Chance Press News - March/April 2010

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.