Buenaventura Press just officially announced their closure over here a couple days ago, although the writing seemed to be on the wall when they stopped updating their site (as of 11/09) and pulled down their webshop. I had the privilege of meeting Alvin Buenaventura a couple times at signings and once when he graciously gave me a tour of his shop, and it’s really a shame that his ship couldn’t stay afloat. Apparently there was a single legal issue that brought everything crashing down, which is even more frustrating, when you think of all the hard work that has to be put in to build a business from the ground up, only to see everything erased in one fell swoop.
In my opinion, Buenaventura did everything that a small press can do right, and as we venture out on our foray into publishing comics with our Paul Hornschemeier project, we would do well to follow their example. The difference is that we don’t have much ambition to expand beyond a micro press, so we’re not going to bang down the doors of book and comic distributors to try to get our comics into mainstream channels. One of the comments I read on Buenaventura’s demise argued that the economics of publishing has changed such that low quality is the only way a publisher can succeed, and this pretty much flies in the face of everything we’re trying to accomplish. While it may be true that some of the high-price gambits by Buenaventura (chiefly, the $125.00 Kramers Ergot 7) and Picture Box ($100.00 Gary Panter art book) may not have panned out, it’s really depressing to imagine that this means that publishers have to sacrifice quality in today’s economy to stay afloat.
The problem when you try to take high-priced books into the main bookstore channels, you get stuck in a nether region in terms of the edition size – you need to have the books printed and bound overseas because domestic binders either can’t handle your design (like the 16″ x 21″ Kramers 7), or their per-piece size prices you out of the market. So do you have 500 pieces made and hope you can sell each one for $400? Or do you accept the minimum order required by an overseas binder and order 3500 pieces that you can sell for $125, risking the fact that you might have to sit on thousands of giant books that don’t sell? I don’t know the sales figures of Kramers Ergot 7, but I bet if the edition were 1000 or 1500, it would have sold out – the problem in the current marketplace is that you can’t have a book like that made with that edition size at a price that people can afford (and this is assuming $125 is “a price everyone can afford,” a fact driven home by more than a few people).
So what does that mean for Chance Press? Our goal is to channel the formal daring of presses like Buenaventura and Picturebox in a business model in which we can have total control over production. If we make everything ourselves (or at least bind every book ourselves), we have control over the cost, the edition size, the quality, and so on. Apart from outsourcing printing from our laser printer to a commercial printer, I can’t imagine us letting go of too much of our production, save of course for letterpress services by our great friend Bill Roberts or similarly talented friends of ours. But the point is that our edition sizes are capped by what we ourselves can do, which in turn determines our business plan. So, for us, the 100 or so copies of Paul H’s book that we’re making is our largest print run ever; however, Paul describes it on his blog as a very limited edition.
Which isn’t to say that no one will ever see our books. While we’re not really interested at this point in the retail channel, we will be exhibiting at conventions and other shows to try to get our work into people’s hands. So I guess what I’m hoping in the wake of Buenaventura folding is that other small presses can fill the void and make really daring books that the major publishers can’t quite support. (There are exceptions, of course – Fantagraphics just published a ridiculously complex and well-designed Gahan Wilson collection.) They won’t be replaced, because it’s really a rare mix to have a shop that prints on a manual Vandercook press while also pumping out all ranges of books, from $4 comic pamphlets to deluxe, oversized hardcover books. But there is a lot of opportunity on the convention scene for small presses to start taking some calculated risks on a small scale, do some hand-binding, hand-printing, find some undiscovered artists, and play off each others’ successes.
Not that Alvin Buenaventura gives a hoot what I think, but I’m still not shy about broadcasting how much he has influenced us going forward. Moving into comics is kind of intimidating to me, because a lot of the people publishing comics are extreme connoisseurs of the medium, and personally, I don’t know much, especially about the history of comics. Someone like Dan Nadel from Picturebox knows more about comics than I will ever come close to… and then I look at the rest of the Comics Comics crew, with dudes like Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, and so on – genius comics creators who live and breathe this stuff. So who am I to throw my hat in the ring and publish this stuff? Just a fan, really, but I know what I like, and if I’m lucky enough to get people I like to sign on with us for small, handmade editions, then so much the better. We’ll never be Buenaventura, Picturebox, AdHouse, Desert Island, or any of the other really good small comics publishers, but if we can assemble good people and put out awesome books, at least I can feel like I’m giving a little back to the medium that I love and carrying on Buenaventura’s tradition just a little bit.