficult to achieve.

It all makes my head spin.  At what point does the object begin to overwhelm the content?  That this is such a subjective question only makes it worse.  Looking through catalogs of fine presses sometimes makes the actual content of their books seem like an afterthought; the author I imagine being embarrassed by the terrible small press publication of his work that I mentioned above seems almost to be in a better place than the author whose work recedes into the background, outweighed by the artistry of the book binder.

In pursuing the balance of form and content, I have felt at times that we do our authors a disservice by printing their work on a laser printer – that their writing is good enough to warrant letterpress printing.  I have come close to throwing away finished work because of small blemishes that only a perfectionist would notice.  I have a bad temper, and I often lose it while sitting at my desk looking at warped hardcover boards, crooked bindings, uneven screen printing, etc.  But we aren’t a fine press, and I’m not sure that our customers expect that of us.  Our goal is still to publish writing and art, and to call attention to book design and hand binding, but not to the detriment of the content.  More than that, the goal is for the design to enhance the content, and vice versa – looking at the book as a total package, rather than simply as writing or simply as an object.

We’ll get there, as we both continue to improve our skills as both publishers and book makers.  I’m very impatient, and I’m guilty of wanting to have the expertise of someone like Bill Roberts right away, without putting in the time at my desk, developing that expertise.  And already, 2010 looks like a productive year for us, so I can only imagine what we’ll be doing in 2020.  It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience so far, and I should add that we’re grateful to our repeat-order customers who give us the confidence to push on with our projects.  I write a lot about our goals as publishers on this blog, but I feel just as often that we’re not meeting any of them.  As long as the books are selling, however, we’ll keep doing our best.

Around $200 of bookmaking supplies from my favorite store (www.talasonline.com) arrived yesterday, meaning we can start working on the hardcover special editions of the two Chance Press Research titles we’re releasing next month.  Below are some shots of my first ever full-hardcover book, which came out much better than I expected.  (This one is a presentation copy, but it will probably never be presented to anyone, since it holds a lot of sentimental value.)

We thought about taking preorders but decided that we will wait until all of these copies are done and announce it for sale then.  So, if you haven’t already emailed us about getting on our deluxe edition mailing list, you probably hate our press anyway and regret reading this post.

Yes, it’s a fairly big announcement, and one we’re very excited to make.  Soon, we will release two books under the “Chance Press Research” banner.  More on those books in a minute, but first a word or two about CPR, and how it aligns with our editorial goals…

While we take pride in publishing a wide range of genres and mediums, we don’t intend to name a new series or imprint every time we publish a new type of book.  However, one area on  which we intend to focus in particular is research into forgotten, unknown, or underappreciated literature.  Our goal is to find smartly written (and enjoyably readable) essays about interesting literary topics and to publish them in stand-alone editions under the CPR header.  While generally the domain of literary journals and academic anthologies, we believe there is a place in the small press for editions like this, and we are proud to debut two such titles in March of 2010.  We will plan to release at least one CPR book per year moving forward, and each will maintain the same basic design and edition size.

The first CPR title is an exhaustively researched account of Charles Bukowski’s “transition years” from 1945 to 1957, written by noted Bukowski scholar and bibliographer Abel Debritto.  This essay debunks the myth of Bukowski’s famous 10-year drinking binge with greater authority than previous efforts and follows Bukowski during his gradual transition to literary acceptance in the 1960’s and eventual fame in the later part of the 20th Century.  Debritto provides information that has never been discovered before, including the titles of Bukowski stories that were rejected from periodicals and then destroyed, and factual accounts of multiple self-generated Bukowski myths.

The second CPR title is a new edition of my essay, Confronting and Collecting the Works of Luigi Serafini.  There has been sufficient demand for a new edition of this essay, and so I have added additional material (previously only available in the ten deluxe copies of the first edition) and printed new covers that reflect the design conventions of the CPR series.

These books will be available in trade, signed/numbered, and hardcover deluxe editions, with prices and edition size to be announced upon publication.  Those already on our subscriber list will get first priority for deluxe copies (please email books (at) chancepress (dot) com to be added to this list).

Preview pictures for both books are below:

In a clear sign of poetry’s resurgence, the fifteenth person bought a deluxe copy of The Confusion will be Enough for them to Leave you Alone by Stephen Hines, rather than spending the money on 1/7th of an XBOX 360. Also, the fact that this book sold out fairly quickly should motivate you to do two things so that you never miss out on gems like this ever again:

a) buy a deluxe copy of MJP’s chapbook for the insanely low price of $20

b) email us at books (at) chancepress (dot) com to get on the waiting list for the deluxe edition of the Larding chapbook, which will be limited to 18 copies and cost around $40 (price still TBD)

Also, keep an eye on this blog, since we are about a week away from announcing a brand new project that will be released sometime this Spring, as well as our plans for the 2nd edition of the Serafini chapbook.

The covers for the Larding book are done – now all that remains is adding the text, since supposedly books are supposed to have some of that inside.

My guess is that the final books will be ready about 6 weeks after the text is ready, which should take another month or two in itself. So, I’m still clinging to the hope that these will be ready by the end of April, but in reality, it will probably be later.

Here’s a pic (deluxe on the left, presentation copy on the right):

I think, as someone who is putting even a few books out into the world, it is useful to have a position on print books versus ebooks. The topic will continue to be debated, but it is inevitable that the terms of the debate will change over time, as technology advances, and the voice that defends print books will get more and more shrill in the face of the “embrace the future”-ists whose side is very clearly winning the battle.

This is not to say that I think that print books will cease to exist –only that the debate will become unwinnable for people who defend print books to the exclusion of ebooks and other electronic media. I think the writing was on the liquid ink screen a few years ago when liquid ink screens hit the market, and “printies” could no longer cite the eye strain that comes from looking at a computer monitor for hours at a time as the smoking gun argument as to why books would always be superior. I think a lot of printies haven’t seen a liquid ink screen up-close before, because it is difficult to acknowledge that they don’t look great – especially compared to your average mass-market paperback.

The main thrust behind ebooks is that they make large amounts of information portable on a small device. This device will continue to develop to the point that a Kindle takes on the comical proportions of a 1980’s cell phone when viewed from a similar future vantage point, but that core drive will never change. As portability and access to incomprehensible amounts of data entrench themselves as the inalienable rights of contemporary culture, it makes less and less sense to decry the rise of ebooks or to adorn them with accusations that they are killing off print books, putting bookstores out of business, and so on.

I hear the position often stated that books are the key gateway to our culture, near-sacred objects that preserve our history and document our existence for future generations. To me, this misses the point – the books merely carry that data. And it’s all data. Now, the emotional engagement with that data in itself is a key aspect of our culture as well. It’s necessary to split the two apart, because it isolates the materiality of the book itself from what the book contains. Not one of the printies’ emotional screeds that I’ve read defends an empty book – every time, the books are the keys to passing on what they contain from generation to generation, but there’s never a reason why this can’t be done electronically, especially when electronically transmitting information becomes the standard method to do exactly this in every other aspect of society.

What do you get from a Kindle when it is turned off? It is a functionless machine whose existence does not justify itself until it is displaying text on the screen. A closed book is more than that – the materiality of the book has the ability to communicate more than just that there is content inside. This is a tenuous distinction, but the cultural history of books (their “place in our culture” trumpeted by the printies) makes it a necessary one – the Kindle has come along as part of a cultural movement based on the potential to do different things with data, more advanced things than anything humanity has conceived of before. When you receive a Kindle in a box, you are receiving the potential to homogenize incredible amounts of print in a single device.

On the other hand, a book will always be tied to the specific data that is contained within. This unbreakable marriage between the exterior device and the interior content creates the emotional attachment to books-as-objects. The specific book becomes the signifier of one text – a favorite story, perhaps – whereas the Kindle is the signifier of all texts. So, can an electronic device that promises totality ever compete on an emotional level with the multitude of cherished specificities contained on a bookshelf?

Probably not, but I am realistic enough to know that emotional reservations are never strong enough en masse to trump the march of technological innovation. Instead of throwing up my hands and running to the printy camp, however, I have come up with my own personal four-word manifesto that sums up how I feel print books can eke out a foothold in a world that is drifting inexorably toward a land of ebooks: make print justify itself. Because it needs to, and quite often, it doesn’t.

The end of the printed wor(l)d isn’t at hand right now. Printies are citing laundry lists of bookstore closures, but pinning this on ebooks is tough. Look at the state of the book industry, the drop-in-the-bucket sales of ebooks versus print books, and the fact that most people don’t spend $250 on books in an entire year, meaning that they aren’t very likely to buy a device for that much that enables them to do something they can do for free by visiting a library, for ten dollars by visiting a Borders & Noble. Instead, I’d look to look at the business decisions of some of the closed bookstores, to see how they managed inventory, engaged with the community, and promoted themselves – since yes, a lot of bookstores are closing, but so are a lot of other businesses, and moreover, a good number of bookstores are thriving as well.

So really, what are printies doing to save the printed word, other than coughing up sky-is-falling scenarios and putting the guilt on anyone who owns a Kindle for the downfall of our shared cultural history? We – lovers of print books (and if this essay suggests I’m not one, the fact that I co-run a small press should be sufficient evidence to the contrary) – need to change the way books are printed and how they are perceived. The corollary to the all-data-in-existence-on-a-thumb-drive world we now live in is the resistant upsurge in crafting and handwork that is visible everywhere. People are turning forgotten hobbies into semi-commercial enterprises selling needlepoint felted animals on Etsy that are even more popular than – gasp – Sony’s robot dog! Letterpress printing is making a huge comeback, with book arts workshops springing up all over the country. And idiots like me are leaving their deskjobs at 5:00 PM to go home and work on small press publishing. The resistance is active and needs to be fed, but it isn’t going to eat garbage.

One printy I read recently talked about the legitimization of his written work manifesting itself in the pile of books he had published – a satisfying material signifier that couldn’t exist in electronic form. I completely understand this, but I think the dark side of book publishing needs to be factored into this too… the remaindered copies on sale for a few bucks, or the creased, worn copies that people didn’t want any more sitting in the dollar bin on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore because the store already had so many that they wouldn’t give it a proper space on the shelf. Books get exalted in the fearmongering that goes on when people start to feel that books as a whole might not exist anymore. But maybe it’s time to admit that not all books are all so great, and that some of them are downright useless as material objects and are only a way to transport some data from one place to another.

I don’t own an e-reader, but I’m certainly not against it, because I see their value. I don’t love every book on my shelf, and I wouldn’t mind if some of them existed on a flash drive instead. If publishers weren’t so difficult to steer, if they could actually recognize new technology as an opportunity rather than a threat, then the publishing business wouldn’t be weaving stories about its own demise at the hands of these awful, awful ebooks. One of the more common bugaboos is the $9.99 maximum retail price for an ebook – a publisher will naturally make less money if $9.99 is the retail ceiling for a hot new book, versus $25.00 for a hardcover. But who does this really hurt? Amazon is going to sell the hardcover for $13.00 anyway, because they have the publisher by the balls and are enforcing a ridiculously low price. Add in the cost of producing the hardcover, warehousing pallets of them, and shipping them, and selling the hardcover through Amazon becomes a loss-leader, with the real profits to be made from a) selling the ebook, which has almost no production costs beyond initial formatting, and b) selling the book at standard wholesale to bookstores, who then have to try to find a way to sell it for full retail when it’s going for half that on the web.

The death of the independent bookstore, then, is not going to come at the hands of the ebook, but at the hands of predatory pricing that has been driving all sorts of independent businesses into the ground for decades now. So how to cope with this and survive as a bookstore that deals exclusively in print books? Make print justify itself. Stock the shelves with books that have to be seen to be appreciated. If a customer’s attitude about a book is, “I don’t care what it looks like, I only care what’s insde,” then print isn’t justifying itself, and the bookstore is fighting a losing fight. But, if the book looks great, feels great, AND has great content, chances are someone is going to buy it straight away, rather than marking it down to buy later from an online retailer. (A quick case study: in the fall of 2008, a comics anthology called Kramer’s Ergot 7 came out – an unspeakably gorgeous 16” x 21” hardcover book that had to be hand bound because of its enormous size. Also enormous was its price tag – $125, although it was much cheaper on Amazon.com. This is a book that could never have the same impact as an ebook, because the size is integral to the experience of reading the comics (sized to mimic the original Sunday page comics of the early 20th century). Additionally, those that bought it from Amazon found that shipping was delayed so that they didn’t get it in time for the holidays, and when it did arrive, it was packaged poorly and thus damaged. People posted on message boards about returning their copies and buying copies for full retail from comics shops, because Amazon wasn’t doing a good job fulfilling their orders. And so, the end result is a book that makes print justify itself, while also bolstering the independent bookstore over the gigantic online retailer.)

It’s a process of separating the wheat from the chaff so that books that have no reason to be physical books eventually get converted into ebooks, and books that justify the print format become the main commodity sold in bookstores, alongside ATM-like terminals that offer the texts to people who would prefer to read it on their ereaders. Obviously this is merely my imaginary future, but anyone reading this article is free to steal my idea and set up a bookstore that sells both print books and ebooks – I promise I’ll patronize your business.

What I think it would benefit print culture to move past is the arrogant assumption that any form of print is superior to any form of electronic publishing. I have seen blogs with amazing, artistic designs that publish groundbreaking works of literature, yet for many authors, a small press that prints something on copy paper, Xeroxes it at a copy shop, and slaps some staples on it is a superior publisher to the web counterpart. And I just don’t understand why some presses dutifully churn out book after book on cheap paper, with ugly design, uneven stapled covers, etc. when the same presses could be publishing the work online in a much more attractive format. This isn’t the 1960’s, where self publishing was limited to typewriters and mimeograph machines. The idea of internet as a second-class citizen of the publishing world helps keep printies lazy by suggesting that no matter what they print out, as long as it is on paper, it is more worthy than what’s online. And with that attitude, why wouldn’t ebooks eventually put print books out to pasture?

My goal is to put out books that justify their existence as books. I don’t want to take for granted the idea that printing something is more worthwhile than just hosting content on chancepress.com. I want to sweat over every last detail of the books – even if it means we can only come out with three or four books a year – because I want the materiality of the books to live up to the cultural importance ascribed to books. Ebooks have a place and aren’t going anywhere, but they can never enable a reader’s emotional connection to the content the way a well designed print book can. And my mission as a small press publisher is to get the absolute most I possibly can out of the print medium in order to do that, in order to create something that just can’t be uploaded and converted to computer code without losing the essence of the original book.

It was unofficially sold out a few months ago, but then we rescued some copies that were on consignment at a book store… and now those, too, are sold out.  We may do a second edition of this book, because it has proven to be way more popular than we thought it would be when we printed it.  (Plus, it looks like I’m going to have some lag time in the production schedule while finishing up the text for the Larding book.)

So, if you would like to be notified when the second edition comes out, please let us know by sending an email to books (at) chancepress (dot) com.