Chance Press

“Here we are alone again.  It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad.”  These are the the opening lines of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Death on Credit, and the backbone of Tirez a la ligne, Celine, an experimental collaboration between Stephen Hines and Jordan Hurder.  Based on a technique called Larding (or “le tireur a la ligne” in French – literally, “pulling on the line”), the two authors took turns adding sentences in between the original sentences, passing the text back and forth as the story grew (first 3, then 5, then 9, and finally 17 sentences long).  Then, the authors switched places and repeated the exercise again.  In the end, Celine’s stark opening setting for his novel transforms into fertile ground on which to construct elaborate narrative spaces.

This book also represents the first publication for Chance Press in which the formal elements of the book (the binding, the paper, and the typesetting) are as important as the text – not merely a case to hold the pages together, but an integral part of the way the stories in the text are built.

More photos here.

Ordering

The first edition is limited to 70 copies.

Trade Edition (35 copies): $7.00 (includes shipping)
Signed Trade Edition (15 copies): $14.00 (includes shipping)
Deluxe Hardcover Edition (20 copies): $48.00 (includes shipping)

To order, please head over to our ordering page.

Edition Details

The trade edition consists of seven laser-printed signatures laid into a handmade paper portfolio, held together with a Gocco-printed wraparound band.  The signatures for the signed trade edition are printed using Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks in two colors, and these copies also include a Gocco-printed bookplate signed by both authors.

The deluxe hardcover edition is really the heart and soul of this project, and it is how the book was originally imagined.  Each signature is printed using Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks in two colors on Canson Infinity Mi-Teintes paper.  The signatures are then sewn one at a time into an accordion-folded spine.  Finally, the book features a Gocco-printed cover pastedown and is held together by a wraparound band made from Canson Montval watercolor paper and archival heavyweight acrylic.  Each copy is signed by each author on the colophon page.

One big change around Chance Press HQ that we haven’t made much of a big deal about yet – it is no longer located in Oakland, CA.  In mid-June, Justine and I packed everything up and moved north to El Cerrito, a small East Bay enclave near Berkeley, massively expanding our available space (TWO bedrooms – how’s that for a luxuriant lifestyle?), while also giving us the opportunity to move Chance Press HQ out of our living room and into its own studio.  So far the change has been great – now, we can set up the room how a studio should be set up, rather than trying to fit paper cutters, paper storage, rolls of bookcloth, printers, and everything else required for making books in between our furniture, bookcases, etc.
Here’s the tour:

^ The door, with two inspirational broadsides about running a small press printed by the Whittington Press in England.

^ Bookshelf with storage for printer paper, book board, weights, xyron, and other press materials; storage cabinet with our new (and hopefully trusty) laser printer; hideous green desk (that I stained myself) with paper cutter, book press and inkjet printer.

^ Main work table, with storage rack next to it – each drawer holds materials for a project in progress.

^ Bookshelf with all of our inventory, mailing supplies, mockups, and paper scraps, as well as our storage closet, where we keep bookcloth rolls and large sheets of paper.

Also, make sure you look through the pictures and take note of the wolf rug I bought almost 10 years ago from a shady guy in Hollywood, as well as my excellent collection of other Whittington Press broadsides.  Looking at this room, doesn’t it just make you want to start up your own small press?

So we’ve got a facebook page, with around 200 fans, which is pretty good for a small press that publishes one book ever 5 or 6 months.  Problem is, like pretty much every other single company in the entire world, we still haven’t cracked the “how to get your legions of facebook/twitter/soon-to-be-defunct-social-media-platform fans to actually buy your products” nut.  It’s always great when a company offers you 30% off bug spray or dishwasher detergent if you mention their tweet, but 30% off something you don’t need is still 70% a waste of money (I think – I’m not exactly sure about that math).  So anyway, we’ve got hundreds of loyal followers that – like most sane people – are interested in listening to my (and Justine’s) gripping updates, but less eager to give us their money.

So, to combat this problem, back when we first announced Tirez a la ligne, Celine for sale, I decided that I’d come up with an offer exclusive to people that ordered the book based on the Facebook post about it.  The deal was that any order placed referencing Facebook would also receive a love poem written inside an outline of my hand, with complimentary epithets written on each finger.  Pretty cool, right?  Can you imagine how much something like this will be worth when Chance Press is as famous as I’m sure you feel it deserves to be?

Well, only two people took us up on the offer, making these hand poems among the rarest things ever published by our press.  We don’t even have copies of them (making them the only thing  published at all that we don’t have publisher’s copies of).  So, given that no one will ever see them besides the two people that ordered them, I figured I would post pics here… enjoy!  (I’ll post these on Facebook too, just so people can see what they missed out on.  Maybe it will get us more fans!)

Well, this fall was supposed to be a whirlwind of work, as we furiously printed, sewed, and published in anticipation of our debut at two bay-area shows: the SF Zine Fest and the Alternative Press Expo.  To get ready for the shows, we’ve been actively soliciting art and comics projects from various artists, cartoonists, and authors, since these are really comics shows above all else.  I was (as anyone who reads this blog will have noticed) really, REALLY excited to get into the business of publishing comics, and my anticipation for bringing our press to the public at these shows has been building for the better part of a year now.  Well, Justine and I made the difficult decision this week that we aren’t going to exhibit after all, because we basically have no projects that anyone at these shows will be interested in.  I wouldn’t have minded showing our poetry and essay publications alongside the comics stuff we’ve been planning, but just showing these books on their own is not going to pique anyone’s interest… and at around $500 for both of them, it’s an investment we can’t afford to make, especially since we’re operating at around a $2500 loss so far this year.

We’re still planning to release the project with Paul Hornschemeier at some point, but finishing it by October turned out not to be realistic, for a number of reasons.  But I am still really looking forward to do this project, and thankfully Paul has been really great to work with so far.   However, other people had committed to sending us comic stories to publish, but now, when it’s time to get our hands dirty, they suddenly won’t respond to emails.  Still others from whom we solicit work aren’t interested in being published in limited editions, saying that they’re waiting for someone who can print 10,000 copies, not 100 (even though we’re very clear that any author we publish has the right to republish the work at a later date).  And of course there are those who just ignore us entirely.  Maybe I’m going about it wrong and I sound like an asshole in the emails that I send, or people assume that we don’t know what we’re doing and will do a shitty job, or maybe it’s the whole “paying in contributor’s copies” thing, and cartoonists – who are justifiably bitter about putting so much time into something that doesn’t earn them any money – just want to get paid for their work.  (I would welcome them to my world, but apparently they’re not interested.)

So, I enter the fall a little bitter and with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, since in the past week I’ve seen three projects that had the green light fall apart before my eyes, and I realized that we were going to go in nearly empty-handed to these shows that I’ve been looking forward to all year.  I’ve got more ideas for projects, and we’re certainly not going to throw in the towel at this point, but it has been a frustrating week around Chance Press HQ.

The silver lining, of course, is that CAROL ES IS STILL AWESOME AND NOT LIKE THE JERKS DESCRIBED ABOVE, and now we can dedicate ourselves fully to making this book happen.  While there’s still tons of work to be done on them, my goal now is to have the entire edition finished for Carol’s gallery show in LA this October, rather than just a few pre-release copies.  So, if you had been looking forward to that book, get excited that you most likely won’t have to wait until 2011 for your copy (unless, of course, we encounter tons of delays and push the release date back 6 months, which pretty much happens on every book that we do).

What is Scribbles in a Sandstorm?

• 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.

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.

As fans of author/cartoonist Dan Clowes are well-aware, some of his best work has never been collected into fancy, hardcover books (or even less fancy softcover books).  While much of the work Clowes is famous for was originally serialized in his comic Eightball, much of what appeared in Eightball has remained in the serial comics format.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – graphic novels make sense thematically, but I don’t know that it is totally necessary to make “best of” books except to introduce people the author’s work (and to give people like me something to buy and then try to get signed).  There have been a couple articles recently about the Love and Rockets paperback collections that argue that the collections eliminate much of the thrill of reading L & R in its original serial format – that the stories, grouped together in separate volumes by author, lose a lot when they are separated from the multi-author, vital atmosphere of the original comic.

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

So Justine and I are back from our two-week honeymoon in New Zealand, and we’re ready to make books again!  We’re about halfway through binding up the Larding books, and once we have the signed pages back from Steve Hines, we’ll be just about ready to list them for sale.  We sat down and figured it out today, and the final stat is that, when you add up the total amount of time we will have spent on the deluxe edition of this book, each copy from conception to finished product will have taken us between 4 and 5 hours (and that doesn’t include the time spent actually planning out the book in the first place).  Spread that out over 22 copies and you’ve got a pretty big workload for what’s supposed to be a “hobby.”

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!

Sometimes personal issues and stress motivate the heck out of me, and I come home every day from work and put in a few hours of good work, and stuff gets done.  Other times, nothing.  Patience… Larding will come out soon, just not quite as soon as I had hoped.  (For those concerned, nothing too bad is going on, just frustrating developments outside my control.)