• An illustrated account of the birth of Dan
• A flurry of artistic output from a secluded desert outpost
• What the Joshua Trees were pointing at all along
• A celebration of printing and bookmaking
• An accordion whose music is ecstatically visual

Chance Press is very excited to announce the publication of Scribbles in a Sandstorm, a collaborative project with Los Angeles-based artist Carol Es.  We have known Carol for a couple years now, although we were hesitant to approach her about working together until we were confident enough in our own abilities to do her incredible work justice.  We have been working quietly for the past few months planning the ins and outs of the project, and Carol has been furiously creating some of the most consciousness-bending art your eyes will ever see.  The result will be unlike anything you have seen from Chance Press, and it will further cement Carol Es’s status as an artist of the highest order.

Scribbles in a Sandstorm is no mere art book, with some images printed on each page and bound in snappy covers.  Here, the art is the book, which contains a removable spine, enabling the accordion-folded text block to unfold and display a 40″ color-printed panorama.  Then, on the flipside, is your instant Carol Es art collection, where tipped-in you’ll find a Gocco print, a letterpress print, and a giclee print on watercolor paper, as well as a bound-in excerpt from Carol’s sketchbook, and a signed original sketch.  No expense is being spared in the construction of the book, which features boutique paper-backed bookcloth, papers from Moab, Canson, Arches, and Rives, and printing using archival Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks.  Because of the time and expense involved in producing each copy, the edition will be strictly limited to 30 copies, of which six deluxe copies will also include a folder containing signed copies of each print, suitable for framing.

This is a new venture for Chance Press – not every book we publish from now on will be this elaborate, but we are very excited to enter the rarefied realm of “artist books” that will complement our other small press offerings.  To support this project, we are hoping to pre-sell ten copies of the book to collectors who believe in what we’re doing and want to ensure the lowest possible edition number.  As a special bonus, anyone who pre-orders a copy will receive one of ten prints of an image titled “The Birth of Dan” from Carol’s sketchbook on Moab Entrada Rag paper, housed in a custom-made cloth-covered folder.  These prints will not be available once the book is released – the ONLY way to get one is to preorder a copy.

Preorder pricing for the deluxe edition of six copies is $250, and the slightly-less-deluxe edition is $150.  (If we end up charging more for the book when it is released, you will still receive the book at the price you paid.)  We are only accepting ten preorders, and otherwise, the book will be available for purchase when it is released, which we anticipate will be around January or February 2011.  You can preorder either edition, or both editions, if you are so inclined and would like to receive two prints.

You can send money via PayPal to books (at) chancepress (dot) com; questions about this book can be directed to this email as well.

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.

We all know that I’m no format elitist, having argued for the coexistence of e-books and print books, and being a collector of comics as well as fine press publications.  However, something about Eightball #23, also known as The Death Ray, also known as the greatest single-issue comic of all time, just begs for a deluxe edition.  One has been in the works (supposedly) for a long time, and I’ve seen pre-publication photos of a French version in the traditional European “album” format, but I wanted to give this comic the treatment it deserved, so I went about making a deluxe portfolio to house it.  I only made two copies – one for me and one to give to the author at his book signing tonight – and they were pretty labor-intensive.

First, a friend scanned the front and back covers, and I printed out a cover pastedown as well as an interior colophon page (cover pastedown is Canson Infinity Arches Aquarelle; interior is Moab Entrada Rag Bright) using the Epson printer (Chance Press’s ace in the hole).  The bookcloth is Italian-made Canapetta, which I love for it’s texture and weight (this is the same cloth we used on the CPR hardcovers – I just wish it came in more colors).  The interior pastedowns are Fabriano Murillo, and the spine is Fabrian Tiziano and Canford card taped together (the triangle is also Tiziano).  This is a big portfolio – 13″ x 9.75″ – and it was a good learning experience working with something this large.  There are considerations I hadn’t thought of (like how to weight the books or how to bray the glued parts down to the bookboard effectively) that didn’t come up when we were working with smaller-sized books.  Still, they came out better than I expected, and Mr. Clowes was very appreciative of his copy, if not maybe a little confused as to why someone would go to the effort to make something like this.

Unfortunately, we can’t make any more of these to sell, because they reproduce Clowes’s art without authorization.  When we do our self-indulgent Chance Press Bibliography in a few years, it will be fun to separate it into stuff we made for people to buy and stuff we made only a couple copies of for fun but still attributed to Chance Press.  That way, completists (I know a few of you are reading this and getting pissed that we keep making stuff you can’t buy) will be able to track down all the available releases, while everyone else can see examples of what Justine and I come up with just for fun, to amuse each other.  (And really, on a sappy note, there has to be a part of Chance Press that stays with us, because CP is one of the things that brought us together and is growing along with our relationship.  So while we love binding and releasing books, there’s also this part of CP that we don’t want to release into the world, because we want it to be ours.  So while it will be impossible for someone to collect all of the one off’s, the different-colored bindings for presentation and author copies, and the like – at least while we’re alive – it’s part of what makes CP what it is.)

And at least we show pictures, instead of keeping all this good stuff a secret!

Front cover

Interior

Close-up of interior pastedown

In other exciting news, work has started on both the Paul Hornschemeier book and the Carol Es book.  I put a mockup in the mail today for Paul, who is working on the artwork right now.  We’re going to start prework while he does that, and then we can get to printing and binding in August/September.  We had originally scheduled to start production on Carol’s book *after* Paul’s is officially released at the Alternative Press Expo in October, but it turns out that Carol has a solo show at a highfalutin’ gallery in LA in late October and she requested that some copies of her book be done by then.  So, we’re pushing into overdrive and trying to get both of them done by then (although the true release date for Carol’s book probably won’t be until 2011, with only a handful of pre-release copies making it to the gallery opening).

Thanks for your patience, those that are waiting for the Larding book – below are some pictures for you to enjoy.

Close-up of the Publisher's Copy

Pile of deluxe editions - the results of this week's work

First picture of the Trade Edition

This edition is unbound - the signatures are tucked into a pocket, with a wraparound band on the outside

Mockup of Paul H's book - the deluxe edition will consist of the trade edition in a portfolio with a fold out poster

Close-up view of the "M" binding for the Paul H book

Spy shot of some color tests for Carol Es's book. Can't reveal much at this juncture!

Flying back to Oakland from Chicago last week, I was trying to sketch out the cover print for the book, despite the turbulence forcing my hand around the page against my will.  I have felt – especially after the covers of the CPR books we just finished – that my ability to arrange letters in attractive ways is limited to parallel lines and 90 degree angles.  I feel like I’m decent at designing books, but I’ve NEVER considered myself any type of visual artist, so the task of designing covers in the first place is one I do out of necessity, not because I think I’m so awesome at it that someone else couldn’t do a better job.  Still, like amateur photography or bowling, it’s something I like doing, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about letter forms and how different ones complement each other on the page.  But, when I look at the greats of the medium – especially my hero Massin – I realize that my designs are all boxy, like I laid down a grid and made every element on the page rigidly adhere to it.  I tasked myself with at least placing text diagonally or something at least to disrupt the rigid symmetry of what I would normally do.

So here’s what I’ll be using to print the covers of the books:

a

a

a

a

a

I’m pretty happy with it (happy enough to use it, at least) – it’s fairly asymmetrical, and I took the bold (for me) step of embellishing the end of the “e” to illustrate the idea of “pulling at the line.”  (Also, I added the horizontal bars at the top and bottom of the “I” – I love this font (Turnpike), although I wanted each letter in “tirez” to be an equal width, and the “I” is just a vertical column.)  The major problem with the design is that it’s wide and not very tall, and I had originally designed the books around a 2.5″ x 2.5″ cover print.  I didn’t want to go back to my original sketches for a square design, so I decided to work the new size into the design of the book.  For the trade edition (the problem of which I’ll get to in a minute), this made sense – I will just print the design directly on the wrap-around band, instead of on the book itself.  Easy enough.  But for the deluxe edition, it is a priority for the cover to have a pastedown to break up the monotony of the bookcloth.  My original plan was to put the square cover print in the upper left-hand corner and the wrap-around band along the bottom, which would have looked pretty neat.  However, there was really no orientation for the new, wider pastedown that looked good (center, top, bottom… I came close to going with just-above-center, but it just didn’t work).  What did work was to turn the print 90 degrees and align it toward the left side of the book.  Not only can I size up the artwork a little bit (since the book is taller than it is wide, leaving the artwork more room to spread out), but the print will look good turned on its side, and the pastedown looks great on the left side of the cover this way.  The problem now, of course, is that the band will cover part of the print, and there’s no way for that not to look bad.  My first instinct was just to ditch the band, but because of the accordion binding, the book really needs something to hold it together.

Here is the solution I came up with:

a

a

a

a

a

a

A thick mylar window strategically placed in the band, right over the pastedown.  Now, the band can go around the center of the book, which looks better anyway, and the window is pretty badass.  I was just going to use .005 acetate, the same stuff Black Sparrow Press used to use as dustjackets for their hardcover releases, but I found this really thick stuff at an art supply store (it’s almost like plastic sheeting), and it fit the bill absolutely perfectly.  Problem solved.

A while back, Justine and I had to decide if we were even going to do a trade edition for this book.  Due mostly to laziness, we cut the deluxe edition from 30 copies to 18, which isn’t quite enough, so we made the choice to produce a trade edition as well.  At first, I planned just to do a normal pamphlet binding, but after typesetting the book, I’m totally sold on the idea of 5 individual page spreads, and I don’t like how they look printed double-sided and bound as a pamphlet (in the deluxe edition, each one is folded in half and sewn individually into the accordion spine).  Problem was, neither of us could think of a good way to deliver unbound page spreads without making the product too complicated to be an inexpensive trade edition.  Luckily, Justine came up with the idea of folding each spread and tucking them into a triangular pocket at the bottom right corner of the inside, and then tying the package together with a wrap-around band.  It took me a few tries to come up with a good size and configuration for the triangle (giving it a gusset so that it can hold the pages).  Problem solved.

Now you have way more information than you ever even thought you needed about how we go about designing our books.  Pretty gripping stuff, eh?  At this point, I’m just looking forward to releasing this book so we can move onto Paul Hornschemeier’s book and a whole new set of design problems to solve.

I followed the above steps, and now I’m the proud publisher (along with Justine, of course) of a book by the great cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier (learn more about him at his website).  Paul is well-established in the alternative comics scene, having published multiple books with the top publishers in the game, including AdHouse Books, Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, and Villard.  He has two major books forthcoming this year, and he is widely published in anthologies (including Mome, generally regarded as the best alternative comics periodical to come along in many years), as well as being a sought-after illustrator and graphic designer.  His work is characterized by obsessive attention to form and detail, humanized by multi-layered emotional storylines – in short, the very embodiment of what great comics can accomplish.

To be working with an artist like Paul is a feather in our young cap here at Chance Press, and it is a daunting task as well.  As a noted graphic artist who designs all of his publications from front to back, Paul is on the same level as the greats in the industry (Chip Kidd, Chris Ware, Jacob Covey, Jordan Crane, etc.), which makes it imperative that we put everything we have into any book of his that we publish.  Luckily, we have a few tricks up our sleeve, and it will be very exciting to see how it all plays out.

What about the book itself?  Paul is relaunching his comics series Forlorn Funnies this fall via a hardcover release from Fantagraphics, and Chance Press will be publishing the companion piece to this book: plans, sketches, notes, etc.  The behind-the-scenes nature of the book complements the look of our handmade books really well; Fantagraphics will publishe the full-color, polished and finished-looking product, while ours will be a little rougher looking, with hand-cut paper, exposed thread binding, and other touches that people have come to expect from us.  This will be an ambitious project, with a higher page count than anything since A Common Thread, a fairly complex convertible “M” binding (more on this in future blog posts), and a large print run of at least 100 trade copies.

Release of this book should coincide with the Alternative Press Expo in October, where we will be exhibiting for the first time.

***

We’ve known Los Angeles artist Carol Es for a couple years, even having the good fortune to spend some time drinking with her and her pet gorilla MJP last year.  Both Justine and I thought it would be great to work with her on a book project, although we assumed that she – who has created mind-bending artist books that sell for over $1000 a pop – would have no interest in working with such neophytes (though she’d likely be too nice to say so).  Well, I finally got up the nerve to suggest project to her, and she surprised both Justine and I by accepting the job and even adding that she thought we’d never ask.  Some sappy “you’re-so-great-no-you’re-so-great” emails followed, and then we got down to planning the book, which promises to be a doozy.

Like Mr. Hornschemeier, Carol is a huge get for us – she has exhibited artwork all over the country, received numerous grants and fellowships, and her work resides in the permanent collections of multiple esteemed museums and special collections libraries including those of LACMA and UCLA.  Her art is full of wide-eyed power, combining the gritty, urban aesthetic of Los Angeles, playful yet haunting cartooning, and mixed media elements to create a startlingly authentic experience of what is swirling around in the artist’s own head.  As I mentioned earlier, to be working with an artist of this caliber so soon into our tenure as small press publishers is a little frightening, like we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.  Still, I wouldn’t have suggested the project if I didn’t think we could pull it off; we’re just going to have to push ourselves to do Carol’s work justice.

Not much about the book has been finalized at this point, although we will be using the same removable-spine accordion binding used by Two Fine Chaps on their fine publication of The Chase.  The book will be published in a deluxe edition only, although a small zine/sketchbook may end up being published separately.  The goal here is to produce a book that bridges the gap between a zine and an artist book and to offer something to the art/book collector who wants a very limited edition handmade book and who might spend $150, but who just can’t afford $1000.

We will be working on Carol’s book this winter, and it will likely be released in the early part of 2011.  Who’s excited?

But, even after finding a great deal on a used Epson R2400, I still had the little problem of this being a collaborative process, and I was still looking for a reliable collaborator.  I had already worked with a couple people (and made pretty good progress with one), but waiting two to three weeks between emails was starting to delay the project beyond what I could tolerate.  So, to kill time until I could figure out what was going on with Larding, Justine and I pushed the CPR books forward and dedicated all of our resources toward getting those released.

And now it’s April (give or take a couple days), and Larding needs to shit or get off the pot.  I’ve done too much work on the project to let it die, and so I asked the question that I’m sure many have asked at various points in history: “Why the hell haven’t I asked Steve Hines to collaborate with me on this?”  In fact, the people I originally contacted were new, barely-published writers, and I wanted to see what they had to offer.  Having just published Steve a few months ago, I thought it would be a good idea to diversify the authors we work with, rather than going back to the same well too soon.  Well, that all makes good sense, except for the fact that Hines can write circles around just about everybody, and the more we can put his work out there the better, as far as I’m concerned.  So there you go: Larding, Hurder + Hines, May 2010, deluxe edition limited to 18 copies, the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken to date.  (The only project even close in terms of complexity is the other Hines book that Justine slaved over.)

Chance Press isn’t going to turn into the Steve Hines channel, but for this project, it just makes too much sense not to do it.  And the writing we’ve done together just kicks ass – it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done, getting pushed to up my game by the stuff that Steve has emailed to me.  Seriously, I wasn’t even getting that much enjoyment out of the back-and-forth process until we started working on this iteration of it, and in about three weeks, we have two full stories to publish.  So, cue this project getting pushed into high-gear, and stay tuned to this blog for updates as the process closes in on its release later this month.

Trade Edition

Bookplates (waiting to be signed)

Hardcover Deluxe Edition

Hardcover Deluxe Edition (detail)

Click image for more pictures

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.