PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (40): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (6)

A big challenge in the writing of this new book has been the colophon. Ordinarily NewLights colophons are very simple—just the info that seems important, without too much “ornamentation.” But this one will be a little different, as I want to integrate it with the main text. The book, theoretically, will have no clear beginning or end, no cover, no endsheets, no title page, and no front or back matter. But it needs to have a colophon, particularly because it’s a collaboration, printed partly by other people in another place. It’s important that their work is acknowledged.

The image above shows the current layout for the pages and colophon (sort of). The colophon is the larger text running around the perimeter of the pages. The pages will literally be framed by a description of their own production. I’m not sure if it’s all working yet, either textually or visually. But here’s the newest colophon text. It’s not long enough yet. It doesn’t fit right. But here it is:

It might also begin here. Every book has its edges, its boundaries, tracing its body in the morning. Somehow, like this morning, this book was made. By hand, by machine. By a persistent light in the morning, once barely there, now stronger, now struggling with its fullness. Most often we should just let it sleep. But the light accumulates, answers fitfully, in pieces, layers. These photographs were taken by the author, in the morning, with its light, its edges, its fitful sleep bashful and lying, now standing, in the light. They were built up, printed, layer upon impossibly thin layer (thinner than these pages, these sheets in this crawling winter morning), offset by Brad Freeman and Print Production Fellows Jenna Rodriguez and Claire Sammons. How could these mornings happen in Chicago? The book is always many places, times, stutters. These mornings are everywhere, but accumulated, printed at The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, as an insert for JAB 31. Unbelievable then, how these mornings were quietly made in the rushing of machines. The text happened later, piled up in the days, piled up like all of our other crumbs, written, designed and printed, made with light, made with photopolymer plates and scraped against these sheets at The Press at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Every morning new, the light just beginning to trace us, these books coughing in the dark. Every morning new, NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al, the text, these piles of it, kicked over like sheets, and folded, stapled, wrapped. 600 times, almost two years, if the numbers of our days ever matched up with time. Impossibly thin, this light, this world. We need more layers, more fullness, here in the bare winter morning. We pull the sheets closer, and the books fall back to stuttering and dreaming. Our days, our homes, our places of repetition, of joy, of new light all the time. We love what we know comes next.