Chance Press

FINALLY available!

Well, it’s been a long time in the making, but we finally announced these books for sale to our mailing list early December and so far have received an amazing response.

The Deluxe Edition is still A Thing That I Am Thinking Really Hard About, but I was really inspired by some things I saw at the Codex Fair in Berkeley today, so expect something (fingers crossed) in the next few months. I’ve had too many ideas and can’t seem to settle on one, so maybe I’ll make 26 different ones?!? Deluxe editions get really, REALLY tedious after making the first one or two – the excitement and thrill at this complex and detailed book art object wears off after you’ve spent enough hours squinting over it and screwing up a bunch of stuff and having to redo a bunch of things; maybe spicing it up with 26 different versions will keep the love alive.

Okay, so here’s the details about the trade edition:

1. This is a FIRST, TRADE edition; this means it is the basic version of the book and it is also the first printing.
2. It is 200 copies  total.
3. The first 50 copies are hand-numbered, feature hand-made red-and-gold fancy endpapers (very pretty, just like Joan), and are signed by Joan herself.
4. The rest of the edition is hand-numbered, and features plain vellum endpapers.
5. ALL copies have a two-colour screen-printed cover (a custom-mixed dark-red print of the infamous Whisky A Go Go bar in L.A. and the title/author in gold) on red linen cover stock.
6. ALL copies (the text, that is) were professionally printed by Keness (a great guy – he’s based in San Francisco, so look him up if you want some nice printing done), on Howard Linen Text in Natural White.
7. ALL copies are hand-sewn with Irish linen thread in red.
8. This is a collection of seven poems by Joan, all centered around the life of a go-go dancer.

We ventured out into the world of professional printing for this book because I absolutely had my heart set on using the Howard Linen paper, but our home printer refused to fuse (do you see what I did there) and so we had to find someone who could do it for us. Jordan met Ken Lloyd at APE 2010 and told him about our project. He quoted us a great price, and really did a fantastic (and super quick) job on this for us. Thanks Ken!

In fact, the whole professional-printing thing was made so easy that we’re considering doing future books this way, especially as our runs get bigger. But don’t worry: this does in no way signal any other kinds of professional outsourcing (unless you count the letterpress work Bill over at Bottle of Smoke Press does for us).

Ordering:

Trade Edition (150 copies): $6.00
Signed Trade Edition (50 copies): $9.00

To order, please visit our online store.

Pictures

Scribbles in a Sandstorm is the book we wanted to publish when we started Chance Press – a no-expense-spared project that showcases the work of a major artistic talent, bound in a way that plays with the reader’s preconceptions of what a book should be. Of course, the artistic talent we had in mind all along was Los Angeles-based artist Carol Es, who accepted our offer and then retreated into the desert of Joshua Tree National Park to create a brand new body of work specifically for this edition. Carol works in multiple  mediums, and the resulting book contains reproductions of oil paintings, watercolors, ink drawings, and sketches.

Ordering:

The first edition is limited to 20 copies for sale plus one publisher’s copy and four artist’s copies.

Standard edition (16 copies): $150
Deluxe edition (4 copies): SOLD OUT

To order, please visit our online store.

Edition Details:

Scribbles in a Sandstorm is a 7″ x 7″ hardcover, hand-bound Artists’ book containing a removable spine, enabling the accordion-folded text block to unfold and display a 40″ color-printed panorama. On the flipside: an instant Carol Es art collection including a Gocco print, a letterpress print, and a giclee print on watercolor paper, as well as a bound-in excerpt from Carol’s sketchbook. The book also includes an original signed sketch. Among the deluxe materials used in the construction of the book are boutique bookcloth, papers from Moab, Canson, Arches, Hahnemuhle, and Rives, and printing using archival Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks.

Pictures:

More photos are available here.

We did what amounts to a ’soft’ release of our three newest books around 6 weeks ago, making the trade editions available to our repeat customers and sending out an email blast… but still no information on the site! Mostly, that’s because we’re lazy, and updating the website is often the last thing that we want to do, and so we put it off and hope no one notices. But this time, there’s a little more to it – we’re also working on a new online store hosted by BigCartel that will handle online transactions a far sight better than our crappy “Buy Books” page that we’ve used for the last year or so. We like BigCartel because they don’t require you to register in order to place an order, which makes them much more customer-friendly than sites like Etsy or Artfire. So, we’re working on that as well as creating pages on this site for each of the new books, and as with everything we do, it’s taking a while.

As far as what we’ve been working on, most of January was spent on the special and deluxe editions of Acontextual Drawings, our recently-published book by cartoonist Abbigail McCracken. Trade editions are available now, and the deluxe editions will be available hopefully by the middle of February. I wasn’t sure at first what I wanted for the cover of the deluxe edition – we usually just do a pastedown on fancy paper, but I wanted to go for something more elaborate this time. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to do a double-layer print of a “colored in” version of one of the drawings from the book. The top layer, then, is a printout of the drawing as it appears in the book, and the bottom layer is a printout of just the colors that fill in the drawing (but no lines). Since both are printed on vellum, the colors show through the top layer, and it looks pretty neat. When the book is closed, it’s fairly dull, although the colors get more vibrant when held up to light.

The two layers side-by-side

Sandwiched between cardstock "window frames" to form the cover

Held up to light to let the colors shine through

That edition also comes with a 5 x 7 archival print, signed by the artist. I’m still waiting to get those back from Abbigail, and then this edition will be available for sale (at a very reasonable price of $20).

Now, say that $20 wasn’t enough money, and you wanted something really awesome. You’re in luck! We’re also doing a VERY limited 5-copy hardcover portfolio that includes the a copy of the deluxe edition described above AS WELL AS archival prints of all eight drawings from the book – all of which are signed by the artist. (Prints are 5.5 x 8.5 on Moab Entrada Rag Bright 300gsm paper.) The cover pastedown is printed on Canson Infinity Montval Torchon, a very unique paper with a nice eggshell texture. Boards are covered in Hahnemuhle Ingres paper and Canson Mi-Teintes, with Japanese bookcloth on the spine. Finally, cloth-covered handmade paper triangle pockets hold everything together inside the portfolio. I don’t have the prints back yet, so no photos of those, but you can see everything else in the pictures below. Price for these is $75 – and remember that there are only 5, so get in while the getting’s good!

Busy busy busy!  Numbered list of what Chance Press has been up to:

1) went to zine fair.  sold a fair number of books.  barry lutz complemented by jesse reklaw.

2) releasing three books – one poetry, one comics, one comic art.  all three are amazing.  you buy now.

3) starting new webstore with bigcartel.  will post link when ready.

4) carol es book officially released.  you buy now.

Well, the first batch of these will be ready for sale through Carol’s gallery in mere weeks.  I’m just putting the finishing touches on the ones that will be sent to the gallery, as well as trying to get one ready for Carol to keep (instead of making her wait and wait and wait for a copy to call her own… starving artist indeed!).  The following photos show the items that weren’t ready yet the last time I shot pictures.  Excuse the poor quality photos – it’s late, and there’s no natural light right now, but I just can’t wait to share!

One note on availability – if you want one of these direct from us, PLEASE get in touch with us prior to Carol’s show.  Once they go to the gallery, we won’t be able to sell any copies at the pre-order price, and we have a huge backlog of other projects that need some attention before I can come back to this book to make the rest of the copies that we’ll offer for general sale.  Also, if the copies sell well at the gallery, they have first dibs on additional copies, so there is a possibility (not too likely, but it’s there) that we won’t have ANY to sell except the ones that people claimed on pre-order.  If you want to chance it (pun intended), I’m guessing I’ll probably have the rest of the edition done sometime in February.

And – for anyone interested in the deluxe edition – we only have 3 copies available to sell at the pre-order price.  See below on what you will miss out on if you pass this baby up!

Okay, sorry for the sales pitch – on to the pictures!

"16 Dans" Letterpress Print (printed by Bill Roberts) on Arches Cover

Fold-out Artist Statement - This piece will also include an original sketch by Carol on the front

The Spine! Really the key to this binding - the spine holds everything together and then slides out to allow the book to expand like an accordion. Once I put the spine in, it finally looks like a real book.

Another view of the spine

The Deluxe edition (ONLY FOUR COPIES AVAILABLE!!!) consists of a copy of the book along with THIS - a portfolio with all of the tipped-in material from the regular book as SIGNED stand-alone prints (so you can frame 'em!). This version is expensive, so I wanted to really go all-out and spare no expense. I decided to do a spineless quarter-cloth binding and then to cover the boards with some sort of exotic paper. A chance encounter with some paper samples from Cave Paper in Minnesota led me to this EXQUISITE handmade paper, made with two different types of pulp to produce a cloudy sky effect. Needless to say, this shit wasn't cheap. But it looks amazing on the books, and no two are alike.

Another view of the deluxe portfolio

The inner pastedown has a custom-designed pattern paper based on Carol's "16 Dans" print. Paper is Arches Velin Museum Rag printed with Epson Ultrachrome K3 ink... I wasn't kidding when I said "Spare No Expense!"

Another view of the inside.

Pictured with all (well okay, most) of the goodies

As we get closer to midterm election season in the US, I thought I’d share some photos of Carol’s book, now that we’re about halfway through making it.  We still need to add a couple tipped in pieces, including a letterpress print that will be printed by Bill Roberts, and an artist statement that will also include an original sketch.    But otherwise, this is how the books will look when you get your hands on them.  And don’t forget – we’re taking preorders!

Gocco print on the left (on handmade banana leaf paper)/Inkjet (giclee) print on the right

Sketchbook bound in

Note: this post is longer than I anticipated… if you just want to see the damn pictures already, scroll down to the bottom.

With apologies to Carol Es, whose artist book I should have been working on yesterday, I have to say that this little project is pretty damn cool.  It’s in the vein of the Dan Clowes Death Ray portfolio I made a few months ago – which is to say, I tried to ingratiate myself to cartoonists whom I admire by making a handmade portfolio for their books.  Although, the difference in this case is that, unlike Dan Clowes, who is WAY too big-time for Chance Press (he’s written entire movies!), I am courting John Porcellino and Noah Van Sciver, trying to get them to publish with us.  So, I put together three copies of this project – one for me, and one for each cartoonist.

While extremely different, their work is oddly complementary.  John Porcellino is an absolute master of minimalist cartooning, whose simple, clean, and emotionally charged line drawings look even more sparse when compared to Noah Van Sciver’s wobbling yet assured self-deprecating caricatures.  Porcellino has been self-publishing his King-Cat zine since I was 8 years old (21 years ago, for reference), and while Van Sciver is newer to the scene, his ongoing series “Blammo” – now in its 6th issue -  has been gaining traction, with the latest issue even nominated for an Ignatz award.  It wouldn’t have occurred to me to seek out these two guys in tandem, but they happened to pass through the Bay Area on a West Coast tour, making a stop at the San Francisco Zine Fest, where they shared a table.  I talked to them a little bit about Chance Press and what we do, and I gave them a couple trade editions… both were receptive, but I thought it would be cool to really drive the point home and show them the kind of stuff we’re capable of doing.

The thing is, much of the zine/self-publishing aesthetic revolves around photocopies, office paper, and staples (although certainly not all of it, and I could go on and on about all the stuff I saw at the Zine Fest this weekend that was really elegantly designed), and so I don’t know how many self-publishing cartoonists are even aware of the handmade book arts, or if they are, how it really applies to their work.  They’re busy enough – since I have not a single iota of artistic talent, I’m unable to tell you first-hand how long it takes to pencil, ink, and publish a comic, but I appreciate the amount of effort involved.  And so I don’t really expect people to go to the lengths we do to publish their own work, since most self-publishers’ primary concern is getting their work out there to as many people as possible.  What I want to do, however, is merge the work that they are putting out with the hand-made, high-quality approach that we use, in hopes that it furthers people’s ideas of what kinds of work lend themselves to limited-edition, deluxe publications.

In other words: this February will be the 3rd Codex Foundation International Symposium and Book Fair.  The work exhibited at this fair is amazing, and the average price is around $500 for an item (although you can find books for over $25,000 pretty easily).  Unlike the Zine Fest, where $60 buys you a 1/2 table, getting in at the Codex fair will set you back $550 for a 1/2 table or $800 for a full table.  It draws a well-moneyed crowd, so hopefully you can get that money back selling your very expensive fine press books.  But – and I’ve written about this before – a lot of the actual work that fine presses publish just isn’t that good.  Self-indulgent wanky poetry of the Dana Gioia variety, etchings and block prints that do nothing to distinguish themselves, or even “conceptual” texts that sound good on paper but are less appealing when they’re sitting on your shelf between hand-dyed eelskin covers in an edition that set you back two months’ pay.

With the goal of showcasing the quality work that many artists self-publish in stapled booklets in a higher end package, I bought a few copies of Porcellino’s King-Cat #71 and Van Sciver’s recently published “Noah Novella” (which isn’t actually self-published, but I chose this over one of the Blammo issues, since it was the same size as KC 71), and set about pulling out the staples and then sewing them into a hardcover Z-binding.  Justine can’t stand this green color, but I love it… I wanted to use it for Carol’s book as well, although Carol apparently also can’t stand it, since she steadfastly vetoed it.  Artists, right?  No, she was right all along, which is evidenced by the fact that the ones I’ve put together using the indigo cloth we agreed upon look amazing.  But, back to the project at hand, I used all deluxe materials, because I wanted to really pull out all the stops and make a statement.  Some half-assed rebinding wouldn’t accomplish what I wanted here – my goal was to go back to the Zine Fest the next day (today), and hand them books that would elicit a response like, “WOW, I’ve never SEEN my work in something like this.”  (And, I’m happy to report, their reactions may not have been quite so emphatic, but they did both seem to think it was pretty neat.)

The boards are very thick – I used ones that I had laying around after binding up the CPR books this spring – and using three of them in a Z-binding makes a really heavy brick of a book that is pretty awesome.   The bookcloth is imported from Italy: the green cloth on the outer covers is Cialux, and the black cloth on the inner board is Canapetta (which I can’t get enough of, and I wish it came in more colors, since the texture and thickness are really, really appealing).  The front and rear pastedowns (which I printed using Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks) are Canson Infinity Arches Aquarelle, and the colophon page is Canson Infinity Rag Photographiqe.  The way this book is constructed, one side of the inner board has the colophon page pasted down, and so for symmetry, I tipped a single sheet of Japanese Mulberry paper to the other side.  This way, you can pull the paper back and see the bookcloth, but when you open the book, it functions as a sort of endpaper.  I decided to put the colophon on the Noah Van Sciver side, because (not to get too esoteric), Porcellino’s drawings remind me of Zen illustrations I have seen, which in turn complement the Japanese tissue paper.

So, there you have it – about 3 hours of work for 3 books start-to-finish… not bad at all (not having to print/collate/fold the books certainly helped).  When I delivered the books today, I got my copy signed by both, which makes this a really awesome addition to my comics collection, as well as the Chance Press library.  Even if we don’t end up publishing either author, it was still a really fun project and a good way to experiment with a binding design I’ve never tried before… and, if we’re lucky, look out for some new publishing announcements in the next few months.

(Also note: if anyone is dying to have one of these for their own, please send me an email and we can talk about it.  Unlike the Dan Clowes portfolio, which I can’t sell due to the fact that the front cover directly reproduces his art without authorization, I don’t think it’s technically illegal to rebind other authors’ work.  The covers would have to be different, though, since those are reproductions of images that I don’t own the rights for.)

Pictures!

(That's the Mulberry paper with the deckle edge along the top.)

I love this accordion binding, and so should you.  I ripped it off of Two Fine Chaps, but they ripped it off of someone else, so it’s not that bad of a crime.  The main feature with this binding is that you can slide a paper spine in between the bound-in paper and the bookboard, so the book looks conventional enough on the shelf and only reveals its surprises when you start poking at it.  I haven’t finished designing the spine yet, so here I will detail the steps required to create this type of binding.  Feel free to rip us off – that’s what we’re here for… again (like the last time I posted a step-by-step), I wish stuff like this was easier to find on the net, and so I’m posting it in hopes that some people will find it interesting, and others might be inspired to try it themselves.

The panoramas are printed two-up and then trimmed to size.

Exactly two inches of white space is left on each side - this is what will be adhered to the bookboard

The panorama is carefully folded to create the accordion, which constitutes the text block

The bookcloth has already been cut to size, and Xyron (dual-sided adhesive film) has been applied to the back of the cloth. The wax backing paper of the Xyron is peeled back and the end of the panorama is adhered to the cloth.

The bookboard is placed along the left edge of the bookcloth, centered from top to bottom. The Xyron on the bookcloth will hold the bookboard in place, and the spine will eventually slide in between the paper end of the panorama and the bookboard. Then, using a right-angle edge, two 15/16" cuts are made at the right top and bottom corners of the bookboard, creating two triangles.

Because the bookcloth will eventually be folded over the top of the board, it is necessary to "hem" the edges so that the final product has a clean look. To position the hem right, a right-angle edge is aligned with the top and bottom edges of the bookboard and a dull knife is used to score the bookcloth. (The first 15/16" of this scoring is the cut that was made in the previous step.)

The triangles are folded over the corners of the bookboard.

The top and bottom edges of the bookcloth are folded over the bookboard.

This is the crucial step - if this part gets messed up, the edge of the bookcloth along the spine will be misaligned, and the binding will look messy. Without removing the wax backing paper, the bookcloth is folded over the right edge of the bookboard, and the book is flipped over so the back of the bookcloth is facing up. A straight edge is placed against the edge of the bookboard, and the bookcloth is scored along this edge using a dull knife. When done right, this score will be parallel with right edge of the bookboard.

Now that the remaining flap of bookcloth is scored along the top, bottom, and right edge, the backing paper is easily removed from the center section. Using the score lines as guides, the top and bottom corners are removed.

Before the backing paper is removed from the top and bottom edge, a bone folder is used along the edge of the backing paper to create a precise fold. Because the score line disappears when the backing paper is removed, it is especially important to make a deep impression with the bone folder so that the top and bottom flaps fold down precisely along the score line. Otherwise, the top and bottom edges of the book will be misaligned.

Before folding the right flap over, the top and bottom are checked to make sure that they are 1mm shorter than the top and bottom of the bookcloth. If there is any extra length (in this case there is), this will need to be trimmed, or the back of the bookcloth will be visible when the binding is finished.

Using a straight edge, this excess is trimmed so that it is 1mm shorter than the top and bottom edges of the bookcloth.

Following the same procedure with the bone folder, the right edge is folded over.

Double-sided tape is applied to the folded-over edges so that the entire exposed bookcloth is covered in adhesive.

Before removing the adhesive backing from the double-sided tape, a spare piece of wax backing paper is reapplied to the exposed Xyron, and the bookcloth is folded over the right flap of the bookboard to check the alignment and determine whether any adjustments need to be made.

After the process is repeated for the back cover, the book looks like this.

A couple other notes: I have only ever seen this binding with paper over boards, which is significantly easier, since it doesn’t require the “hemming” in order to make the edge look presentable.  Most of the difficulty I’ve encountered so far involves the hemmed edges not lining up correctly, and it took me a few tries to nail down the correct technique for determining the correct place to fold the edges of the cloth over in order to create the hems.  Also, I’ve described the technique using dry adhesive (Xyron and double-sided tape), although I suppose PVA could be used.  The problems with using PVA are that 1) any warping at all to the boards will make it difficult to insert the spine at the end, potentially ruining the book, and 2) it would take forever to complete the binding, since you would be waiting for the PVA to cure after every step.  So, although there are probably some purists out there who look down their noses at people who buy their adhesive in the scrapbooking aisle at Michael’s, it really is preferable to using glue.

So, there it is- from start to finish (assuming all the pre-work is done), binding one of these books takes me between an hour and 90 minutes, although I expect that will get shorter as I become more comfortable with the process.