Chance Press

Let’s just say I thought I was closer to being done with the Larding project before we put it on hiatus in February.  At the very least, I thought all the design work was done.  Well, not quite, it turns out.  But this is what is fun about running a small press and getting to design books from start to finish – and solving problems along the way has been exhilarating, even if the self-imposed stress I’m under has left me feeling a little ragged.  The goal is to get these out before Justine and I leave for our honeymoon on May 1st, but that’s looking less and less realistic (there we are again with the dreaded More Work Than We Expected).

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:

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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:

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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.

Take note, kids – this is how you lure top talent to your small press… Find authors you like as they’re graciously doing book signings, and then present them with at least ten books to sign.  As they wade through the task of signing each and every book you plonked down in front of them, make small chitchat, eventually steering the conversation to your fledging small press that they’re way too good for in the first place.  Suggest doing a project with them like you’re half kidding, and then email them later that evening with a more firm proposal, steeling yourself against near-certain rejection by acknowledging that they’re probably too busy to spend any time thinking about the fool you just made of yourself anyway.

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.

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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?

So, the Larding project, darling of my incessant news updates, went on hold for a couple reasons.  First, despite all the pre-work that I put in during December and January, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to print out the text until we procured an Epson Ultrachrome K3 printer.  When the book is finally released, I think people will agree with me, that it just wouldn’t be the same if it were printed any other way, including letterpress.  The test pages I’ve done on the Epson look so good, it’s kind of mind-blowing… I’m using InDesign to do the text (which is another new development for us, since all the previous books were done either in Word or Publisher), which enables me to do more things with the actual words and really experiment typographically, and then the Epson brings it home on Canson Infinity Mi-Teintes with the richest black of any printing method I have ever seen.

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.

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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.

Here are some pictures of the extra-fancy publisher’s copy of the Serafini 2nd edition.  Because this is our first hardcover release, and since I’m pretty proud of the essay inside as well, we wanted to do up a really nice copy to keep in our collection.  So, while the deluxe edition for sale has blue Italian bookcloth and a Canson Montval pastedown, we upgraded the publisher’s copy to green Japanese Asahi cloth and an Arches 88 pastedown with a deckle edge.

But, perhaps the best, and most blog-worthy, upgrade is the interior pastedowns.  We recently invested in an Epson Stylus R2400 inkjet printer, because we want to incorporate the technology behind fine-art prints into our work.  This is the most affordable printer that uses Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks, which are used in pretty much any fine art print or high-end photography print that you see, and you will see elements incorporated into our future deluxe editions that are made possible by this printer.  Because of the cost of the ink (and the time it takes to print), the bulk of our printing will still be on our trusty Lexmark laser printer, but the Epson gives us a lot of new capability – and the deluxe editions of the Larding book will be the first ones to truly show off what this baby can do.

For the Serafini book, however, I wanted to experiment a little with the printer, so I found an iconic image from the Codex (a deer’s head planted in a pot, with tree branches for antlers) and laid it up on a sheet to create a pattern.  I printed out the pattern on Canson Infinity Mi-Teintes paper and pasted it down over the original interior pastedowns, creating a really beautiful effect.

I thought about adding these endpapers to the deluxe editions, but there are a few problems – first, these books are already going to be relatively expensive, and I don’t want to add to the cost by having to recoup expenses on paper and ink (which is not cheap and is used up faster than in a regular inkjet printer, due to the vibrancy of the colors).  Second, I don’t own this artwork, and so I don’t want to “sell” Serafini’s work, even though I’m sure no one would ever find out.

So, unfortunately, no copies with the “upgraded” interior pastedowns will be available to the public.  They do look great, though, don’t they?

The debate about what constitutes a small press bears about as much fruit as debating “what is art?”  Really, anyone who does anything to publicize literature could be considered a small press, from someone that runs a blog like Gloom Cupboard or Zygote in my Coffee to someone that painstaking hand-sews letterpress-printed pages into leather-bound deluxe editions.  You could draw the line at “press = paper,” but I really think that there’s very little difference between a publisher who copies and pastes a manuscript into Wordpress and a publisher who copies and pastes a manuscript into a document that is submitted to a print-on-demand service that makes books that are then sold directly on Amazon, all without the publisher ever touching a copy.  The line is always going to be arbitrary – do you have to sew the binding yourself, or can you use a stapler?  Do you have to employ manual methods of printing, or can you use a laser printer?  Does your paper have to be handmade?  How about your ink and your glue?

So, to avoid bloating the term “small press” into uselessness by claiming that it encompasses every word published by contemporary DIY culture, I associate it with some basic concepts:

• Self-printing: this could mean Xerox, laser, inkjet, by hand, letterpress, silkscreen, woodblock, etc.  As long as YOU, the publisher, did it, and not a service that returned the printed pages to you.
• Self-binding: staples, thread, animal hide, paper covers, hardcovers, cloth covers, etc… again, as long as YOU did it.
• Self-fulfilling: meaning, literally, fulfilling orders yourself.  Packing, mailing, stamping, trips to the post office, etc., instead of warehousing your copies at Amazon and running all your payments through them.

Now, to reiterate, this is just my idea of what the small press is, and it is formed by my experience so far with the above categories.  (You know you’re always free to call me an exclusionary bastard in the comments section.)  This encompasses a fairly wide range of outfits as well, from zine-makers with a Kinko’s card and a stapler to experienced book binders with Teflon bone folders and stainless steel scalpels.

My guiding light as a small press publisher, as I stated in a recent post, is to make our publications justify their existence in print.  And this is where I encounter the crossover between the small press and the fine press.  At both extremes, there are books that are simply ridiculous – on the small press side, you have poetry books that are hastily stapled, poorly printed, and just plain ugly to read.  The publisher of a book like this will say that he or she only cares about the writing, man; apparently, all other concerns about form only serve to distract the reader from the author’s genius.  On the other hand, you have books that cost thousands of dollars, even though they only print five lines of a poem by a 16th Century Frenchman you’ve never heard of.  The publisher of this book insists that it’s not just about the writing, kind sir; it is about the craft of bookmaking, the interplay between the delicate grain of the paper, the hand-tooled Moroccan goatskin cover, the custom-formulated ink on the Vandercook press, the handspun slik headbands (are you bored yet?)…

But, there is value in looking at the fine press and emulating what they do while running a small press.  We can’t charge $250 and up for every book we produce, so there’s no way that we can create books that rival those put out by well-known fine presses (such as Whittington Press, Janus Press, Barbarian Press, Sherwin Beach Press, and Kickshaws, just to name a few).  However, these presses are the ones that hit the home runs, when they produce books that strike the absolute perfect balance between engaging text, elegant printing, deluxe materials, and beautiful (but still purposeful) binding.  Whittington Press’s annual deluxe edition of Matrix is a good example of the “perfect book,” in the context of this balance.  But it’s a rare thing, and almost impossibly difficult to achieve.

It all makes my head spin.  At what point does the object begin to overwhelm the content?  That this is such a subjective question only makes it worse.  Looking through catalogs of fine presses sometimes makes the actual content of their books seem like an afterthought; the author I imagine being embarrassed by the terrible small press publication of his work that I mentioned above seems almost to be in a better place than the author whose work recedes into the background, outweighed by the artistry of the book binder.

In pursuing the balance of form and content, I have felt at times that we do our authors a disservice by printing their work on a laser printer – that their writing is good enough to warrant letterpress printing.  I have come close to throwing away finished work because of small blemishes that only a perfectionist would notice.  I have a bad temper, and I often lose it while sitting at my desk looking at warped hardcover boards, crooked bindings, uneven screen printing, etc.  But we aren’t a fine press, and I’m not sure that our customers expect that of us.  Our goal is still to publish writing and art, and to call attention to book design and hand binding, but not to the detriment of the content.  More than that, the goal is for the design to enhance the content, and vice versa – looking at the book as a total package, rather than simply as writing or simply as an object.

We’ll get there, as we both continue to improve our skills as both publishers and book makers.  I’m very impatient, and I’m guilty of wanting to have the expertise of someone like Bill Roberts right away, without putting in the time at my desk, developing that expertise.  And already, 2010 looks like a productive year for us, so I can only imagine what we’ll be doing in 2020.  It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience so far, and I should add that we’re grateful to our repeat-order customers who give us the confidence to push on with our projects.  I write a lot about our goals as publishers on this blog, but I feel just as often that we’re not meeting any of them.  As long as the books are selling, however, we’ll keep doing our best.

Around $200 of bookmaking supplies from my favorite store (www.talasonline.com) arrived yesterday, meaning we can start working on the hardcover special editions of the two Chance Press Research titles we’re releasing next month.  Below are some shots of my first ever full-hardcover book, which came out much better than I expected.  (This one is a presentation copy, but it will probably never be presented to anyone, since it holds a lot of sentimental value.)

We thought about taking preorders but decided that we will wait until all of these copies are done and announce it for sale then.  So, if you haven’t already emailed us about getting on our deluxe edition mailing list, you probably hate our press anyway and regret reading this post.

Yes, it’s a fairly big announcement, and one we’re very excited to make.  Soon, we will release two books under the “Chance Press Research” banner.  More on those books in a minute, but first a word or two about CPR, and how it aligns with our editorial goals…

While we take pride in publishing a wide range of genres and mediums, we don’t intend to name a new series or imprint every time we publish a new type of book.  However, one area on  which we intend to focus in particular is research into forgotten, unknown, or underappreciated literature.  Our goal is to find smartly written (and enjoyably readable) essays about interesting literary topics and to publish them in stand-alone editions under the CPR header.  While generally the domain of literary journals and academic anthologies, we believe there is a place in the small press for editions like this, and we are proud to debut two such titles in March of 2010.  We will plan to release at least one CPR book per year moving forward, and each will maintain the same basic design and edition size.

The first CPR title is an exhaustively researched account of Charles Bukowski’s “transition years” from 1945 to 1957, written by noted Bukowski scholar and bibliographer Abel Debritto.  This essay debunks the myth of Bukowski’s famous 10-year drinking binge with greater authority than previous efforts and follows Bukowski during his gradual transition to literary acceptance in the 1960’s and eventual fame in the later part of the 20th Century.  Debritto provides information that has never been discovered before, including the titles of Bukowski stories that were rejected from periodicals and then destroyed, and factual accounts of multiple self-generated Bukowski myths.

The second CPR title is a new edition of my essay, Confronting and Collecting the Works of Luigi Serafini.  There has been sufficient demand for a new edition of this essay, and so I have added additional material (previously only available in the ten deluxe copies of the first edition) and printed new covers that reflect the design conventions of the CPR series.

These books will be available in trade, signed/numbered, and hardcover deluxe editions, with prices and edition size to be announced upon publication.  Those already on our subscriber list will get first priority for deluxe copies (please email books (at) chancepress (dot) com to be added to this list).

Preview pictures for both books are below:

In a clear sign of poetry’s resurgence, the fifteenth person bought a deluxe copy of The Confusion will be Enough for them to Leave you Alone by Stephen Hines, rather than spending the money on 1/7th of an XBOX 360. Also, the fact that this book sold out fairly quickly should motivate you to do two things so that you never miss out on gems like this ever again:

a) buy a deluxe copy of MJP’s chapbook for the insanely low price of $20

b) email us at books (at) chancepress (dot) com to get on the waiting list for the deluxe edition of the Larding chapbook, which will be limited to 18 copies and cost around $40 (price still TBD)

Also, keep an eye on this blog, since we are about a week away from announcing a brand new project that will be released sometime this Spring, as well as our plans for the 2nd edition of the Serafini chapbook.