Why not order a book just to test it out?

While most of our tools are your garden variety craft tools (X-acto knife, bone folder, needle/thread, beeswax lump, pliers, glue brush, etc.), we have amassed some neat tools that this blog post will introduce to the world.  My favorite tools get imaginative names, which I will list here:
-Slicey
-Roundy
-Squeezy
-Printy
and
-Stabby

Slicey is the first tool we owned – a Martin Yale 7000e paper cutter that was a wedding gift from my parents.  It makes trimming the edges of books a breeze, and it can cut through a ream of paper like a hot knife through vegan butter substitute.  The reason the Oulipo book uses illustration board instead of bookboard is that I didn’t want to ruin Slicey’s blade by cutting bookboard, which has bits of abrasive crap insde.  Illustration board (as long as it is acid-free) is okay for thin boards (like the ones I’m using on this book), and it is constructed like thick card stock, making it more blade-friendly.

Roundy is a new tool – a heavy-duty corner rounding press.  For our previous books with rounded corners (the special edition of the Serafini book and the McSweeney’s book), we used a small corner rounding punch, which was a real pain, and very difficult to get even as well.  This has been on our radar for a while, so we’re happy to finally get it in stock.  Now, if you order a book from us that doesn’t have rounded corners, Roundy will provide a snazzy upgrade over the production model for only $15!  (Enough suckers and Roundy will pay for itself!)

Squeezy is another new tool, a book press handmade by me.  While I could have accomplished the same thing with two pieces of wood and some clamps, I wanted a self-contained unit that would be easier to operate and store.  So, I bought two pieces of wood, sanded them down, and covered the inside surface of each piece with spare book cloth (so the wood surface doesn’t mar the book being squeezed), drilled four holes, and glued in four gigantic bolts.  Extra touches include recessed washers (so the nuts don’t dig into the wood over time (TMI)), and a handy handle, which I added because the already-made one that Talas sells has a handle.

Printy is our Gocco printer, which isn’t even ours.  I borrowed it from a coworker and am scared she’s going to need it back, since they aren’t very easy to find in the US anymore.

Finally, Stabby is my triangular straightedge that I bought from an art supply store.  They gave it to me for less than half price, because it had been there for years.  It works when I need a straightedge, and best of all, the point is so sharp that it could stab someone in the brain.  You’ve seen pictures of it in the post about covering boards with bookcloth.  It’s pretty intimidating.

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Tools required:
-X-acto or similar knife
-PVA glue, plus a mixing container
-Straight edge
-Heavy book

1. Cut bookcloth to size – each piece should be 1″ bigger than the board on all sides.

2. Cut the corners off at a 45-degree angle, 1″ on each side.

3. Cut 7/8″ in from each edge of the cut corner.

4. Mix PVA glue and water in a container so the glue is thin enough to spread easily, but not so thin that it runs or drips off the board.  Coat one side of the board in the glue mixture, making sure that the board is entirely covered (including the edges and corners).

5. Place the glued side down in the center of the bookcloth, and put a dot of pure PVA glue on each corner.

6. Fold the triangles you cut into the bookcloth over the board and hold them for 10-20 seconds until they bond.

7. Put a thin strip of glue around the edge of the board (including over the triangles).

8. Fold the edges of the bookcloth over the board one by one – hold them in place until the glue forms a temporary bond.

9. Place a heavy book over the board and put pressure on it for a minute or two.

10. Use a scissors to cut the loose corners, and place the board under weight overnight.

The finished product then looks something like this:

So – there you have it.  If you’re an amateur bookbinder, now you know how to cover an individual board in cloth.  If you’re a devoted Chance Press follower, now you know what the boards on our next project will look like (don’t you think it’s about time you emailed us to request a copy, regardless of how expensive it will be?).  And finally, if you’re a more accomplished bookbinder, now you know how far superior your well-guarded methods are compared to how we do it over in Oakland.

The cloth should be here in about a week, and then we can get to work covering the boards, which will be the last of the pre-work that we can do before we have to start working on the text.

Bookcloth samples (from swatch books)

I was feeling “industrious” (Justine’s word) last night, so I decided to tweak a blog post about McSweeney’s that I wrote a couple years ago and print it out to make a little chapbook to give Eggers as a thank-you for his numerous signings, and as a tribute/fan letter to McSweeney’s.  I thought I would do it as simply as possible, but I got swept up in the project, hence the cover pastedown, rounded corners, vellum endpapers, etc.

This book is not for sale, and only five copies were produced.  The cover is linen cardstock, and the interior is printed on some leftover textured paper we had from the Steve Hines book.  Each one is hand sewn, and the corners were rounded page-by-page with a little rounding punch, since we still haven’t gotten around to buying a real corner rounding press.

Because we love getting emails, you can email us if you are interested in the book.  We haven’t decided what to do with the remaining three copies, but if giving them away turns from a possibility into a definite course of action, it certainly won’t hurt your chances of getting one to send us a friendly hello.

McSweeney's logo on vellum endpapers (extreme close-up)

Colophon page (copy five of five)

Why the funny title?  “Larding” is the name of a style of experimental writing that was developed by the Oulipo, the mostly-French workshop of “Potential Literature.”  The goal of the Oulipo is to use various constraints to focus and augment the creative process, rather than letting the creative mind run free (think of the absolute opposite of stream-of-consciousness writing).  Constraints can range from the lipogrammatic (writing a text without a certain letter or phrase, such as the letter “e”) to the mathematical (constructing the relationships between characters in a story based on a geometric shape or algebraic equation).

“Larding” is the process of beginning with two sentences, and then inserting a sentence in between the original two, and repeating this process as long as you have the patience.  If you start with two sentences, after one step you’ll have three sentences, then five, then nine, then seventeen, and so on.  The idea to publish an experiment like this came from a type of book design I saw and thought would be perfect for larding.  It’s not quite the cart leading the horse, since we consider ourselves book designers as much as publishers, but I hadn’t even thought of doing this project until I saw another publisher use this particular design and realized that the two go together perfectly.

Now, we both know that, sales-wise, this project could fall flat on its face.  Our main customer base (the generous book lovers at Bukowski.net) even started a forum thread making fun of Oulipo as self-indulgent and boring (not in response to this project, of course), so there’s a pretty good chance that copies won’t exactly be flying into their hands.  Still, the whole point of this enterprise in the first place is to branch out from the small press staple of poetry and publish writing that we are both passionate about.  (Not, of course, to disparage publishers who focus primarily on poetry, as I assume that those publishers are simply publishing what *they* love… but as a publisher starting out, it is really easy to fall into a groove, especially with the amount of poets who are looking to have their work published in the small press.)  Me, I have been an ardent fan of Oulipo for over a decade, so this book is really something that I’m looking forward to putting out.

It will be by far the most labor-intensive project I’ve undertaken so far (the Hines book was also very labor intensive, but Justine did most of the work on that one) – each will have an accordion-folded spine with five individually sewn signatures, cloth-covered boards on the front and rear covers, french flaps with pastedowns inside, and gocco-printed cover labels.  I’ve been working on the pre-work for this edition while collaborating on the text with two very talented writers (to be announced later), so that by the time the text is done, we “merely” have to sew the signatures into the edition and it will be finished.  Still, we don’t expect to be ready with it before April, and only then if it doesn’t end up being More Work Than We Expected.

Here is a teaser shot:

So, if you own a 2nd edition copy, you now know why your copy may not look like your neighbor’s copy.

I’m sure we could squeeze out 20 more of these and satisfy demand for the next few years, but the simple truth is that these books take a really long time to make, are way underpriced for the amount of labor we have to put into them, and pull us away from other projects.  When I start working on a book (I don’t want to speak for my lovely co-publisher), I get tunnel vision and want to focus only on seeing that project through to completion… to the point where I was getting annoyed with having to switch gears to “finish” copies of A Common Thread (pasting in endpapers, trimming, pasting down cover plates, etc.) in order to fill orders.  And really, nothing we do should be annoying or tedious… there are process involved in publishing that can’t be described any other way, but the excitement of coming out with a brand new book offsets that tedium, and that excitement just isn’t there anymore with a book that is, as Fergie would say, “so two thousand late.”

The sagely Bill of Bottle of Smoke Press once described his reason for never publishing second editions similarly (although much less long-windedly), and it basically boils down to the fact that we can either take up our resources making more copies of books we already published or we can direct our energy to new projects.  And honestly, I’m as excited about our next project as I have been about anything we’ve done so far.  I’ll post a teaser about it in a few more days.

Part of the goal here is to bring some treatment to the subject of running a small press (as well as a fledging business), since I think a few (and I literally mean three) people might find that subject interesting.  It’s Web 2.0!  If you start a business, you absolutely *must* start a blog about your business as well, or you are guaranteed failure.  And, after proving myself for the past 4 or 5 years as a masterful internet bore on my previous blogs, I am excited to turn away potential customers by blathering on incessantly.

But, with any luck, Justine will post too, and that will be a nice change of pace for everyone.  Enjoy the new format, and also note that – since we’ve converted news updates to blog form – you can add our blog to your preferred RSS reader.  Yay technology!