NewLights Press: IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE)

OFF TO IOWA

2012-02-03T03:33:00.000-08:00

To talk with some people about books. Go figure. See you on Monday.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: 7:8:1

2012-02-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

7 one word poems of 8 letters or less by various authors  Including contributions from: Lauren Bender, Anselm Berrigan, Aaron Cohick, Jeremy Sigler, Hunter Stabler, Nate Wilson, and John Yau
 24 pages, softcover, saddle stapled, 4 ¼” x 9” 
Letterpress and screenprinted cover with photocopied text pages
 Edition of 100
 2003
$3 – currently unavailable

This is an older book, from 2003, before I really had a clue as to what I was doing but having a good time trying to figure it out. The roughness of this and the other older books has a certain kind of charm, at least for me. But perhaps I’m just getting nostalgic.

You’ll notice at the end of this book that it says “tin woodsman editions” along with “NewLights Press.” Tin woodsman editions was a second imprint that I was using briefly, that was supposed to be for cheap, fast books in large editions. At the time, I think I was thinking of NewLights as making “nicer” books and thus felt the need for a second imprint. Tin woodsman was abandoned when I came to the conclusion that NewLights is and was a press that produces many different kinds of books.

I do like this “one word” idea though, and it may be making a comeback very soon….

LOCAL-IZING (2)

2012-01-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Speaking of community, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to get this blog to include contributions from other people. I’ve always hoped that it could be a resource for others engaged in similar activities, but perhaps it can also be a channel of communication for that community as well. My first thought on how to do this was to do simple profiles of other small presses and makers of artists’ books. But then it came to my attention that someone else is already doing that, has been doing it for awhile, and is probably doing a better job than I would. I haven’t given up on that idea completely, but I need to figure out how to steer it in a different direction.

And then, of course, there could also be interviews. And there will be interviews—in fact, this post is the first one (Really! Keep reading!). I thought it might be interesting to do the interviews with groups of people, asking one question about a particular topic. As usual, I’m doing everything on the fly, in the morning before I go to work, so I haven’t quite refined the system to have received multiple answers that I would post all at once. I’m excited about this first one, so it’s going up now. Here it is: a question about community, directed to Adam Robinson, the proprietor of the great Publishing Genius Press in Baltimore, MD.

NewLights: Publishing Genius is based in Baltimore, MD, and frequently publishes work by Baltimore writers. Does Publishing Genius make it a point to publish work by local writers and artists? And why? And are there other activities around publishing that you see as important for fostering local community?

Adam Robinson: Initially, I didn't have any intention of publishing writers local to my community. In fact, I didn't realize until last year that a significant portion of PGP books were from Baltimoreans (7 out of 18, basically). Then, when I did realize it, it came as no surprise. It made sense, not because Baltimore has a particularly rich literary community (which, as you know, it does), but because I seek out like-minded people, and I become friends with them, and I pay close attention to what my friends do. I do feel like it's one of my goals to promote my community's culture, and interestingly that is another way of expressing myself, personally. By publishing Megan McShea's book (forthcoming), I'm saying, "This is who I am, or what I want to be like." However, does this foster local community? I mean, it bolsters Baltimore's writers outside of the community, but I'm not doing a great deal to get the books into the hands of this city's residents. But one aspect that I think does foster the community, something that you pointed to in your blog post, is bringing in outsiders for the event, and showing them around town. Taking them to the amazing local literary hotspots like Atomic Books and Normals. Introduce them to people by hosting readings and encouraging the exchange of ideas. And not just that, but publishing and reading translations, I think, has been on my mind a lot lately. Because it's an important question: what is a community. There are worlds within worlds. Before I'm a Baltimorean, I think, I'm an artist. That links me with other artists, regardless of location. So I want to know what my fellow art citizens are doing in Spain and Iraq and Singapore. This last bit is perhaps more ethereal than the practicalities influencing your question, it's basically where PGP has been since starting out -- that the literature community takes priority over the municipality -- and yet 40% of the books are by writers who live within 10 miles of me.

Hopefully there will be more of these soon, hopefully they can be presented together. (Of course they can.) If this is a question that you’d be interested in answering, please let me know at newlightspress-AT-gmail-DOT-com.

LOCAL-IZING (1)

2012-01-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

On Monday I had the good fortune to see Ralph Nader speak at Colorado College. It was a great talk, focused on the increasing “corporatization” of American life & politics. (You can watch the whole lecture here.) He didn’t just talk about how bad things are, but gave lots of simple, practical suggestions for people to get involved and begin to change things. So, naturally, I wondered: what can I do, personally? And not just what can I do in terms of getting directly involved with politics/civics, but what can I do, what can the NewLights Press do, to integrate this kind of responsibility and action into daily practice?

One of the ideas that came out in the talk was the idea of “displacement” of large corporations by local businesses and economies—an idea very important to (and already well developed in) the development of more sustainable and responsible agricultural practices. But what is a local economy/ecology for writing and art? What role can small presses play in developing that local culture in a positive way?

One could argue that small presses, by nature of their being small, only participate in a local economy. But when I look at NewLights particularly, it’s quite clear that we haven’t engaged with our home community in a purposeful way in a long time. NewLights has published work by writers from all over the country—most recently by someone from Austin, TX, who was living in NYC when we started the project. J.A. Tyler lives in Fort Collins, CO (about 2 hours away from CO Springs), but publishing a Colorado based writer was an accident—that project began when NewLights was in California, before I knew that I might be moving to Colorado.

NewLights has resided in 4 different states in the last 8 years of its existence. The only place it was rooted in for a significant amount of time was Baltimore, where it began. So I could use the excuse that I’ve moved around too much to invest a lot in a local community. But that’s just an excuse, and now that things seem more permanent, the question returns: what can we do?

And the answer, very simply, perhaps too simply: publish Colorado writers! And when you do that organize readings and other events! Create a space-time for a community to develop! And when you work with a writer or artist from another place, get them out here to do an event, so that there is an exchange with other local economies! It really is that simple. But it’s also not that simple—more questions arise.

If the goal of the press is to publish “the best” writing that we can find (the “best” of our particular area of interest), then are those writers and artists going to necessarily reside in Colorado? And particularly in Colorado Springs? So what does it mean when, as a press, a commitment is made to publishing local work? Does that involve lowering our standards? Or will that commitment allow a space for that local work to grow?

I have a feeling we’ll come back to this….

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: SOME BEES BY LAUREN BENDER

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

& another "digital reprint," this one of a NewLights classic, Some Bees, by Lauren Bender. These are erasure poems, written by selectively crossing out words from a dictionary.

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Poems by Lauren Bender
32 pages, softcover, saddle stitched, 8” x 5”
Cover is letterpress printed and hand painted on handmade sisal paper, text pages are laser printed
Edition of 50
2005
Out of Print

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (39): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (5)

2012-01-23T08:21:00.000-08:00

Or maybe like this, just better, not as sloppy:

KNOWLEDGE/POWER

2012-01-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

INFORMATION!

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (38): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (4)

2012-01-16T07:41:00.001-08:00

Still working on refining the text for the next book. Lately I’ve been thinking of it as an unpacking of the book as a domestic object, or a domestic space. The repetitive structure of time & duration and the repetitive structure of the book. Here’s some more text:

& this is where we can begin, thankfully. The pages of the book turn. With each page we are confronted with the repetitive structure of the design. The text hangs in a grid, suffused with light and legible in its predictable frame of negative space. In the spaces of the structure meaning takes its shape. The thick void that is the page articulates the letters, the words, the sentences. The shape of the margins tells us about the flow of the text. When the blankness interjects itself into that flow we sense a pause, a break, a breath. If the text area changed shape and position from page to page we would wonder how to read—is this one text? Or many? Where do we begin? In what order do we proceed? We, as readers, gather purpose from the repetition and predictability of the structure. We may ask for innovation in content, or even in literary form, but we often do so with an insistence on established and conventional visual structure. Visual structure is literary form. The text that will shatter your days is completely illegible until the right moment. And at that moment and, and that moment &

—light like that and dreaming just right; the light falls in layers over these sheets; it must be morning, and waking; and waking; and waking; and waking; and waking; just like that, just like that; unbelievable; and gorgeous; and waking; just like that—

—this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this light; this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this light; this light; as broken; as such; as necessary; this light; this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this middle; that middle; this beginning; this light; this light; this light; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this beginning; this middle; this is a holy place, the most human place of our everyday defeats; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; & morning; this beginning; this middle; that morning; just like this—

& this is where we can begin, thankfully. The pages of the book turn, the days fold into one another and stack up. The structure of the design of the book asks us not to pay attention, asks us not to see it. We read. We do not see. It is a space that we come to occupy, but we never see it—it is there, all the time, so frequent & familiar. All that we ever see are its stops & gaps. What if we were to look around, at this space, at this structure? What would we see? Could we see? How do we experience its repetition? How do we live inside a repetitive structure of time? How can we not live inside a repetitive structure of time? The book is our home, is our ultimate defining experience &

PLAN B

2012-01-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

Spent the morning working on the PDF for the digital version of The Infernal Method, only to realize when I got to the end that all of the images had been converted to grayscale (for another project). Alas, it looks like re-scanning will be necessary before that goes up on the web. In the meantime, you can’t go wrong with a Hennessy Youngman video, this one is about Damien Hirst:

GOOD YEAR

2012-01-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

6:46 AM on a Wednesday morning and it feels like snow outside, and the fact that it’s 2012 is beginning to sink in. That familiar feeling that it’s time to get things together and move ahead. I’m back now, back at home, back at work. What now?

The College Book Art Association conference was wonderful, as always—great people, thoughtful presentations, interesting and fun conversations. I always wish those things weren’t so short.

There are not very many copies of What You Will left. It’s always so elating and so sad to see them go. But a book’s got to live its life....

What now? The next project is an artists’ book insert in the next issue of JAB. The offset/letterpress book mentioned in some earlier posts. The offset portions are done, beautiful, and here in CO in stacks and boxes, waiting patiently. And then after that there is The Heads, a book of poems by Justin Sirois, and an as-of-yet-undetermined book with Divya Victor. And who knows what else. The usual, I suppose. But what that is—who knows what else.

Will 2012 be a good year? I think we can make that happen. It’s the only reasonable thing to do.

HERE & BACK AGAIN

2012-01-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

& tomorrow it’s off to the CA, for the College Book Art Association conference. Below is an excerpt from the talk I’ll be giving with Mr. Kyle Schlesinger:

Reading is an experience that unfolds in time—the letters build up into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into a text. That text is at once continuous and fractured. We see it as a line, moving relentlessly from the beginning to the end, but that line is precarious—shot through with cracks, fissures, breaks, white space. The line is an accumulation of fragments. The line is an accumulation of voids. The largest gaps occur in the transition from page to page, through the gutter or around the fore-edge. These are the crucial non-spaces of reading, when the technology of the book rushes up to meet our attention, when our conception of time asserts its artificiality; yet we, as readers, steadfastly ignore it. The lines of text and the blocks of the pages divide and spatialize time—sometimes arbitrarily, always artificially. Artificially because we don’t read like that, we don’t experience books in the way that the things themselves like to imply—in a straight line of perfectly divisible units in strict sequence. The text does not pass by our fixed viewpoint like the frames of a film. We read, we stop reading, we get distracted, we pet the cat, we back up, we start again, we read, we start to fall asleep, it’s a little warm in here, we read, we stop, we read, did you remember to?..., we flip to the end of the chapter to look at an endnote, we read, we stop, a word or phrase reminds us of something, we read, it’s time to eat, we grab a bookmark and wedge it into the space of the gutter, we close the book and now it’s all fore-edge again, now we’re back at the beginning. We walk away. We come back hours later. We walk away. We come back days later. We walk away. We come back years later. The text does not change, but it’s a different book every time we pick it up.

POSTING WILL BE EVEN MORE ERRATIC

2011-12-26T03:44:00.000-08:00

for the next week. Hitting the road this morning and heading back to the PA. We'll be back to it (at least for a bit) on the first.

LIMIT TEST (5)

2011-12-21T08:14:00.000-08:00

Recently I received an email from a friend, in reference to these “Limit Test” blog posts, where he asked me what I thought about the idea of editions and POD (print-on-demand) and ebooks. Are they the unlimited edition? Or does the idea of the edition no longer apply?

Those are interesting questions. The main thread of these posts has been about physical book-objects and their production, but this is an interesting idea that is worth pausing and considering. Does new technology provide an avenue for rethinking the edition?

POD books are set up so that once designed, they sit on a server somewhere, always available, and when someone orders one, a copy is printed, bound, and sent to the buyer. The advantages of this are obvious. But is that an unlimited edition? Is it really any different from a book mass-produced in an “unlimited edition” that goes through multiple printings, theoretically as many as it can until no one ever wants to buy a copy again? Is POD different because you can produce a single copy at a time, instead of thousands? Or is that just a question of scale? POD could also be used to produce unique books….

And then ebooks. Does the fact that they are not physical objects, but digital objects, exactly and endlessly repeatable, mean that the concept of the edition does not apply? One could, in theory, produce a limited edition ebook. There could be one master file from which x number of copies would be made, and all of those copies could have code inserted that would prevent them from being copied again. Or something to that effect. Someone will try this at some point, if they haven’t already. (And then there’s William Gibson’s Agrippa (a book of the dead).)

But what about an ebook in its (now) normal, infinitely downloadable state? Edition or not? One answer: it’s not a real thing, so the idea of the edition does not apply. That answer doesn’t quite work, because if an ebook could be made in a limited edition, then the idea does apply, whether it’s used or not.

Another answer: it’s the same as POD, the same as a mass-produced book that undergoes multiple printings. It is an edition, the closest thing that we’ve developed to the “unlimited edition.”

Maybe “unlimited edition” isn’t the right term. What about “not-limited edition” or “open edition?” As discussed in earlier post “unlimited” and “not-limited” editions are paradoxical terms. So maybe we need to throw them out all together—maybe there is no limit, no edition. An ebook that is not editioned is not limited. Producing multiple copies is not synonymous with “editioning”—which inherently implies a limit.

We can produce an object in multiple without “editioning” it?! What a relief! Thank you, ebooks!

LIMIT TEST (4)

2011-12-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

This post is speculative in nature, a loosely connected brainstorming going off of the question at the end of the last post: What if the edition is not conceived in terms of a constraint at all, but as the generative prompt for the piece? (Side note: Are a “constraint” and “generative prompt” two different things?)

One example put forth in a much earlier post was the idea of a time-based edition: an edition consists of how ever many copies can be produced within a certain amount of time. And then the question: do just finished, “good” copies count, or does everything made within that time count? Do the traditional rules of editioning still apply?

[Thinking about more ideas, a bunch of possible ways to determine the number of edition come to mind: essentially random or found number systems. But that approach just limits the number. What I like about the time-based idea is that is has would influence how the object is produced and how the edition is selected at the end.]

The edition as a concept is interesting in the sense that it defines a “single” object as existing in multiple, both one and many. And not the theoretical multiple of the infinitely reproducible, but a multiplicity that can be defined, that actually exists simultaneously.

What if one counted number of images made instead of objects produced? And the entire edition was collapsed onto a single sheet of paper? (Like a Warhol “painting?”) What if the edition immediately displayed its variance?

What if the edition comprised every print that could be made until the matrix is destroyed through use? Or what about every print made after the matrix breaks down?

What if the edition contained every print that didn’t match the master of B.A.T.?

What if the print initially occurs as a single matrix printed on a giant piece of paper, that is then divided up later? What would determine those divisions?

What if atmospheric or situational variables were combined to produce the parameters of a variant edition? Ex: the amount of people in a given space, what the temperature is in that space, versus the temperature outside, might determine what colors or pieces are used on a particular copy of a single print. The “print” is an open-ended act that incorporates its own time and situation into its making.

This is from the colophons of the NewLights Press DIY series: “This is book number n in an edition whose limits will be determined by practical use and interest.”

LIMIT TEST (3)

2011-12-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

The NewLights Press makes limited edition books. Those limits are determined by two things: 1) the amount of books that we can afford to make—financially, temporally, spatially, emotionally, spiritually; and 2) the number of books that we think will find a home eventually—the number that we can expect to sell/trade/give away. The size of the edition is the maximum number of copies that those two constraints allow. Preciousness or scarcity is something to be avoided. The NewLights Press does not make limited edition books. The NewLights Press makes books in small editions.

(Small, tiny even, when compared to mass production. But on the larger side when compared with other people & presses making books by hand.)

The NewLights Press makes books in small editions, and does not do reprints. No matter how fast that first run sells out. Again, this is not about preciousness or scarcity. It is mostly about the fact there just isn’t enough time to reprint the books—let’s do a new one instead. Let’s do a better one, let’s make the next book.

Limits on an edition are a practical necessity. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Are there ways in which the edition can be re-thought, re-deployed, re-made, re-produced? If the edition is considered abstractly, as a constraint or framework, how can we play with it? What if the edition is not a pre-determined constraint on the number of copies, but a pre-determined constraint that interacts with the process of production to make a certain number of copies? What if the edition is limited by time? Space? The weather? The text? Another text? The financial markets? The unemployment rate? What if the edition is not conceived in terms of a constraint at all, but as the generative prompt for the piece?

LIMIT TEST (2)

2011-12-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

In some ways the unlimited edition is a paradox. There can never be an infinite number of copies of a particular book at any one time. The edition is only theoretically unlimited, through the potential of more & more reprints. But those will only last as long as the market for the book does. The demand, ultimately, will determine the supply.

So every edition, in one way or another, is limited.

The difference between the limited and unlimited edition is: 1) how they are conceived of at the outset, and 2) how they are expected or made to function in the world. In a limited edition, the book/object is made in an edition of x number of copies, and then that’s it—no more, no less. No matter how fast or slow they sell. The status of the limited edition is fixed, generally present and filled at the time of production. The limited edition avoids excess. The limited edition is also based on truth/trust. Its value is dependent on its scarcity. If it’s found that there are more copies on the market than are claimed by the object itself, the price and credit of the maker or publisher will shrivel together. The artificial destruction of the book/object, while it may increase the price, will also destroy the credit of the maker/destroyer. The limited edition is a cold, merciless act accepted in good faith in a cold, merciless world.

In an unlimited edition, the book/object is made in an edition of x number of copies, and will be printed again & again & again & again if there is thought to be a market. But the unlimited edition could also only exist in 5 or 100 copies as well. The status of the (unlimited) edition is contingent, tied to the world & its whims. The unlimited edition is only unlimited while the book is in print. If a book is in print, it is simultaneously stalled in, and caught up in, the process of production. The book in print is the book eternal, waiting forever to be finished.

The unlimited edition is eternally threatened. The edition could actually shrink, if the books remain unsold and are pulped. Most mass-market, unlimited edition books face this fate. When the book goes out of print, its edition can become severely limited, but often its value does not increase. The book out of print is the book untouchable, both scarce and forgotten.

Is it better then, to limit the edition at the start, and avoid the slaughter? Or is the possibility of infinity worth the gamble?

LIMIT TEST (1)

2011-12-09T08:34:00.001-08:00

Looking through the Internet the other day, I came upon this (via Printeresting):
http://blog.art21.org/2011/12/06/bound-municipal-de-futbol/

It’s the first post on the new “artists’ books” column on the Art:21 Blog. The intent here is not to critique the book or the post, but to use a brief part of it to talk about something else—the idea of the limited edition.

The Art:21 post mentions that the book "was printed as a limited edition of 1000” My first thought, when reading that, was well, that’s not really a limited edition. 1000 copies seems like mass production, compared to the scale that NewLights and many other book artists and small presses are working at. But 1000 is a limit (assuming they don’t reprint), however high it may seem. So one could, theoretically, have a limited edition of 10,000 or even 1,000,000. Is there a cut-off point on the number that takes a book from a “limited edition” to a “mass-produced object that only happened to go through one printing?” Are mass-market books that only go through one or two printings, by default, a “limited edition?” What is the purpose of a limited edition anyway?

To begin, we’ll start with this excerpt from an interview contained in Hanging Quotes: Talking Book Arts, Typography & Poetry, by Alastair Johnston. The interview is listed in the book as being with Sandra Kirshenbaum, but is, actually, her interviewing the author of the book, Alastair Johnston. Anyway, here are Alastair’s thoughts, circa 1991:

Alastair Johnston: […] I hate the term “fine limited edition” book.
Sandra Kirshenbaum: Oh, you hate it. Then why did you produce one? [laughs]
AMJ: Uh…
SK: It’s a joke, it isn’t really fine?
AMJ: No, it is a fine, limited edition book. I produced it because, in order to use the best possible materials in the book and because of the nature of the binding, which takes forty minutes a copy, I could only produce, realistically, a hundred to a hundred twenty-five copies. If I manage to sell out the edition, I will reprint it. But to me, the notion of a limited edition is anathema. I believe in unlimited editions because that’s what publishing is—getting a text out into the world. Having something so expensive or so exclusive that only a few people have it appeals to the worst kind of snobbery and the commodification of the book. It takes it out of the realm of information, which is what a book is, and puts it into the realm of collectability, which renders it as useless as a 1937 Edsel.
SK: So what you’re saying is that limitation per se is not a desirable trait in a book, only the natural limitation by a factor such as the amount of handwork or even the restriction of available funds.
AMJ: Right.
SK: But if you carry that idea to the logical extension, then isn’t it sort of antithetical for you to deliberately choose methods and materials that will result in limitation and exclusivity, snobbery and all the rest?
AMJ: Well, I’ve actually had a change of heart in recent years. Initially, when I started publishing, I would use cheap materials, of which the main single cost is paper and binding. And I would do books on the cheapest decent paper and do big editions, and try to get them out in the marketplace for under ten dollars. And people would ignore them. Generally, at that level, you’re trying to compete with the trade publishers. You also have distribution problems. And I began to realize that there was no point in putting up all that money and doing a thousand copies of the book if I only sold two hundred. So, therefore, why not spend the same amount of money and do fewer copies and charge a more realistic price for it. I’m still trying to make it affordable […] [1]

So that’s somewhere to start. To be continued.

1. Alastair Johnston, Hanging Quotes: Talking Book Arts, Typography & Poetry, (Austin: Cuneiform Press, 2011), 143-4.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (37): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (3)

2011-12-07T08:12:00.001-08:00

The book continues to take shape. Yesterday I found out that I have more time than I had initially thought. So now it can be really shaped, shaped well. I want to really write this one, construct the text of this one. But these things, of course, take time, take it away, away. The base layer of the text is there, so now it’s a matter of starting to insert it into its contexts, it spaces, its form, and seeing what happens. And more shaping as a physical thing. And more shaping as a textual thing. And at some point the light will hit it just right—

[…]

& this is where we can begin, thankfully. The pages of the book turn, and in them we recognize our own days, each one folding over the one before. The space between them is essentially a non-space—the fold of the gutter, the impossibly thin fore-edge—these are the dreaming spaces of the book, the times when text and pages sleep and pass into the next day. If only we could always breathe so calmly. The book is our ideal self, our ideal time, perfect and uneventful, artfully arranged and bursting with light and meaning. Our lives, unfortunately, are chaos, overwhelming fragility, no meaning beyond the raw and gorgeous fact of what is &

—light again, again; in the creaking, stirring; movement begins; again; another morning; like the last; but better, always better; the raw and gorgeous fact of what is; the light, the window, the bed, the warmth, the cold, the creaking and stirring of bodies to movement; suspended in the air; stripped to the bones; exposed to the elements of the morning; suspended; hanging; above; on top; and pushing; pushing through; this terrifying machine begins again; again; this ascent; and hovering; above; and exposed; the cold; the warmth; this light against these objects; raw and gorgeous; this paleness in the air; it moves, barely; bare; the windows covered; still dreaming; still suffused with sleep; with paleness in the morning; against these piles of days; now slight, now slightly stirring; the past is there, but gone; gone; bare and now moving away; bare and now huddling close; to the warmth; the warmth exposed to the cold; this light; fantastic and soft; clutching and pushing; suspended; bare and scraping; this clerestory; constant in its explosions; this clerestory, suffused with light and meaning—

& this is where we can begin, thankfully. The pages of the book turn, and in them we feel a ghost image of our own days—an image flattened, thin, tattered, and marred with frantic scribblings. The book, always empty, always pointing away, like a window or a dream, reminds us of the fullness of our days. They both repeat, but these things in which we live, chaotic as they may be, are thick and heavy, a volume to each sagging page. The book is our phantom self, a fragile extension of our time-soaked consciousness back into our object-laden world. We use it as a lens, a filter, to view our own duration. But it will never supplant the breath, the heartbeat, the raging silence of our mornings. The book is lovely, but it is not love. For it we feel nothing but sadness—shabby, sagging thing that it is &

—the window, the mirror, the door; closed and secure; bashful; the blushing of the light; uneven; pushed to one side; pushing; suspended; that paleness exposed in the pushing of the morning; gorgeous; white and brown and blue and gray and white and cold; the light; this shabby entreaty; this breath; again; again; everyday; this heartbeat; quickens; this is terror; love; exposed to the raw light; a string of windows; a string of days; a thread of text intertwined with pale legs in the morning; text bare and scraping; worship; worship bare and scraping; this clerestory, this scriptorium; another day’s dream is written in pale ink and paper, this light on these objects; immaculate; the constant scriptorium; the writing of trembling pages; white and warm; the constant scriptorium; these are days, already turning; always turning; there is no stopping, no going back; just pushing further into the light; shabby thing that it is; the ceiling; the floor; illuminated; illuminated again; and shaking; and shaking; and shaking; the cold; the cold exposed; the cold bare and scraping; against warm sides; ribs and spines; folding—

[…]

THANK YOU

2011-12-05T08:45:00.001-08:00

We will be back to our regular erratic blogramming soon, but first I just wanted to thank everyone for the support, compliments, and kindnesses last week. It was our strongest release-week yet in terms of sales (just about half the edition). But even better than that was all of the communication, with friends both old and new, that surrounded the release. It’s always so enjoyable to be a part of the swirling world once again. Distribution, and the creation of a community through that, is definitely one of the most fun and most important parts of this endeavor.

Here is a nice, thoughtful review of What You Will by Michael Cross, on his blog, The Disinhibitor. Michael is a poet, editor, printer, and publisher from Oakland, CA. & he’s a really smart guy.

& I think we’ll end with a pre-viewing of the next book. The offset pages came in the mail last week:

WHAT YOU WILL

2011-11-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

What You Will, a new book of poems by Kyle Schlesinger! It’s done! It’s out! & it wants to live in your home!

Poems by Kyle Schlesinger
44 pages, double signature pamphlet stitch with folded jacket
4.375” x 8.75” (closed)
Letterpress printed in three colors from photopolymer plates
Edition of 100
All copies are signed by the author
2011
$20 (plus shipping)

LIBRARIES! You can get a free copy of this book for general circulation! Read about the NewLights Press Library Policy here.

Read about the making of the book here.

"SPEAK OF THIS TO NO ONE"

2011-11-22T07:38:00.001-08:00

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/VIGILANCE/

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (36): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (2)

2011-11-21T08:07:00.001-08:00

Still no title. I think it will probably have to wait until the end. The writing began in earnest in over the weekend, finally, and as this long weekend approaches, maybe there will be significant progress. What follows is the middle of the in-progress draft, two braided threads of text:

[…]

& it can cut deeply & it will be impossible to put it back together again; you can never read the same book twice, you can never go home; time passes; every piece of light is brand new in the unstoppable wave of time; & your hands are hopelessly wounded, scrawled with characters, words, gestures, trembling; terrifying machines in the terrifying light; try and try, your hands will never arrest the book in time; all you can do is bleed &

—a morning with folds, fast heartbeats, folds, and joy; joyful light shining through this glass, this stain; it is the morning, a blemish, a blush; the already scarred face of a new day; gorgeous in the light and twisted like that; red like that; read like that; brown, white, blue, yellow, white; and sheets turning folding; waking in the wake of this light; this day; this light; this day; this light; this day; this light; always new in every repetitive push; this terrifying machine; this time; this day; this light; turning and the light pushes through, awkward, groaning, fumbling, the light passes bashfully; this morning; stripped down to thick & bright, this white gorgeous in the way that it is read; never a sight as such in darkness; never a site as such in darkness; this is joy; this morning; this sight; this is sight; and waking; this morning; made; this light; unmade; folds; the mechanics of these things are incredible; movement, the way movement happens; always new; this day; this light; as such; thick & hanging, everywhere; like that; just like that—

& this is the ultimate measure of time &

—this is where we can begin, thankfully;
[…]

I spent some time playing around with different structural conventions, on how to break the phrases in way different from the “natural” sentence. I don’t know if this solution will be the one actually used, but we’ll see—I do like the rhythm. I’ve also been thinking about the punctuation conventions of early manuscripts, before the rules of punctuation had solidified at all.

And the “normal” text is written only using “you” and “it” as pronouns, while the italicized text is only written using “it.” Very simple structural choices or exclusions like those can help to build very strange texts.

DON’T DETERMINE ON ME

2011-11-18T08:17:00.001-08:00

The following excerpt is from the article “The State of the Book: A Conversation,” by Johanna Drucker and Buzz Spector, which is in the printed Printeresting edition of The California Printmaker (the journal of The California Society of Printmakers), p. 20. [Ed. Note: Totally worth buying and reading and owning.] This particular part is Johanna Drucker:

But as we shift towards the multi-platform possibilities that the current media environment offers, what changes will it make to our work? I find it very useful to use all media for their distinct capacities—aesthetic, production, distribution, affordability, etc.—but know […] that media only offer opportunity, they don’t determine anything. As I’ve said many times, the technical ability to produce avant-garde typography (i.e. Futurist and Dada compositions) was present in Gutenberg’s shop. The cultural disposition towards such innovation did not exist. Such work could not be conceived. Sure, shaped poetry has a long history, into antiquity, and all written language makes use of graphic affordances, but mixed font, diagonal, radically cut-up typographic work has as much to do with the bombardment of the senses in urban spaces by polyglot and multi-modal communications in verbal forms (radio, posters, newspapers, journals, advertising, film) as with technical innovation. [emphasis added]

I think that the point that Drucker is trying to make here is an important one: that any media in and of itself has no “natural” state, no “natural” progression that the work in that media inevitably follows. “Media only offer opportunity” to human and institutional agents. This is also the whole point of The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns, which talks about how everything we take for granted about books & print was not always so, and were constructed over time, differently in different places, through an extraordinarily complex set of conversations, arguments, laws, and practices. To cite a modern example, the Internet is not inherently and naturally “democratic,” and could/can/is be used for insidious and/or overt social control—all in the name of justice, of course.

What does this mean for us, now, in the opening stages of a possible shift from print to electronic text? It means that we shouldn’t let corporate/media/money interests tell us what the future is—it means that we must share in the active shaping of it. Which is why this is such an exciting time to be doing all of this writing, publishing, making, designing, shaping, becoming, occupying, sharing, talking…

AFTER MATH

2011-11-16T08:04:00.001-08:00

It’s always a strange thing to finish a large project. Suddenly an absence, and not-knowing creeps back in, nestles under the covers. But there is rest. Hopefully today What You Will will arrive in Austin, and I can hear what the author thinks. We’ll see.

Ordinarily we would release the book as soon as it’s finished. With this one we’re waiting a bit, mostly because of Thanksgiving. (The release will be Monday, Nov. 28.) Which is good, because it will give us more time to coordinate the release and promotion. And promotion is something that NewLights need to work on, as noted in some earlier posts. And also distribution logistics—I’m still not happy with how shipping options are set up with our PayPal buttons. But there is time to work all of that out, and it’s not necessarily interesting to anyone but me.

This morning I was thinking about a “book trailer,” which is something that I’ve seen other small presses doing, for at least a couple of years (maybe more?) now. Usually they’re videos. We’re not really set up for video production, so maybe if we do a trailer it will be in digital book form, images and text from the finished piece, plus images and text from the process of making it.

But perhaps the most important question at this point is, “Now what?” Not in the sense of what book is coming next, because the publishing schedule is set for at least the next year, but in terms of what NewLights can be/do. Where do we take things from here? That question, of course, is always there, but sometimes it is repressed by a series of tasks-at-hand, only to come rushing back in every quiet moment, hanging, a filter through which all of our breath gathers, a window through which all of this sunlight passes. A new day shivers. It is winter, the air around us is cold. And so warmth blooms in action.

WHAT YOU WILL IS COMPLETE

2011-11-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Finally, after nearly 2 years. Now they will be sent to the author, Kyle Schlesinger, so that he can sign them. They will officially be released and available for purchase in exactly two weeks, on Monday, November 28.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (35): AS-OF-NOW UNTITLED (1)

2011-11-11T11:14:00.001-08:00

Each book begins with a series of notes: the specs of the project, lists of related ideas, attempts at written sections, etc. Often all of these things swirl around in my brain for days or weeks before I actually sit down to write them. But actually writing them down is important, for a variety of reasons: 1) it records ideas so that they are not forgotten, 2) it takes ideas out the nebulousness of the mind and helps to build specific connections between them, 3) it begins to give the idea a (loose) shape, and 4) when the ideas are outside of my mind/voice, I can evaluate them more objectively and effectively.

The conceptual composition grows. It is not always a temporal-linear growth—sometimes it’s necessary to return to the beginning, either to harvest a particular idea, or to reboot a project that is getting out of hand. Things change.

What follows is the current state of the notes for a new project, the next book, a small insert to be included with the next issue of JAB. Other pieces can be found in posts below, and the image above is a second visual mock-up.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Letterpress & offset. Initial idea: use each medium for its strengths. New idea: use each medium for its weaknesses, or for qualities outside of transparent reproduction.

What is offset not good at?

Offset:
Cover each page in multiple layers of opaque white, building back up to the silence of the page/white morning light. Print text with hard impression still visible under the offset layers. Different colors/shapes under the white? Different colors of paper? (The Heads)

What about solid black? Or black & white? Or other solid colors?

A book about light? Newton’s Opticks. Photographs. What about actual reproduction driven to abstraction? A photograph of the Rothko blinds in the morning. Close-ups of her skin in the morning light—filling the frame and covering the debossed text.

New plan. Offset, CMYK photo images of color fields in the morning light. Letterpress text, in negative, on top of those, in transparent colors and/or opaque white. Two or more “braided” lines of text. Use of perimeter text idea.

Writing without pronouns? Or indeterminate pronouns?

How do we move in the morning? Where does the world lie? As blinking, breathing, rising. It turns. It is suspended.

How do we move in the morning? Where does the world lie? As blinking, breathing, rising. Turning. Suspended. As light as such. Something in the spine stirs, folds, folds over. As blue light, now white light, stretches. The window sagging in the light. The light dizzy in the window. Morning. Reading. Stretching. Stretching over and across. Lines across an open body. Folding.

Perimeter text could be a “list”: turning, moving, breathing, etc. Maybe not. Definitely not.

Font for interior text? Low contrast roman. Palatino? Centaur? Poliphilus? Investigate cost. Italic paired, instead of sans serif? Needs to print well in negative. Placard for perimeter text, possibly Arial/Helvetica.

How do the lines connect? What is each line? Above example could be perimeter. Could also be italic. Does use of italic make the “poetic” voice subordinate to the “theoretical” voice?

Structure: the page as unit (how many words?). Two sections of main text, each readable independently, forwards or backwards, and also able to be read in linear order. “Blank” sections? How to use? The swerve. Too much? Too “written?”

Reetum vel init adio esequat. Ut vel delisis nummy non ut doloboreet dunt vulluptat, sequat.
Tat. Duisit la facilit lumsan vel ercillaortio con velisci llandrem nullan et velisissim am, vullaorem alit, quis ametum quismod dit nim nonse magna feu facipsu scilit wis augue dolorer incin henim doluptat. Atin ullamet lumsan volesse feuis dolor in utpat. Ut lum acinit alit volore ming ea auguer susci tem vel utpat, cons ex et incipit augiam, core dolum dolore cor si bla alit adigna facillandre dolor se ver si blan vel erat, conulpu tpatue feu facidunt wis aliquat, quat dit nulla cons ea con henim dolor at incil et, quam, cons enit dunt autpat praesenit autatumsan utat. Duismod olobore dolore vel dolessenibh et velenismodo eu facin enibh el iurem dolenim zzrit in henim ipit, conullan ulluptat. Ut lan estrud min esse minci bla feugait estrud te feum zzriure dolortin eugait delit prat. Ut at. Ut il deleniam in vullutat Um nisi. Rud tis niamet nulput ad modolore te ea

165 words per section. Rough estimate.

WRITING IS DESIGNING

2011-11-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

& designing is writing. The image above is the first go at a layout/structure for the spreads of the next book. Just roughing it in.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (34): WHAT YOU WILL (20)

2011-11-07T08:12:00.000-08:00

Entangled. Now that binding has begun, it’s hard to think about anything else besides getting these books done. They will be finished by the end of the week, even if I move at a moderate pace. After they’re finished, they will all be mailed to Kyle to sign, and then when they come back to me, they will be released and available. Probably in about 2 weeks. At last, at last.

Compiling, collating, stacking, binding. This is one of the strangest parts of the whole activity—when all of those fragments are drawn together into a moving whole. Ostranenie. The book never looks how you dreamt, never looks how you remember. It takes its shape gradually, through folding and sewing, and then through pressing and trimming. It expands, it contracts, is hewn from space and time, plane, line, and point, bending, sagging, twisting, moving. An object in the world, subject to. As light as such. Always almost there, almost done, almost there, almost done, almost there, almost done. And so on. It bends.

STUDY: COLOR & SEQUENCE

2011-11-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

This is the first part of a new project, the base layers/sequence for our first offset/letterpress combo book.

It's amazing how weird and plastic-looking the "pages" look in this viewer. The final book will not only look like (and actually be) a real book, but there will be many other layers and text and other fun things as well.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (33): WHAT YOU WILL (19)

2011-11-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

Printing is complete. Final count: 202 press runs. & binding has begun.

MY GIRLFRIEND'S ARTWORK IS AWESOME

2011-10-31T08:02:00.000-07:00

And now you can buy it on Etsy. Which you should. And look at more at http://www.coriecole.com Small press people: buying this work does (indirectly) support small press publishing. Everything, as always, is connected, and these things are human things.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: SILVER STANDARD BY JUSTIN SIROIS

2011-10-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

Poems and images by Justin Sirois
56 pages, softcover, with printed and stapled dustjacket that adheres to book through a series of magnetic strips, double signature pamphlet stitched, 8 1/8” x 5 1/8”
Letterpress dustjacket & cover, digitally printed pages, staples, magnets
Edition of 100
2006

The middle of this book has two fold-out pages. We did our best in translating them to this digital version. The image below shows what they look like and how they work in the real thing:

According to the website of Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, they still have some copies of silver standard available for purchase!

& the original post about this book can be found here.

SUPPORT FUTURE TENSE BOOKS, SUPPORT THE WORLD

2011-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

An independent press that’s been operating for 20 years? Trying to raise money so that they can expand their production? Sold! I’m in!

Find out more and donate here.

And visit the Future Tense website.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (32): WHAT YOU WILL (18)

2011-10-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

I have not so much been absent in these past two weeks, as present somewhere else, in the workings of that other press. But I have managed a few things during that time, specifically more press runs on the jackets for What You Will:

Only 10 runs remain.

A FEW THINGS, ALL CONNECTED, AMEN

2011-10-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

Been away for a few days while not really being away—some busy mornings with no time to write. So we’ll ease back in with a few announcements of things:

The venerable poet, printer, and thinker-of-all-things-book, Alan Loney, has recently started a new blog for his imprint, Electio Editions. There are some good posts with lovely images (like the one above) of lovely things up there already.

A new press has started in our former home of The Bay Area: Zumbar Press, which is focused on producing letterpress chapbooks and broadsides, as well as documenting that process of construction (something we here at NewLights can certainly support). Only 9 copies of the first broadside remain.

And this new press in the Bay reminds me of Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba press, which undertook a similar project, beginning in the 70s and continuing and discontinuing until now & into the future. There is a great interview with Lyn in the new issue of Mimeo Mimeo, which just came out. Get your copy here. Then subscribe.

And also in that issue is an essay about poetry and typography by the aforementioned Alan Loney.

Mimeo Mimeo gets thicker and better with each issue. Which is good for all of us, good for the world.

EVERY DAY

2011-10-07T08:05:00.001-07:00

OCCUPY the places and channels of power. The spaces in which power is exercised. The means by which we are subjected to their objects. OCCUPY the role of producer. TAKE IT BACK and show the world that we have been producing all along. OCCUPY the channels of meaning and knowledge. DISTRIBUTE everything you have ever loved and could love. TAKE CONTROL of what you consume, BREAK IT APART and show the shattered surface to the rest of the world. KEEP LOOKING for more cracks in everything and OCCUPY them. TAKE CONTROL of every possible media, show us what it is, what it can carry. DO NOT STOP until we can see that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT ANYMORE. There will probably never be any rest. GIVE IT ALL AWAY. The sunlight is the only model. OCCUPY your life in such a way that it is continually BURSTING, overfull. TEAR OFF THE TOP OF YOUR SKULL and LET YOUR MIND TOUCH SPACE & HISTORY. There is no such thing as GENIUS. There is no such thing as BOREDOM. IT IS ALL IN YOUR MIND. OCCUPY your language and the way that it MOVES IN THE WORLD. BURN AWAY the hardened, dried, blackened EXOSKELETON OF YOUR SOUL. It does not belong to you.

LOOK HARD.
LOOK AGAIN.
PAY ATTENTION.
LAUGH HARD.
WORK HARD.
WORK LATE.
SLEEP WELL.

BE GENEROUS

BE KIND.
LOVE FIERCELY.
OCCUPY EVERYDAY.

SOMETIMES THE BOOK SHOWS ITS TRUE FACE

2011-10-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

The image above shows a random, beautiful moment that I found in an old book that I borrowed from Tutt Library here at Colorado College. The book itself is Milton’s Areopagitica and Other Prose Works, (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1927). This page spread is the opening of Milton’s “Of Education,” which was written in 1644. This marked up and cut down spread is a fantastic chance composition, but it also demonstrates the multi-authorial nature of this particular (and by inference, any) book. The large print is Milton’s original text. The smaller type before that is the editor’s introduction to this particular piece. But beyond that there are the authorial voices of the typeface, design, typesetting, and printing, by themselves and as a visual unit. There were also multiple binders/bindings, evidenced by the cropping off of the marginalia, the highly visible sewing, and the bright orange “library” bookcloth. & of course there’s also the marks of the former readers/owners. Did the same person make the notes in black, do the underlining in red, and fill in the “O” in “Of Education?” These two pages show the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of the text/book through time. The wonderful marks of a life lived living.

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (12)

2011-10-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

Looking at the ILSSA hand-mind essay that I’m working on this morning, and I see that although progress has been made, it remains a bunch of tenuously connected ideas. Here are a few of them, far from perfect, coherent, or done:

The example above [below on this blog], of an observational painting exercise, is quite literal as a representation of both “mind” and “hand.” But “hand,” or the use of it, does not necessarily have to be tied to the body part. “Hand” does not strictly mean the manipulation of something physical—although any interaction with a linguistic or conceptual object is mediated somehow, often through technology, like the typing and typesetting of this essay. “Hand” essentially means active or engaged. When someone writes or critiques the discourse of any given field, they are participating in it, manipulating the field and its (linguistic/symbolic) objects. Any act of participatory creation involves “the hand,” in its broad sense, at some level—and thus the hand becomes the mind, and the mind becomes the hand.

The hand and mind are connected, and that connection is attention.

The work of the hand allows for a “making strange” in the mind. The act of construction forces the mind into an observation of reality, of the here and now of an object being built. The observations of the mind refine the work of the hand against and to the mind’s original projected ideal. Every creative act is a continuous mediation and remediation between the ideal of the original idea (generated in the mind) and the reality of the thing-in-the-world (generated by the hand). The constantly attentive attention of the hand-mind feedback loop generates new knowledge, or reinforces/refines things already known. That knowledge extends the attention paid into the future, to new activities, new objects, new meanings-in-waiting.

The hand-mind feedback loop is analogous to the artist-audience feedback loop. The artist, engaging their own individual hand-mind, acts as the experimental, knowledge gathering hand of the culture. The audience members (at once individual and collective) engage their hand-minds to construct new knowledge/meaning from the objects made and presented to them. This new knowledge/meaning travels back to the artist, and is refined and manipulated further. The social space of art is a constant cycle of production. The social space of art is the feedback loop between artist and audience.

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (11)

2011-09-29T07:41:00.001-07:00

The past few mornings and nights I have been writing an essay for a forthcoming ILSSA publication. The essay is about “hand/mind.” (This is a part of a small series of essays by multiple people—the other subjects are “old/new,” “work/play,” and “time/money.”) Below is the opening paragraph (as it stands, here, now, this morning):

Look hard was the dictum of the class. We were attempting to make accurate, representational, still-life paintings of white on white tableaus—eggs and white ceramic ware against white backgrounds. One thing that became almost immediately clear was that the idea of white—pure, bright, disembodied, unmodulated—did not map well against white-in-the-world—never pure, wrapped around objects and/or embodied in pigments, and always appearing in shades of gray mixed with reflected and projected color. This fact became apparent to this group of struggling students very soon, but it became apparent not in the abstract of language (as it does in this essay) but in the actual practice of painting that we were engaged in. The linked act(s) of looking and making were de-verbalized, connected in the building of moments, and existed as concrete moves and the testing of procedures. We were studying representational painting. We were studying the mechanics of representational painting, and the knowledge that we were developing existed in the circuits between hand and mind. Only later, during class discussions, did we attempt to represent that knowledge in language; but our understanding of each other’s comments was always filtered through the work of our own hands. Knowledge is always connected to practice.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (31): WHAT YOU WILL (17)

2011-09-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

This will be the last post documenting the layering and building of the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will, because them covers are done gloriously done.

This is a good way to preview the book in its entirety, because the book is reprinted, in its entirety & exactly in position, on the cover. You are seeing the entire book collapsed. This is what time looks like.

I am intrigued by the surface of the printed areas, by how the ink and (non)color built up, and by how the edges and impression of the different plates left different marks. There is something in these covers that can be expanded into future books—an approach, an idea, an insistence on the physicality of the printed object. Books are for handling, after all. These covers are like oil paintings that you get to play with, finally.

Only the jackets remain to be printed. Only 24 more runs. It won’t be long now. This is how time stands as a wall against our bending backs.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (7)

2011-09-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

And one thing that had made me very uncomfortable last week was the reactivation of my Facebook account and the creation of a page for NewLights. One concrete issue that the BlazeVOX discussion brought to my attention is that I could/should be doing more to get the word out about the books. The NewLights Facebook page is a start to that. “Like” NewLights and then you’ll get to watch me figure out how to use that page as an effective way to communicate, in painfully slow, discontinuous, and awkward “real” time. I know that sounds enticing. It will also be a good way to get news if you don’t like this blog. Or to get news easily separated from the rest of this mess. Or something. Anyway, here’s the link, one more time, who doesn’t want to like and be liked:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NewLights-Press/276760435686307?sk=wall

Any other small presses out there, I would love to be pointed to your pages as well.

And there will probably be a Twitter account in the future too. Yikes.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: THE COLLECTED BOOKS OF JACK SPICER

2011-09-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

You can see the initial post about this book here.

FOR RODCHENKO

2011-09-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

For Rodchenko/For Travis:
Working Notes Toward The Heads
NewLights Press: A. Cohick, et al
3 digital books, 96 pages each, 9” x 12” (open)
Pure RGB colors
Edition determined as viewed
2011
Free

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (6)

2011-09-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

In the last post on this topic I wrote: “For a person to set up as a publisher and declare themselves an editor without any socioeconomic vetting by an acknowledged institution of authority (one with money & power) is a subversive act.” I’d like to explore that statement a little more, grounded in a particular experience.

Many years ago now, when I was living in Baltimore, I was acting as the “Project Coordinator” of the Dolphin Press, which was a fine press run out of the Printmaking Dept. at the Maryland Institute College of Art. NewLights had been started by then too. Running Dolphin was a volunteer position—a stopgap measure to keep the press producing during a time of little/no funding. The Dolphin Press, in any official sense, did not exist. But I figured it was good “professional” experience—and it was.

I put “professional” in quotes, because, back then, even more so than now, I really had no idea what I was doing or what I was supposed to do. But enough background—this post is supposed to be about the subverting of institutional authority.

At some point during my time at Dolphin, one of the other departments at MICA purchased a book from the press, and, naturally, asked for an invoice/receipt. Of course nothing like that existed, so I had to make one. I kept thinking something along the lines of: I’m just some normal jerk, I can’t make or issue an invoice. I don’t have the authority to do this. I did it anyway, of course. I made an invoice for a transaction between two academic departments—one of which was imaginary.

The small press world, though, as a whole, is imaginary. Imaginary despite the aching muscles, the bottomed-out bank accounts, and the stacks of wonderful books. Our imagination will tear us apart from the inside.

A year or two down the road, when it became time to design an invoice for NewLights (when actual businesses (bookstores) and other institutions (libraries) started buying things), I realized that the detritus of the institution (“the institution” in the general sense)—its forms, invoices, documents, correspondence, paperwork—is one of the major things that constitute its identity outside of its local time & place. Thus the strange looking invoices, correspondence forms, inspection slips, etc. that NewLights uses. Such things are the flimsy foundation on which this imaginary institution rests.

What makes a press “real” and what makes it “imaginary?” Is it a physical location? Is it money? The things that it publishes? Its paperwork? Its tax forms? Its ISBN numbers? Its authors? Its publishing practices? How all of those things congeal into an image of “the press” in the mind of the public?

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (30): WHAT YOU WILL (16)

2011-09-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

The image above shows the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will as they now stand, to change again tomorrow. The versos now have all of the poems, 12 of them, printed (the white rectangle on the left side). There will be five more plates printed on that side, from the title sequence. & one run of scoring and the covers are complete.

The images below show the jackets with the first two runs on them. Please excuse the colors on these images—the lighting in the studio is awful for photos. The last image is the most accurate, color-wise.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (5)

2011-09-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

I remember reading a comment on an HTMLGiant post a few months ago (I have no idea which post) where the commenter was talking about how anyone can set up a small press or journal and declare themselves an editor, despite any actual qualifications and/or experience they may or may not have. And I think that’s an accurate observation—when I started NewLights I had no idea what it meant to be an editor, how to be an editor, what an editor actually did, etc. I still don’t, really, which is one of the reasons why I am interested in this conversation.

What is it that we actually do?

For a person to set up as a publisher and declare themselves an editor without any socioeconomic vetting by an acknowledged institution of authority (one with money & power) is a subversive act. It is a usurpation, a move against power bestowed, a move for power built up from the ground. Built up from the ground in the sense that the self-appointed small press editor openly acknowledges their lack of institutional approval, but declares, through their actions, that “I/we will learn this, figure this out, build this up.”

I started the NewLights Press in May of 2000. All I had was access to a print studio (I was in school), a copy of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and a need to make books. I certainly did not have a clue. I didn’t know of any other small presses operating in Baltimore at that time (there were some). Websites for such operations were becoming more and more common, but for a 20 year-old still seemed very exotic. This is not a “let me tell you how hard it was back in my day” passage—it’s an attempt to establish the fact that the social/cultural context in which small presses begin and operate now is radically different than what is was just 11 years ago. The closeness of the community and the long reach of small presses now is a consequence of electronic communication and the ever-accessible “storefronts” of our websites. And this context continues to change—we will see how digital books and e-readers play out. Almost every day we read about how big publishers are struggling. Almost every day we read about another small press that has started up.

Publishing/running a press is, like just about anything, a process. And it’s not a straight climb towards ‘better” work or more sales and more secure financial foundations. It fluctuates, sometimes with astonishing rapidity. If small presses gave up because they could not figure out a way to make a profit or at least break even, then almost all of them would close down after a year or two, or five or seven years down the road when things got rough. And no matter how promising a start, things will get rough.

The higher the profile of a press, the more “anonymous” its operations become—it begins to attract an audience and potential authors outside of an immediate, local community. And thus the press needs to become more “professional”—more like a large publisher. With that comes accountability and transparency.

NewLights, despite being the same age as BlazeVOX, has remained a much smaller operation, with a different (but overlapping) set of goals and interests. And because of that I really don’t think too many people would give a damn if I started asking authors for money. Some people wouldn’t like it, for sure, but there would be no big outcry. And any discussion/argument that might ensue about it would happen under very different terms, because NewLights operates under very different terms.

There is a fine line to walk between asking small presses to operate under certain community-approved standards and hollowing out their identities and practices. One of the things that make small presses great is the fact that their practices are person to person. When they begin to detach from that local, personal interaction without being able to predict and account for the consequences, nasty messes can ensue.

NOW (NON)LIVE ONLINE: THE NEW MANIFESTO (FIRST ITERATION)

2011-09-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The first digital version of a NewLights Press book (The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (first iteration)) is now here and available for your reading pleasure. More out-of-print (and probably some in-print) titles will be added as the days get shorter.

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (4)

2011-09-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

A week has passed since the initial furor of the BlazeVOX incident. I am trying to continue using the event as a springboard for an analysis (a haphazard one, to be sure). As time goes on this is less about the specifics of what happened and more about the conditions that allowed it to happen (or produced the event), and an attempt to string together something productive in the aftermath. I am trying to pay my attention.

If there’s one consolation that Geoffrey Gatza (the editor/founder of BlazeVOX) can take from the whole controversy about his publishing practices, it’s that people in the small press community care about what BlazeVOX is doing, and that the press has become a major force in the scene (it actually has been for awhile now).

And of course, in the sense of “any publicity is good publicity,” even more people know about the press now.

But in the exchange we saw the cost of that high profile. It raises the bar for what people expect from a press. And it seems like the small press world, whether we like it or not, is becoming more professionalized, and the presses that operate in this world are becoming more institutionalized, more public. Sometimes, they are becoming more business-like—even if that business continues to lose money.

Changing technology has helped to increase the public profile of small presses. Websites and internet publishing and sales have been around for awhile now. Public sites where discussion is an active part, like blogs, are more recent but very widely used. Social networking sites as a means of promotion are also thoroughly integrated into how we work. Another more recent trend has been book trailers—video ads for books meant to be posted and shared. And there are ad spaces on websites as well. All of these things are good things—they help to get more books out into the world and help to bring sales to authors & presses.

Writing is generally thought of as a solitary activity, and for the most part, it is. Publishing has been, historically, always a group/public activity, utilizing different people and businesses with different areas of expertise. A press like NewLights, where I can take a book from initial concept to final distribution, is an exception, not the rule. Publishing is, in one aspect, the construction of a channel through which artworks can be disseminated—publishing is public, both in “intent” and “structure.” But at the same time, the process of bringing together a book, for a small press, is often a very intimate affair, involving a fair amount of work done in solitude, or with a very small group of collaborators. This small group is often just editor and author, as the editor tends to do most jobs at the press. The experience of bringing a book together is not that different from the experience of writing a text—it involves a closeness with the work, it is mediated by technology, the decisions made are aesthetic as well as practical, and it is done with a potential audience in mind. Publishing is a creative act, productive in and of itself, and is not simply, as stated above, “the construction of a channel through which artworks can be disseminated.”

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed within and by the interactions of the object that it produces with its audience. In this formulation the press is an always still-forming social entity. It is social and political.

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed in the process of production (before a publication’s public life), in the interactions of its constituent parts: author, editor, designer, printer, etc. In this formulation the press makes finished things that are then distributed after the fact. It is authorial.

We could say that the identity of the press is constructed in the reach of its publications, in the reputation of its authors, and in the dollar amount of its sales. It is economic.

We could add more. None will be correct.

More soon.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (3)

2011-09-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

Curses—it looks like I’ve spent most of my blog writing/coffee drinking time reading, trying to catch up on recent conversations on the BlazeVOX controversy. Much good discussion continues. A few quick questions have sprung to mind:

1) What is the role or job of an editor/publisher? Are an editor and publisher the same thing? Are a “role” and a “job” the same thing? What are the images of the small press editor/publisher being constructed in this debate? How do those images map to actual experience?

2) And parallel to that, was is the role or job of a writer in the small press community? What images of the writer and her/his role are being constructed? How do those images correspond with our lived experience?

3) What specific publishing practices are being marked as illegitimate? What practices are being marked as ones to emulate? How do presses identify which practices are best for them?

4) What does the general call for transparency in publishing practices tell us about the how we view or exist in our community? Does a move toward transparency signal a shift in the development of the community’s professional identity?

5) Am I any good at what I do? How can I do it better? What are my priorities as a publisher? How do my priorities match up with what other members of the small press community believe they should be? Should I care?

6) What makes a small press successful? What makes a small press legitimate?

7) Is there something productive, and I mean that in the sense of an actual product (I always return to making), that can come from this?

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (2)

2011-09-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

[It occurred to me this morning that I forgot a perhaps important part of the disclosure in the first post about this. Not only do I know several people who have been published by BlazeVOX, but the NewLights and BlazeVOX list of authors overlap slightly. This has since been amended in part 1 as well.]

Over the summer and now into the fall (soon, closer every chilly morning) I’ve been reading The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns (University of Chicago Press, 1998). It’s a work on the history of printing, focusing specifically on printing in early modern London, from roughly 1500-1800. It describes how printing, as an idea and as a practice, was constructed in that time and place, how the players involved (authors, printers, binders, booksellers, the state, the crown) actively created the discourse surrounding and fueling the new craft. The book demonstrates how everything that we take for granted about printed books (their fixity, their reliability, etc.) were not always givens and had to be developed over time through a complex array of discussions and the implementation of various regulatory practices, both informal and formal. It’s a very interesting book.

The reason that I mention it is because the BlazeVOX controversy is, essentially, exactly the same historical process being described in the book—this time happening in and around small press publishing, here and now. This process has been going on for a long time, outside of the current BlazeVOX discussion, but its recent intensity, coupled with my current reading, has finally made the process visible to my often belated perception of such things.

The parallels between the functioning of the small press world, bound together now by digital media, and the public discourse of early modern London (and other European and colonial cities & countries) are many. Blogs are the equivalents of early pamphlets: short, printed texts about current subjects, distributed widely and cheaply. And the comments section of the blogs and social media sites are the equivalents of the coffeehouse or tavern. And the stakes here are real, just as they were then, even though they are being played for outside of any legal system. The financially precarious world of bookmaking and selling in early modern London was based largely on reputation, and by extension of that, credit. The reputation of a major small press publisher of innovative poetry is being contested now. And in this world in this time, the reputation of a press remains one of the most valuable things that it can possess.

In McLuhanish terms, the “global village” inaugurated by the new media of the mid-twentieth century is being hybridized, through contemporary digital media, with the rowdy city of the “typographic man.”

The BlazeVOX controversy is a spontaneous, collective, public disciplining of the small press world, particularly of the publishers. [My hope is that it will help us change our practices for the better. I think it will.] Small press publishing, especially publishing focusing on avant-garde poetry/fiction/non-fiction, has been, historically, a practice almost entirely regulated by social (not legal) norms and interactions, often unspoken and intuited through “regular” social interactions. Almost entirely—the US government did get involved in prosecuting some publishers (City Lights, Grove) for obscenity. But those cases were in a sense not just about small press publishing, as they had bearing on the entire literary community in the US and other countries. But for the most part, the practices of small press publishing have been constructed outside of any official legal setting. And because of that they have been very unruly, uneven, haphazard, criminal at their worst, heroic at their best—messy. Wonderfully messy.

We have found ourselves in the midst of a particularly messy part right now. I’m sure that the fiery parts of this controversy are over, and many people will want to forget about it (if they even wanted to pay attention in the first place), but I want to continue this series of posts in the hope that something productive can be elaborated out of this “crisis.” What that something is, I’m not sure. But I do believe this is an important process and discussion. And I imagine the NewLights contribution to it being just as uneven and haphazard, undisciplined, as the discourse in the community as a whole. And I don’t want to pretend that NewLights is outside of this discourse either. Because we are all in this together.

More soon.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (1a)

2011-09-06T10:17:00.001-07:00

One thing that I thought it was important to add: the BlazeVOX controversy really doesn’t affect how I feel about the work that they publish, and I don’t really give a damn if the authors helped to subsidize their books, as far as the work is concerned. As has been said elsewhere, BlazeVOX is not a “vanity press,” and the stigma that usually comes along with work put out by such presses does not apply here. The work being published is good. I don’t see any reason to doubt that.

In the midst of all these opinions about the “author donation” practice is a struggle for/questioning of legitimacy in the small press world.

BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED IS UNCOMFORTABLE (1)

2011-09-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday there was an event of no small controversy in the small press world. It all started with a blog post, written by Brett Ortler about BlazeVOX [books] and their submission/publishing policy. After Mr. Ortler’s manuscript had been accepted by BlazeVOX, he was asked to chip in $250 towards the publication of the book. Mr. Ortler was surprised and disappointed by this (it’s best to read his entire post, as I can’t adequately describe his reaction here), and wrote a blog post about it, calling out the questionable practice and publicly calling “for Mr. Gatza to amend his submission guidelines and website to include information about this policy, the amounts he’ll expect of other authors, and the like.”

And so the event began, spreading through blogs and other social media. Some questioning the practice:

http://htmlgiant.com/presses/blazevox-goes-vanity-press/

Others defending BlazeVOX and the editor/proprietor Geoffrey Gatza:

http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/2011/09/power-glory-blaze-vox-meet-pouter-my.html

http://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com/2011/09/hooray-for-blazevox.html

http://notellpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/09/no-tell-books-supports-blazevox.html

And some have been reflecting on what this all means:

http://htmlgiant.com/presses/a-kingdom-of-kings/

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1858

http://slopeeditions.org/index.cfm?p=n.7

http://blog.shannacompton.com/2011/09/oh-vanity.html

And the official BlazeVOX response:

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/blog/to-the-blazevox-community-35/

And as I get to the Internet this morning I can see that a bunch of people have been writing about this, of course, and already it all feels overwhelming. But I did write (most of) this post already & I feel compelled to participate as well, but probably more in the third category—trying to figure out what can be learned from this, not just in a moral sense, but also as way to investigate the small press world and its growing pains.

But first a disclosure: I do not know Geoffrey Gatza, have never corresponded with him, and have never submitted a manuscript to BlazeVOX. I do, however, have several close friends who have had books published by BlazeVOX. The BlazeVOX and NewLights list of authors overlap slightly. There is a BlazeVOX book that recently arrived in the mail sitting on my desk right beside me as I write this. BlazeVOX has been operating for a long time, and puts out many books every year, and probably just about everybody in the small press world knows someone who has been published by BlazeVOX, if they haven’t themselves. That’s actually important, I think, to this discussion—or at least to this version of it.

All I have to say in terms of an opinion about the BlazeVOX co-op approach is this: In 2006 I borrowed $100 from Justin Sirois in order to complete silver standard. It wasn’t a question of whether or not the book would be published, as I was already in the middle of production. The book was literally half-finished, in pieces all over my studio. I probably needed the money to buy another toner cartridge, or more magnets maybe. Justin is a good friend and we had worked together many times, so I felt comfortable asking him—I was, in essence, reaching out to a friend for help, the one with the most vested interest in the project. I actually don’t remember if I paid him back. But he did get lots of copies of the book, and they sold quickly. That was the only time that I have ever asked an author for money. Will it be the last? (I hope so.)

Whenever I find myself working with a new author/artist, I always tell them up front, in the first letter detailing the publication process, that there is no money to be made and that I can’t pay them. (Hopefully that will change in the future.) But I do give them copies of the book (so many for free, plus more at a discount) to do with what they choose—give them away, sell them, burn them, whatever. This approach has worked so far, probably because the NewLights books are different and exist/circulate under different circumstances than most books. But this very informal, contingent approach might not work all the time.

Because I think that one thing that we are seeing with this BlazeVOX incident is that the small press world has gotten perhaps uncomfortably public, and that small presses that have been successful (in the sense of longevity & profile, not money) are becoming institutions in the eyes of their writing/reading public. And people are now, naturally, demanding accountability and transparency in the operation of these institutions. Wait a second are we—gulp—asking ourselves to professionalize?

Other than the immediate controversy around this controversy, it seems that there is more to be talked about here. To be continued.

THINGS & THINGS

2011-09-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

that I found interesting on the Internet lately. The first is the work of Dafi Kühne, a designer and printer in Zurich. Not only does he produce interesting designs, but he prints them himself, often using constructed matrices—collagraph/relief, from contact paper, laser cut acrylic, cardboard, and even some wood type that he had fabricated. I thought these posters were particularly gorgeous:

They were printed from letters cut out of contact paper and stuck to a sheet of OSB. You can see more images on Mr. Kühne’s website. Thanks to the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts for bringing that to my attention. They are doing some great exhibitions and programming there lately.

And then I would take the hell out of this class: Graphic Texts: Looking at Text and Image Combined. And there are some great links in the post, which is probably the main reason I wanted to repost it.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (29): WHAT YOU WILL (15)

2011-08-31T07:56:00.000-07:00

The image above shows the current state of the covers of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will. As you can see, printing on the verso (left) side of the covers has begun. They are 4 runs deep at this point. Hopefully printing on the jackets will begin tonight, after work.

Speaking of “work,” there’s been a lot of posts at The Press (at Colorado College) Blog lately, as I try to catch up on everything from last school year before this was begins. Recent highlights include a CMYK & delaminated letterpress broadside by Darren Wershler, and a book/broadside project integrated with Twitter through the use of a QR code. Check them out here.

COMPLINE

2011-08-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

Poet & printer Michael Cross, who used to publish wonderful books under the imprint Atticus/Finch, has started to publish wonderful books under a new imprint: Compline. The first book from that new press is C.J. Martin’s Two Books.

Two Books is one the best looking books I’ve seen from a small press in a while. It’s very elegantly designed, small in size but with a heft to it (it’s a little bit more than 200 pages). The image at the top of the post shows the (digitally printed?) cover while this one below shows the simple and beautiful letterpress printed jacket. Find out more about the book, the author, and the press, and buy the book, here.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (28): WHAT YOU WILL (14)

2011-08-23T07:58:00.001-07:00

The right half (recto) of the cover of What You Will is complete: 44 runs. 17 remain on the verso. And then 28 on the jacket. Because I am back “on the clock” at the Press at CC, production is being adjusted slightly—I will print the jacket, 1-2 runs per session on weeknights after work, and do the cover, 2 runs per session, on the weekends. The runs on the cover are 4 times as long (2 covers x 2 sides) as the runs on the jacket. So now both pieces will develop simultaneously, and hopefully there will be images of both as they build up.

Long projects like this, with lots of printing, always help me generate new technical ideas as I’m working. Things happen that I did not anticipate, sometimes those things are interesting. The important thing, as always, is to pay attention.

I am intrigued by the surface of the printed areas of these covers. I am also intrigued by the deboss/emboss of the large, “negative” type inside a solid block. The use of multiple impression depths in combination with figure/ground reversals seems promising.

This book was conceptualized and designed (and went into production) when I was still in the Bay Area, when I had no reliable access to lead type. I had to make the book with what I had access to: photopolymer plates. It made sense to me to convert that constraint to an advantage—to make a design that fit with & drove the work and could only be achieved through photopolymer. This is what led me to the transparent, mirrored letters and the “negative” type blocks. This book could not be printed digitally. This book could be printed offset. But then that’s where things like impression and other on-press interventions come in.

I have been asked why I don’t offset print the NewLights books. The answer, at times, is as simple as: because I don’t know how to run an offset press. It’s important to me to be able to participate, actively, in the production of these things. & now, to set these things up so that they require that active participation to function.

THE HOLE ART OF PRINTING

2011-08-18T07:49:00.001-07:00

When I was a graduate student in Arizona I lived my life in a series of small, windowless rooms: my studio apartment, my studio, and the letterpress shop at ASU. I referred to my various places as my “holes:” sleep-hole, work-hole, and type-hole, respectively. And then the other day I came across this passage in The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns (which is about printing & books in early modern England):

[…] A printing house, as already observed, must be represented as both private and public. One the one hand, it could not be open to all and sundry. The craft skills of the workers must remain mysterious, and it must be subject to the proper uninterrupted oversight of the master over his household. On the other, however, it must avoid being labeled “private” in the seventeenth-century sense, meaning illicit, secret, or seditious. Printers engaged in such dubious operations were said to do their printing in “holes,” or in “corners.” [Joseph] Moxon [1] defined a “hole” as “a place where private Printing is used, viz. the Printing of Unlicensed Books, or Printing of other Mens Copies.” That is, privacy immediately generated the two great evils of the trade: sedition and piracy. The notion was accordingly destined to become central to disputes over the status of printed materials. […] According to Moxon, printing in holes was lucrative and fairly common. There is reason to believe him. The Stationer’s Company certainly never lacked for spoils when it launched its periodic purges of offenders […]. Successive measures passed by both Parliament and the [Stationer’s] Company attempted to curtail such operations, […] aiming to discover “Printing-houses, and Presses erected in by-places and corners, out of the Eye of Government.” Parliament eventually ruled that printers must work only in “their respective Dwelling Houses, and not elsewhere.” […] The consequence is remarkable. It was not by chance that printing houses were set up in homes: the conjunction was formally obligatory. By corollary, a “private” press was one established anywhere but the space that society today considers archetypally private. Truth was made at home; lies emerged from holes. […] [2]

1. Joseph Moxon was the author of Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, published serially in England from 1680 – 1684.

2. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.), 128-9.

ONE THING CLOSES & ANOTHER OPENS

2011-08-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

& so back from my travels in the vastness of the west. & marking one complete year here in Colorado. My summer break from Colorado College ends today—this morning I go “back to work,” even though I was never away for that long.

The two months of this summer break seemed like such a luxury. Part of me felt guilty about having that time. And that time was wonderful, even though money was tight. My biggest fear going into the summer was that I would waste it, that I would not have the “get up & go” to get up & go to the studio every day and do the work. But I did, and even though things (of course) took longer than I thought, I still managed to get a lot done. A great deal of work still remains. As these long projects are finally drawing to a close, I find myself anxiously looking forward to a tentative batch of new publications. But first things must come first.

My hope in the coming months is to broaden the scope of both the NewLights Press and The Press at Colorado College. This is a state of permanent of transition. The only reasonable thing to do seems to be anchor that transition in production. And so we go again, one more day, one more day into the breach. A constant morning, both empty and full.

The world is there. The light strikes it lovingly.

GOING TO GET A CLOSER LOOK

2011-08-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

at these western lands. So this blog will be quiet until next week.

THE FIRST ITERATION OF THE NEW MANIFESTO OF THE NEWLIGHTS PRESS IS NOW OUT OF PRINT

2011-08-08T12:59:00.001-07:00

“But wait,” they said, “how could a book supposedly printed in an ‘unlimited edition’ be out of print?”

& that is an excellent question. The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press is printed in an unlimited edition, but that edition will be comprised of successive iterations, each of those iterations being different versions of a single book. The different iterations will not be simply re-designed or re-edited versions of the same text/book, but will be entire re-visionings, based on what has been done before, and always looking forward to what could be done in the future. The book will be a literalization and activation of the reality of the text-in-flux, always immanent, always imminent. So each iteration is the same book. So each iteration is a new book. So The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press will be continually new continually.

The second iteration will hopefully be complete and released by the end of 2011 or beginning of 2012. From here on out, the first iteration will be available for FREE as a PDF—just email Aaron (newlightspressATgmailDOTcom) if you would like a PDF copy (maybe someday when NewLights has a “real” website it will be available for download). & it will also become our first experiment with an online edition, which will hopefully be up & accessible by the end of September 2011.

YOU WERE ON THE GROUND FLOOR (2)

2011-08-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

“All I can tell you is what it feels like when you leave the studio…. it’s like you have a bunch of rocks in your stomach [and] then, all the trouble starts…. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on…. You do it and the work is done…. And then you leave the studio and those rocks aren’t there anymore.” [1]

[…] “To say that Stella, Warhol, and Smithson invoked the industrial is not to say that these artists worked literally to make machines, or sought employment in actual factories […]. What Stella, Warhol, Smithson, and other purveyors of the 1960s technological sublime intuitively understood was the need to play the codes: that is, to tolerate the seemingly necessary and always enforced ‘uniqueness’ of the art object and establish their own author-functions within art discourse (through statements, interviews, exhibitions), while simultaneously asserting and performing assembly-line production techniques, ‘executive artist’ efficiency, or geological agency that resonated with other cultural systems. […] [T]he artists of the 1960s unified the iconic [image of] and the performative [doing of] in the place of the studio (or, in Smithson’s case, in place of the studio), effecting this change across ‘styles’ and ‘isms’ as different as Minimalism, Pop, and Earthworks and expressing it in the useless objects of Art. That they sought (and achieved) a kind of sublimity (in technological form) is a measure of their ambition—to reach for that overwhelming response that had always been held out as the highest goal for American art. […] Stella’s praise of ‘executive artists’ and use of assistants in producing his brand was one unifying [of the ‘iconic’ and ‘performative’] move; another was Warhol’s conversion of studio into Factory, use of assembly-line silkscreen techniques on serial objects, and claims to delegate art production to ‘Brigid’ and ‘Gerard.’ A seemingly final, ‘post-studio’ stage was initiated by Smithson, who moved art production to the industrially mediated peripheries of abandoned quarries and mining sites, and located its meaning in discourse rather than in the object above all else. This was not some ‘Triumph over American Painting’ (to twist the standard paean against itself). It was an inversion and critique, an “anti-romantic anti-studio” dependent for its luminous salience on the Romantic constructs of an earlier age.” […] [2]

[…] “During the 1990s, many companies that had traditionally manufactured their own products and maintained large, stable workforces embraced what became known as the Nike model: don’t own any factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors, and pour your resources into design and marketing. Other companies opted for the alternative, Microsoft model: maintain a tight control center of shareholder/employees who perform the company’s ‘core competency’ and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called the companies that underwent these radical restructurings ‘hollow corporations’ because they were mostly form, with little tangible content left over.” […] [3]

Fig. 08.11.01 "Art is the ultimate luxury." Screenshot from http://www.daum.fr/en-eu/

Fig. 08.11.02 Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68.

1. Quote from Phillip Guston, 1966, reprinted in:
Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.

2. Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57-8.

3. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (New York: Picador, 2007), 359.

YOU WERE ON THE GROUND FLOOR (1)

2011-08-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Coming home from the studio yesterday, I caught the end of Democracy Now! on the radio, where Amy Goodman was talking to Billy Bragg. They discussed many different and interesting things, but one exchange struck me particularly:

[…]

AMY GOODMAN: But this is David Rovics’ other question. "You were on the ground floor of the punk rock scene that was sweeping much of the world in the late ’70s, early ’80s. What impact did the early punk scene have on society culturally and politically?"

BILLY BRAGG: Well, the thing that it did was it—the great thing about punk was it was DIY. You know, the year before punk rock broke, I went to see The Rolling Stones at Earls Court, in a massive stadium, some of the first stadium gigs in the U.K. The distance, culturally, for me, in row Z, and Mick Jagger, I had absolutely no concept of how I would ever get from here to there.

Within a year, I had been to see The Jam. The Jam were my age. They looked like me. They had the same guitar as me. They had the same attitude as me. And suddenly a light went on in my head. How do you do it? Well, you just do it. You don’t wait to be asked. You don’t have to be a brilliant musician. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest singer. You know, I’m not technically a great guitar player, as your viewers would have already worked out, nor, you know, do I have a fabulous singing voice. But I have an idea. And that is all the justification you need to stand up on this table and sing as loud and as out of tune as you want. I mean, Woody Guthrie did that. I do that. And that’s what punk was all about. It was in your face. It was all about attitude. It wasn’t a haircut. It wasn’t a pair of bondage trousers. It wasn’t a ripped T-shirt. It was about, this is what I’ve got to say, and you better listen, because I’m not going to go away until you’ve heard it.

[…]

Bragg’s response to seeing the Stones playing a stadium show is similar to the response that I have when going to a museum and seeing contemporary “museum” art—it’s big & expensive & spectacular & seems to come from a world totally different from the one that I (and my peers) inhabit.

At this past College Book Art Association conference Ann Hamilton was the keynote speaker. She talked about her work, naturally. Her work, both big and small. Ann Hamilton is a very intelligent person (& she seems really nice too) and we have many interests in common, but I am definitely most intrigued by the simple, elegant videos that she makes with a tiny camera sitting at her kitchen table:

& the pictures that she takes with her mouth:

There is something to be said for work that one can make at home or with a relatively simple studio, without an enormous grant and an army of assistants. & I think I will be writing some of those things to be said on this blog this week. TO BE CONTINUED!

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (27): WHAT YOU WILL (13)

2011-07-29T10:49:00.001-07:00

The images above show the cover of What You Will where it currently stands, 62 runs deep, with 26 on the left side now, and 36 on the right. Every plate used in the printing of the book is printed on the covers in white, in its exact location on the page, one on top of another. The books will be bound with a double-signature pamphlet stitch, so there are two cover sheets for every book, printed exactly the same on the front and back. So when the covers are folded and wrapped around and into the pages, the rectos of both sides of the cover will have all of the plates from the recto pages of the book, and the versos of the cover will have all of the verso plates of the pages. The layered structure of the entire book will be visible at once, both collapsing and exploding the pages.

Printing right now is very routine: just switching plates, making slight adjustments to the position, and printing long runs (100 books x 2 covers per book x 2 sides per cover = 400 impressions per plate). Yesterday I was reminded of an incident in one my painting classes when I was in art school in Baltimore, an “incident” that at the time was small (a normal critique of work done in class) but looking back from here, that professor, was, in a way, predicting the future….

The first semester of my sophomore year (Fall of 1999, the semester before I learned to print and started the NewLights Press) I was in a painting class that was based loosely around traditional techniques of figure painting in oils (glazing, etc.), but also featured a large amount of independent work. I was in the class mostly because I wanted to work with that professor, who was great. One day we were doing an in-class figure painting from a model. I was working on small, square canvas, and had set up a painting where most of the model was cropped off of the canvas and the majority of the composition was the white wall behind him. Because what I was interested in was painting that wall.

And so I tried to paint the wall (on my canvas), but I really wasn’t trying to paint an image an image of the wall (I thought I was), I was just putting white paint onto the surface of the canvas and enjoying that. The professor stopped me and explained that I wasn’t really painting, in the sense of trying to make a picture, but that I was just “marking time,” making a series of essentially arbitrary brushstrokes on a surface. The only thing being articulated by those strokes was the time it took to make them.

This was before I learned to make books. I thought of myself, more or less, as a painter. I was trying (not really trying) to be a “good” one. I had no idea what that meant. I was 19. I had not yet been pointed to the work of Robert Ryman, though it probably happened soon after this “event,” perhaps because of it:

Robert Ryman, Ledger, Enamelac paint on fiberglass, aluminum and wood, 1982.

Robert Ryman, Series #33 (White), Oil on canvas, 2004.

That professor was pointing out that my engagement with that painting was an engagement with the raw or mundane or technological aspects of the process: making marks on a surface. That was a valid critique from his point-of-view, the point-of-view of the assignment, because we were supposed to be doing a figure painting from life. But sometimes critiques like that open up other doors. And I think that is one of the main things that made this professor good—he didn’t just tell me to stop and get back to the figure, but talked to me about what I was doing, helping me to see something in my approach that I was blind to. [Thank you, Karl.]

So fast forward to yesterday. I was printing, white block after white block. And at some point I stopped, and thought:

Am I just marking time?

And the answer, at least for the moment, seems to be yes and no—yes, marking time, but no, not just marking time. Marking time because the time of the process of printing the book was being articulated on a single surface and distributed across the edition. Marking time because the temporal structure of the book would be legible at once. Not marking time because the surface of the page, and its 2D composition were also being articulated. Not just marking time because that time will be re-inscribed into the here-and-now of the reading of the book, of the reader’s understanding of the book as an object, as a made thing-in-the world.

PARTIES IN THE USA

2011-07-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

I decided today that I will hereafter, at least in conversation, refer to “printing” as “partying.” That way I can say things like “I spent this entire summer partying,” or “I get up at 6 AM everyday so that I can start partying as soon as possible,” or “All this partying is just killing me.” Man, I can’t wait to PARTY ALL WEEKEND LONG.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (26): THE NEW MANIFESTO (1)

2011-07-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

This lovely tired morning and looking over the current draft for the second iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press. Here’s an excerpt:

If we are to engage with the labor of making books we must not do so only in an effort to preserve them and the traditional crafts that go into making them. We must not lock them in the display cases, the glass coffins, of the museum. The book has a long history, but it is not, never has been, must never be, an object frozen in time. The book has a long history, but it is our job, as producers and readers, to make sure that it continues to have a living present. Everything that we cherish about books, about making them, reading them, owning them, collecting them, living with and through them, will be preserved if they continue to be culturally relevant. We must keep them out of the museums, out of the archives. They must live in our libraries, in our streets, in our stores, on our bookshelves, and in our hands.

Books are not art in the traditional sense. Books do not require viewers. A book viewed is a book dead. Books need readers, and thus they must circulate outside of the venues of art alone. A book read is a book alive, breathing, beating, shining and reverberating through its readers.

ADVERT!

2011-07-25T09:32:00.001-07:00

The other day a friend of mine offered me space for a free ad in a publication that she was putting together (it was free because she ended up with 2 extra pages that needed to be filled quickly). I said yes. Then I was stuck with the odd task of making an advertisement for NewLights. I have never actually made anything that was strictly and discreetly an ad, at least for the press. So a new challenge. Strange to try to embody the whole thing in a single image/text composition. It is, after all, about movement. But the image below shows what I ended up with:

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (25): BROADSIDES & ACCIDENTS

2011-07-21T09:06:00.000-07:00

A while ago I wrote a post describing the severe physical consequences of not storing one’s photopolymer plates properly. I never really tried to print those curled plates—I attempted to attach one to the base to see if it would flatten out, and it didn’t, so those never got used. But I did, at another time, for another project, manage to print from some plates that were severely warped.

The pictures shown in this post are from January of 2011. [I had forgotten about them until recently.] Before I left the Bay Area in August of 2010, I had made the plates necessary to print the letterpress portion of KC Trommer’s and Brenda Iijima’s broadsides. Those plates were stuck in an envelope and shipped to Colorado, and then they sat at the Press until I made time to print them in January. Which means they had been sitting, with minimal protection from the environment, for roughly 5 months. I think that the envelope that they were in did keep most light off of them, and provided restraint against severe curling, but they were far from perfect. Fortunately, for these projects, less-than-perfect plates were okay. (All of the printed “negative” space on these would eventually be peeled away, so print quality did not matter.) And their less-than-perfectness provided some interesting results.

Two things made these plates particularly prone to warping—the large amount of solid areas of type-high polymer, and the very dry climate here in Colorado. One thing that I was surprised about is that the plates don’t just curl, but that the actual surface can change shape over time.

A not-flat printing surface means that solids are not solid. In some cases, the shapes of the letters were just barely visible enough to do the cutting.

A little bit into the runs the plates actually cracked. (The curling is a result of the plates slowly hardening and drying out, meaning that they are also becoming more brittle.)

That reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s lithograph from 1963, Accident, where the stone broke during printing, but was used anyway and incorporated into the print.

When I went back to printing What You Will about a month ago, I was concerned because even though I had stored the plates properly (flat, in plastic bags and in the dark) they had still curled quite a bit. And I had imagined them being as printed as dark, flat, perfectly geometric solids. I didn’t know what would happen. I was worried that the surface of the plates had warped and the type would be completely illegible. And I wondered, not so much worried, if the plates would crack. And I think that if they had, and assuming that the cracking would not have rendered the small type completely illegible, I would have went with it. Partly because I couldn’t afford to remake those plates for a third time, and also because the cracks would have added another layer of legibility. A nice, dark, as-planned solid lends a physicality to the print (especially in a book where the ink can be touched by the reader) but I think that they remain (at least somewhat) abstract. Whereas a cracked plate + print would be more concrete, more specific, more opaque, more legible, more present. The reader would be brought ever so slightly closer to the matrix and to the process.

So maybe, maybe next time I will figure out how to really destroy those plates.

LESSONS FROM GILLIAN WELCH: THE PRACTICAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS OF HAND-MECHANICAL PROCESSES & VARIABLE EDITIONS

2011-07-19T05:00:00.001-07:00

[The embedded video in this post has been acting strangely. If it's not working, you can watch it here, I hope.]

I HAVE NOT BEEN BLOGGING SO MUCH BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN PRINTING SO MUCH

2011-07-18T10:36:00.001-07:00

Time is composed of groups of marks on stacks of paper that will become stacks of books for groups of people.

“Work is best done in a state of flow in which one is fully engaged by the task and there is no sense of time passing.”

These images are scans of the set-up sheets for Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will. The pages are now completely printed. The covers and jackets remain, only 62 more runs.

LUMINOUS THINGS ARE ALL AROUND

2011-07-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

I linked to this in a post last week, but it’s so fantastic that I’d thought I should mention it specifically: The William Blake Archive. It’s a comprehensive digital archive where you can view and read multiple copies of Blake’s illuminated/printed books. Things like this are one reason why the Internet and other digital technology is good for books, and good for those of us who are interested in them.

Along with the works themselves there are also some informative essays about Blake’s life and about the process that he used to make the books. Here’s a brief passage (related to some other threads that have been running through this blog) from the essay about his process, “Illuminated Printing,” by Joseph Viscomi:

Blake realized very early that his new medium's autographic nature made the poem the only prerequisite for executing plates, that rewriting texts was also an act of visual invention, and thus that the medium could be used for production rather than reproduction. With no designs to transfer or reproduce, the placement and extent of text, letter size, line spacing, as well as placement and extent of illustration, were invented only during execution. This method of designing meant that Blake did not know what lines or stanza would go on what plate, or how many plates a poem/book would need. Working without models allowed each illuminated print and book to evolve through its production in ways impossible in conventional book-making. Blake could begin working on a book before it was completely written.

And of course you can also download Blake’s texts from Project Gutenberg.

Several worlds to get lost in.

THE FESTIVAL TO PLEAD FOR SKILLS

2011-07-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday (the seventh day of the seventh month) was the ILSSA (Impractical Labor in the Service of the Speculative Arts) Festival to Plead for Skills. Here is the description of the event from the ILSSA site:

This summer, on the 7th day of the 7th month, ILSSA will celebrate its own version of The Festival to Plead for Skills. The festival is derived from the Chinese holiday of Qi Xi and the Japanese festival of Tanabata, in which celebrants wish for the betterment of their own craftsmanship. Instead of wishing, the ILSSA festival will be a holiday of practicing.

We hereby invite all ILSSA Members to observe this holiday by making small objects as iterations of their practice. The objects should be no larger than 2 inches in any dimension, and should be the natural result of practicing a skill: using a tool, trying a method, honing a technique. Conceive of this project as something you can complete entirely on July 7th. We imagine Impractical Laborers across the land, practicing together in observance of the holiday.

For this year’s festival (my first) I decided that I wanted to combine my practice with some hands-on research in type design. So I set up a series of 2” x 2” pieces of cover weight paper, each with a letter (laser)printed on it. I chose 5 different letters, in caps & lowercase, from three different typefaces (we were making 30 objects this year) that I wanted to study up close. The typefaces were: Palatino Linotype (my old favorite), Lucida Console (a weird san-serif face that I enjoy), and Matthew Carter’s Georgia (so that I could compare a serifed text face for the screen/web with one for print/book). After they were printed I delaminated each of them, carefully tracing their form. It was extremely satisfying to focus my attention on all the little details and to carry that attention through the actual cutting. This was probably some of the most accurate cutting I’ve done in a while. Something about focus, I suppose.

This was a good and fun event, as it was personal and solitary (every participant chose what they wanted to do) as well as social (we all practiced together, and everybody gets one of each object). Every studio a networked node of production, independent and in concert.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (24): WHAT YOU WILL (12)

2011-07-08T17:40:00.000-07:00

Printing on Kyle Schlesinger's What You Will has resumed, and has been going strong for the past two weeks. This post is sort of about that, but not really—It's about one of those weird, interesting things that can happen while one is working, those things that one needs to remember to use later. “Happy accidents” is what the kids like to call them. The pictures here show some strange, randomish printing on the tympan of the press. The “accidental matrix” here was a long piece of hair stuck between the quoin and furniture. It was long enough to pick up ink from the rollers and to brush against the tympan while I was printing. The line quality is really lovely, and of course the composition that is built up by the movement of the hair is something I never would or could have done if I had been trying to control it. This makes me wonder: what are the possibilities of a movable or flexible printing matrix, like pieces of hair, or string, or wire, or cloth, or something else?

THE INDIE LIT CITY SUMMIT: FRIENDS & RESOURCES

2011-07-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

The first (and hopefully not the last) Indie Lit City Summit will be held in Washington DC on July 16. What is it? Here's (part of) the description from the website:

The Indie Lit City Summit is a regional gathering of editors, publishers, reading series coordinators, and other literary organizers to raise questions, surface issues, share information, and collaborate on solutions. There is an enormous amount of experience and expertise in our community that can be tapped into to better all our work.

I would definitely be going if I was still in the Baltimore/DC area. I would maybe even go now if I could afford it. The travel that is, because the event itself is FREE.

And then there's the Independent Publishing Wiki, which I found through the City Lit Summit site. This kind of knowledge sharing & community building is wonderful.

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (8)

2011-07-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

I have been scouting around in the field of “book history,” and it is rich indeed. And of course the rest of the Internet:

[…] [L]iterary work by its very nature sets in motion many kinds of creative intentionalities. These orbit in the universe of the creative work—but not around some imaginary and absolute center. Rather, they turn through many different kinds of motion, at many structural scales, and in various formal relationships. The universe of poiesis no more has an absolute center than does the stellar universe we have revealed through our astronomy. What it has are many relative centers which are brought to our attention by our own acts of observation. The universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state. Authors themselves do not have, as authors, singular identities; an author is a plural identity and more resembles what William James liked to call the human world at large, a multiverse.

Literary texts differ from informational texts by being polyvocal. Whereas “noise” is always a form of corruption for a channel of information, it can be exploited in literary texts for positive results. The thicker the description, so far as an artist is concerned, the better. (Minimalist styles of art thicken their media by processes of subtraction and absence.) A thickened text is a scene where metaphor and metonymy thrive (Coleridge’s “opposite or discordant qualities,” his “sameness with difference”). For [Hershel] Parker, the thickness comes from the artists’ imaginative resources, who can be counted on to put into their texts far more than they are even aware of. Parker’s “intention” includes, crucially, the vast resources of the unconscious and preconscious.

But thickness is also built through the textual presence and activities of many non-authorial agents. These agencies may be the artists’ contemporaries—these are the examples most often adduced—or they may not; furthermore, the agencies may hardly be imagined as “individuals” at all. The texts of Sappho, for example, gain much of their peculiar power from their fragmented condition […] [1]

[…] But what’s unique in the case of literature is that the text isn’t the finished work. A novel or short story isn’t a solid object. It’s just groundwork, and the reader’s imagination and reference points revive its content, extrapolate from its clues, and finish the work individually. In a way, when you’re writing a novel, for instance, you’re actually writing an unpredictable number of novels at once, and that number depends on how many copies end up being read. No other art form that I can think of involves that level of collaboration between artist and audience and disrupts the passiveness of being a work’s receiver with so much freedom and creativity. The high degree of interaction and codependence that the writer/reader axis makes possible is gorgeous and offers such a great opportunity to experiment with how text reacts when it comes in contact with the imagination. And writing allows you to play with the crapshoot decision of when a work is finished or, rather, when something is ready to be placed outside of your control and then finished by other people in largely unknowable ways. […] [2]

[…] But texts shape the response of readers, however active they may be. As Walter Ong has observed, the opening pages of The Canterbury Tales and A Farewell to Arms create a frame and cast the reader in a role, which he cannot avoid no matter what he thinks of pilgrimages and civil wars. In fact, typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts convey meanings. […] The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts. The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever men confronted books, and it has produced some extraordinary results, as in Luther’s reading of the Psalms, Rousseau’s reading of Le Misanthrope, and Kierkegaard’s reading of the sacrifice of Isaac. […] [3]

[…] To this point I have been taking the word “text” to signify the linguistic text, the verbal outcome at every level (from the most elementary forms of single letters and punctuation marks up to the most complex rhetorical structures that comprise the particular linguistic event). And even if we agree, for practical purposes, to restrict the term “text” to this linguistic signification, we cannot fail to see that literary works typically secure their effects by other than purely linguistic means. Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographical codes on the other.

We recognize the latter simply by looking at a medieval literary manuscript—or at any of William Blake’s equivalent illuminated texts produced in (the teeth of) the age of mechanical reproduction. Or at Emily Dickinson’s manuscript books of poetry, or her letters. In each of these cases the physique of the “document” has been forced to play an aesthetic function, has been made part of the “literary work.” That is to say, in these kinds of literary works the distinction between physical medium and conceptual message breaks down completely. […] [4]

1. Jerome McGann, “The Socialization of Texts,” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 42.

2. From an interview with author Dennis Cooper that is part of the HTMLGiant “What is Experimental Literature” series of posts. You can read the whole interview (which is great) here.

3. Roger Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 21.

4. McGann, 43.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (4): SPACE TRAVEL

2011-07-01T09:58:00.001-07:00

[First a quick note: This will be the last official post of “Manuscript Book Week,” but there will undoubtedly be more posts about manuscript books as research continues.]

One interesting visual aspect of many of these manuscript books is the amount of spatial depth articulated on and in the pages, particularly on the pages that are heavily decorated/illuminated. The diagram below shows the relative depth of the different components of the spread pictured above, with the lightest shapes (white) showing the areas depicting the most depth, moving to black, where whatever is on the page seems to sit directly on or above the page surface.

European manuscript books often mix “realistic” scenes that recede behind the picture plane, with abstract or trompe l'oeil decoration that stays on or above the picture plane. (For a quick comparison, scroll down to the post below and compare to the Qu’ran pages, with their more “modernist” use of geometric decoration.)The different colors of text and the actual surface of the page hover between those two poles, sometimes moving back and forth, depending on where the viewer/reader is looking. And of course the book itself is an object-in-space, on a table or in the reader’s hands, and participates actively in real space as well (as opposed to a painting, where the two-dimensionality seems fixed, because the painting is anchored to a wall).

It would be interesting to use the kind of spatial manipulations demonstrated in manuscript books with photographic reproduction available now. If depicted three-dimensionality is actively used within a book, in concert with the (seemingly) two-dimensional pages moving in literal 3 & 4D space/time, plus the n-dimensional space of a properly tuned text, that could create a hyper-object that would tear a hole in the space/time continuum, as well as tear your face off and blow your mind up.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (3): READING THE OTHER WAY

2011-06-29T09:30:00.001-07:00

“A 9th-century Qur’an, Near East, in horizontal format, written on parchment in kufic script, with red dots for vowels and green dots indicating the glottal stop. The large gold roundel marks the end of a tenth verse.” Or. 1397, ff. 18v-19. [1]

Speaking of the conventionality of written/printed language: one experience that can make the nature and limits of that conventionality immediately clear and palpable is the experience of a second language, an-other-language, especially if that language is rendered in a completely different alphabet.

While working on the Al-Mutanabbi broadside project I got to learn a small amount of Arabic and the basics of how the written language works. It’s interesting how the “idea” can be the same (a phonetic language) but the implementation can be completely different. Completely different but still able to be comprehended and used. An-other technology.

“An 11th- or 12th- century Qur’an, from Iraq or Persia, written on paper in the Qarmatian style of eastern kufic script. The older system of red dots indicating vowels is combined with black vowel signs still in use today.” Or. 6573, ff. 210v-211. [2]

The Arabic alphabet contains 29 letters, and each of those letters changes shape depending on where it falls in the word. Each character has a form for when it stands alone, when it begins a word, when it is in the middle of a word, and when it is at the end of a word. Like the “long s” that appears in old English, or the slight alterations that occur in English cursive letters to link them properly to the letter following them.

“Detail from the colophon page of volume three of Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, 1305-6, with the signature of the master illuminator, Abu Bakr Sandal, inscribed in the ornamental semi-circles (right).” Add. 22408, f. 154v. [3]

The Arabic alphabet reads right-to-left. Apparently, this is a huge “problem” for design programs (like Adobe InDesign) but not so much for word processing programs, like Microsoft Word. Or maybe not a problem for the software but for the user who has to buy a second version of InDesign in order to properly set Arabic. But one can hack one’s way through the Arabic in the left-to-right version of InDesign using the “Glyphs” palette, much like setting metal type out of a case. An-other language.

“A 17th-century Qur’an from Persia written in nashki script, with an interlinear Persian translation in red nasta’liq script.” Or. 13371, ff. 313v-314. [4]

[…] [T]he Arabic language […] belongs to the Semitic family of scripts which includes among other Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. A common feature of all these languages is the fact that their alphabets are composed almost entirely of consonants, vowel signs being added only later to facilitate reading. […] [5]

A detail of the previous image.

It’s interesting to compare these manuscript Qur’ans to the European manuscript books, to see how they are similar and how they are different. How the rules of each culture (like the fact that illustration was forbidden in the Qur’an) helped to determine how the conventions of the written language developed. Paying attention to the conventions of various other languages can help us deconstruct our own, to pay attention to it, to dwell in it more fully, and to utilize it more incisively.

1. Colin F. Baker, Qur’an Manuscripts: Calligraphy, Illumination, Design, (London: The British Libray, 2007), 20-1. The numbers after each caption designate which manuscript and pages the images are from. All of the manuscripts are currently held at the British Library.

2. Ibid., 24-5.

3. Ibid., 46.

4. Ibid., 78-9.

5. Ibid., 13.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (2): SCRIBAL PRACTICE

2011-06-28T09:29:00.001-07:00

The first draft of this post started as a dull procession of facts about manuscript books—a natural danger, perhaps, of research based work. But the point of this is to generate new ideas. Here’s a not new idea that seems appropriate:

“Production not reproduction.” [Phillip Zimmerman]

How is scribal production (essentially the slow, embodied, re-production of a text) an act of production? Does the copying out of a text allow a reader to participate in it differently? Beyond copying and staying within the text, how does rendering it visually (incorporating images and “decorated” letters, designing/typesetting) and threading it through the structure of a book (a reproducible time-structure) change the way in which we read? Is the term “read” even appropriate anymore?

The hand-mechanical activity of the scribe is devotional, meditative. But the content matters less (to me) than the action itself. It’s about understanding a text physically, bodily, experientially. Not moving through a building as a temporary occupant, but actively participating in its construction, living and working in it, becoming a shaper of space and time, of knowledge and experience.

If possible (and it’s usually just a matter of time) I like to completely retype a text that I am working with (if I didn’t write it in the first place). Is this a waste of time? An obsessive habit? An invitation to “scribal error?” In my experience, the re-production of a text letter by letter allows me to understand it more thoroughly, more minutely, than “simply” reading. It’s like studying a text on an atomic level, like taking apart and rebuilding a machine in order to understand how it works. Hand typesetting provides the same kind of experience. It is a kind of reading that does not posit the text as before the reading, but a kind of reading that actively creates the text here and now, as an immanent, ongoing construction. Not eternal and unchanging, but experienced always in the present through constant change and repetition.

MANUSCRIPT BOOK WEEK (1)

2011-06-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Mainly because I want to share all of the beautiful things I’ve been seeing. Last week I began doing some research on manuscript books. “Manuscript books” are books made entirely by hand. They are generally unique, usually (but not always) dating from the time before movable type, and are sometimes called “illuminated manuscripts.” The research up to this point has been general at best, just a few simple, well-illustrated books about medieval European books and early Qu’rans, just to provide a broad story and sample of what exists. But already they are pointing to new directions.

Modern printed books attempt to convey some of the rhythms and emphasis of speech by a whole series of typographical conventions, including indented paragraphs, spaces between sentences, capital letters, italics, and a large repertoire of punctuation marks […]. Medieval punctuation was haphazard at best. Mostly, scribes made use of what we now call decoration. A big initial marks a major opening or division of the text. A slightly smaller initial may indicate a chapter or a paragraph of somewhat lesser significance. A small illuminated initial marks a break in the text less weighty than a larger initial but more important than a simple capital letter.

The hierarchy depended not on any standard size as such but on the scale of any initial in relation to another in the same manuscript. […] Once the relative hierarchy is put in context […] we have a whole new tool for interpreting medieval texts. In that sense, decoration is a device for reading a text as sophisticated as punctuation is today. […] [1]

[emphasis added]

I would add to that series of “typographical conventions” the spacing between individual words and standardized spelling. The conventional nature of written and printed language is important for two reasons: 1) These conventions developed over time in many different circumstances, conditioned by different languages, technologies, cultures, economies, etc. and that points to the fact that our “laws” of grammar, usage, definitions, and spellings are not natural truths that accurately represent a pure language. 2) These conventions that we have internalized play a major role in that way that we read, in the way that we experience written and printed language. Reading as a practice has changed over time, and it continues to change, especially now, as we stand in the chaos of another transformation of the technology of writing. And thus it is possible to imagine and construct new ways of reading, new legibilities of text, by interrogating the conventional nature of written and printed language.

This is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that seems particularly critical now, again. The space of our new technologies of reading and writing has opened up new avenues of contestation. The only thing at stake is meaning. These old books were made during a period of massive flux and expansion, and looking at them closely might yield new ways for us to participate in our own astonishing flux.

So I am imagining these posts (theoretically confined to this week but probably continuing anyway) as looking closely at different examples from manuscript books and breaking them down visually/functionally, hopefully generating some ideas in the process. As always, we’ll see what happens, where we end up.

1. Christopher de Hamel, The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 21-4. The image at the start of this post was taken from that same book (p. 46) and is from a “tenth-century English manuscript of the works of St. Aldhelm.”

(DE)COLLAGE

2011-06-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

[Note: I noticed yesterday when I was looking at the other altered books on this blog that I had not “officially” posted this book as complete. So here it is. It was actually finished at the beginning of February, 2011.]

Altered book by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al.
220 pages, hardcover, casebound, 11” x 18” (open)
Mass produced art history book altered through delamination
Unique
2011
Contact for price

The original book was:

Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art, (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). It is one of the best surveys of collage in modern & postmodern art that I have read.

The last image shows a detail of the text that was runs in a continuous line along the bottom of the book. It was written subtractively (by removing words) from the original text. But you, lucky you, can read the full text below:

The method of constructing from parts. It is the synthesis of colourless, white or grey-black areas of colour, or the arrangement of unexpected proportions. Written in the graphics of a powerful weapon aware of the very different demands of concluding that the system of montage is dialectic. It is a statement, after all, that neither Klutsis or Lissitzky could have made; nor Heartfield or Hoch, “Lyricism is the crown of life: Constructivism is its already existing soft-porn surfaces, even, on occasion, a castrating machine. Yet the most persistent motif is one that only collage as a device could generate: the softness of parts not only indexically presented but eroticized as a purely photographic contrast of textures: grass, gravel or wood, inside barbed-wire, in the midst of dry leaves, or, in one case, inverted on the body and placed against the austere brick superstructure.

Such works not attempted hitherto: the minutest visible variations in photographic color and tone, magnified by the tell-tale curves of the paper’s scissored edges. By systematically excising one and placing it against a subtly contrastive one, an interval, a gap, which is in itself stimulating. ‘It is sight’, he had suggested, proposing desublimation of the senses: ‘The optical environment in which ‘the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art…in which an intense detachment this detachment that enabled him to see a Cubist collage by Picasso or Braque in a radically anti-illusionistic way: ‘the Cubists always emphasized the identity of the picture as a flat and more or less abstract pattern rather than a representation’. To choose between them is preferable to ambiguity: collage had now attained to the full and declared three-dimensionality we automatically attribute to the notion “object”, and was being transformed, in the course of a strictly coherent process with a logic all its own, into a new kind of houses we live in and furniture we use’. rectangles littered with small pictures rectangles are references to technology, the industrial process, heavy machinery. Thirdly, as a physical object it occupies a kind of middle ground between the single, exhibitable object and the flickering succession of a moving film. Turning its pages is a one-person affair, addressed to relatively private experience as opposed to the collectivity of a show. Yet politics was never far away. To that extent it may be mourning the flowering of quiet defiance: she knew such works could not be exhibited. But she was increasingly vulnerable. She was being watched and possibly denounced, she managed to escape attention.

text written in opposition to works of ‘degenerate’ modernism is positioned close by. The art historian T. J. Clark has studied the problem: the work to annihilate the negation of the negation’. she boldly mangled several works to produce collage of her own. The background to this benevolent act of ‘completion’ is inevitably complicated by Krasner’s relationship to Pollock. ‘”Waste not, want not”, open it out and let space back in, it turns out that Krasner had her own adventure tumbling, thinking that Krasner soon became disenchanted with the work.

My studio was hung with a series of black and white drawings I had done. I hated them and started to pull them off the wall and tear them and throw them on the floor…. Then another morning began picking up torn pieces of my drawings and re-glueing them. Then I started. I got something going I started. People would just come and wouldn’t put on a show or entertain. They came happily and sat down and left four hours later: you’d listen to some music and you’d look at things. What I enjoyed was not the conversation but the things we looked at…there were evenings where there was not much talk.

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (7)

2011-06-23T10:57:00.001-07:00

Fig. 06.11.01
A scriptorium. The imaginary space of this construction. [1]

These past two weeks I’ve been finishing another volley of the NewLights broadsides, spending many hours a day cutting and peeling the negative space of text away from the text itself. The process creates its own tracks, is multiply inscriptive, multiply legible. And because of that activity, I have been thinking a lot about “the body writing,” and I have been about thinking the broadsides and the altered books in relation to scribal activity and manuscript books. No conclusions yet, of course. But somewhere I see the slow pulse of a poetics of inscription, of printing, of making. Not a poetics about, but of.

[…] writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. […] [2]

Barthes uses the term “scriptor” to describe his “modern” author or writer. That particular term is very unstable, especially when examined in relationship to the activity of the scribe, typesetter, and/or printer. Is there a point where “authorship” ends, and “scripting” begins? Is it the point “where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the body writing”?

So we will start with this term “scriptor,” and begin to map out the space it occupies, or creates…

scribe n. 1. historical a person who copied out documents. informal, often humorous a writer; especially a journalist. 2. Jewish History an ancient Jewish record-keeper or, later, a professional theologian and jurist. 3. (also scriber or scribe awl) a pointed instrument used for making marks to guide a saw or in signwriting. v. 1. chiefly poetic/literary write. 2. mark with a pointed instrument.

script n. 1. handwriting as distinct from print; written characters. writing using a particular alphabet: Russian script. 2. the written text of a play, film, or broadcast. 3. Brit. a candidate’s written answers in an examination. 4. Computing a program or sequence of instructions that is carried out by another program rather than by the computer processor. v. write a script for.

scriptorium n. chiefly historical a room set apart for writing, especially one in a monastery where manuscripts were copied. [3]

[…] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. […] For [the modern scriptor] […] the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins. […] [4]

Fig. 06.11.02
Marking/making the word & the book is a game with serious consequences. "The Cathedral of Fulda preserves an early theological manuscript whose wooden covers are reputedly scored with the marks of sword blows received when St. Boniface, a German evangelist in the eighth century, used the book as a shield to ward off a pagan attack. The book was none too effective in this respect, and Boniface was killed, but the book has been held as a treasured relic ever since." [5] The imaginary space of this construction.

1. Image from: Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1980), 4.

2. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 142.

3. Definitions are from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Revised Tenth Edition, 2002.

4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 145-6.

5. Image and description from: David Pearson, Books As History: The importance of books beyond their texts, (London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008), 132-3.

THINGS ABOUT THE THINGS OF THINGS

2011-06-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

Here on a rainy morning and there is, as usual, too much interesting stuff to read on the Internet. Here on a rainy morning and that old feeling of not knowing what I am going to write. (Terrifying? Exhilirating? Dull and senseless? All of these?) I was just reading the latest installment of the HTMLGiant series “What Is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions}” (The latest post, as of the time of this writing, was with Eileen Myles.) Often in the answers to the questions there is some discussion of the label “experimental literature.” Eileen Myles seems the most suspicious of this term, saying that she “feel[s] like [she] is being asked to endorse a brand.”

And this discussion makes me wonder about that description of this press, up and over there in the sidebar --------------------------------------->

& I am always wondering about the “description” of what this “press” “does.”

Right now I am actually more concerned with the “literature” than I am with the “experimental.”

“Everything that was literature has fallen away from me.”

The reason that I call the term “literature” into question for use over there is because it connotes a finished and definable product, a thing, done, called “literature.” And there are of course a host of cultural qualifications that come along with that term. But emphasis on product is not really the whole point of what NewLights is up to. We make things, yes, but those things are dynamic, (hopefully) enacting processes in and outside of themselves.

So what do we use instead of “literature?” How about “writing?” That helps to transfer the emphasis to process. And maybe the “experimental” will be enough to say “writing not like writing.” Things, made & making.

Perhaps I will change the description tomorrow, but tomorrow how knows what will change?

[UPDATE: The word was changed to "writing" on 06/23/11.]

RECEPTION IS PRODUCTION (4): MUD LUSCIOUS PRESS NEPHEW SERIES

2011-06-16T12:35:00.001-07:00

The other day I received an email announcement from Mud Luscious Press, which is run by newly anointed NewLights author J. A. Tyler. The announcement was for the new book in their Nephew chapbook series, Meat Is All, by Andrew Borgstrom. It caught my attention for a few reasons: 1) the cover, shown above, looks great, 2) the excerpt available is weird & interesting, and 3) the edition, or the mode of production-distribution of it, was described as: “This book will be available for 90 days or until 150 copies are sold, whichever comes first.”

I was intrigued by this idea, so I wrote to Mr. Tyler asking him to explain a bit more. Here’s his response:

We take orders for our Nephew titles for either 90 days (max.) or for 150 copies (max.) and we don't print the book until we have reached one of those two points. This allows us to guarantee that we only print exactly as many copies as are ordered (zero waste, more effective production cost structures) and it also allows us to guarantee buyers that even if a title doesn't sell out immediately, they will be waiting a maximum of 90 days to receive their books (not a bad wait time for a pre-order of an exclusive title).

Then I asked him how they were actually making these books, and he said:

Our printing is done by our regular Mud Luscious Press printer, facilitated by David McNamara at Sunnyoutside - this printer allows us to do runs as small as 25 copies and as large as we like (David is fantastic!).

That’s a damn smart & practical way to handle the production of a book. And the idea of a time-based edition could yield other interesting results. Speculation aside, this approach is a concrete example of the way that new printing technologies (print-on-demand, digital presses capable of quality printing and short runs) and new distribution the technologies (the Internet) are changing the ways that small press books are produced. This kind of approach would not have been possible (at least in this streamlined of a form) 10 years ago. These kinds of innovations and changes are extremely important. And it helps to reinforce my conviction that this is the most exciting time to be engaged in textual culture since Gutenberg made that crazy invention of his.

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (6)

2011-06-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

The following quote is from: Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 58-9. It offers a sociological/cultural definition of authority, which is perhaps useful for our examination of authorship:

[…] Authority names a complex social process of dependency. A person possessed of authority differs from a tyrant, who deploys brute force to be obeyed. As Weber long ago observed, someone possessed of authority elicits voluntary obedience; his or her subjects believe in him. They may believe him to be harsh, cruel, unjust, but still, something more is present. People below come to rely on those above them. In charismatic forms of authority, those below believe that the authority figure will complete and enable what is incomplete and disabled in themselves; in bureaucratic forms of authority, they believe that institutions will take responsibility for them. […]

What’s interesting about this definition is that it points out the fact that people desire authority—it “elicits voluntary obedience.” We, as readers, expect and believe that we need the author(ity) to explain & guarantee the meaning/value of the work. Cutting away the author is to free the work from its primary signifier. Without this we are alone, tentative, fumbling. There is anxiety. There does not seem to be a goal.

I do not ask authority or authorship from the mug that I’m drinking coffee out of. Its specific function frees me of that anxiety. Can “use value” replace the author(ity) in art?

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (10)

2011-06-10T08:23:00.001-07:00

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (5)

2011-06-08T08:12:00.001-07:00

The goal is no longer to be an “artist” or “author:”

[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the master printer, […] produced a “new man” who was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […] [1]

But the “master printer” should be dissolved into the press itself:

[…] The new mode of book production […] In the figure of the small press, […] produced a “new productivity” that was adept in handling machines and marketing products even while editing texts, founding learned societies, promoting artists and authors, advancing new forms of data collection, and contributing to erudite disciplines. […]

The emphasis, obviously, remains on production, but what an expanded list of activities, all out there in the world.

1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 154. The image in this post was scanned from the cover of the book. The caption describing it reads: “A printer’s shop, detail of an engraving from Nova Reperta, a series of prints, designed by Vasari’s pupil, Stradanus, in the 1580s, engraved and published by the Antwerp firm of Galleus. […]”

GOOD READING ON THE INTERNET

2011-06-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

HTMLGiant is running a series by contributor Christopher Higgs called "What is Experimental Literature?" The posts are essentially mini-interviews with a different writer each time, gathering various thoughts on, you guessed it, "experimental fiction." This week's post featured NewLights author Brian Evenson, and it is a really interesting read. My favorite jewel-like gem is:

[...] That strikes me as the heart of innovative writing: necessity and seriousness (even if it’s a comedic seriousness) inextricably bound to a real attention to language and form, whatever the specifics of that attention might be. All the other things that we might find in innovative writing–typographical experimentation, sexual transgressiveness, narrative disruption, verbal bedazzlement, etc., etc.,–all of which are readily identifiable and can be very good things in the right hands, they all come secondary to that. But since those things are much easier to talk about, we tend to think of them as characterizing innovative writing. But such characterizations are faulty, maybe even lazy, and I think end up missing the point. [...]

You can read the rest here.

Also, Brian has a related essay in this month's issue of The Collagist, which is also really good, and deals with an idea (the process/aesthetics of stripping away) that I am very, very interested in.

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (4)

2011-06-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

When I was first thinking about and planning this series of posts, the idea was to base them on a close reading of two essays, the classics on the subject: “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes, and “What is an Author?” by Michel Foucault.

B O R I N G!

Actually, no, not boring, not at all. But if the intent here is to look critically at authorship now, then staying within just those two (authoritative) essays doesn’t make much sense. Refined approach: use the reading of the essays as a structuring principle, but build the “text” from in situ writing and other sources. Keep the authorial on its guard, and do not be beholden to just two powerful voices, no matter how insightful they are, no matter how much you may want to agree with them.

& keep up the interchange of this series on authorship with the other series on The Hand-Mechanical and The Democratic Multiple. The switching between the three is the movement of this practice.

& a new book this weekend, related & humane, and bringing other things back around. From Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 37-8:

The modern era is often described as a skills economy, but what exactly is a skill? The generic answer is that skill is a trained practice. In this, skill contrasts to the coup de foudre, the sudden inspiration. The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training. Musical prodigies are often cited to support this conviction—and wrongly so. An infant musical prodigy like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did indeed harbor the capacity to remember large swatches of notes, but from ages five to seven Mozart learned how to train his great innate musical memory when he improvised at the keyboard. He evolved methods for seeming to produce music spontaneously. The music he later wrote down again seems spontaneous because he wrote directly on the page with relatively few corrections, but Mozart’s letters show that he went over his scores again and again in his mind before setting them in ink.

We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. “I could write a good novel if only I had the time” or “if only I could pull myself together” is usually a narcissist’s fantasy. Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.

Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are “Eureka!” moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.

WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING (3)

2011-06-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

The clip above is from Emile de Antonio's 1972 film Painters Painting. The film itself (highly recommended, by the way) is made up of interviews with artists, collectors, critics, and dealers. This clip shows part of the interview with Andy Warhol. Note how he's also holding a microphone, as if he's conducting the interview as well. Warhol's "film crew" can also be seen in the background/mirror.

WHAT MATTER WHO’S SPEAKING (2)

2011-05-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

The role of publisher/designer/bookmaker naturally puts one in a strange and strained relationship with the role of the author. One spends a great deal of time and energy making and distributing work that is not necessarily one’s own. That is not completely one’s own. That can be very much one’s own.

Traditionally the designer and printer of books is supposed to hide their work, and let the author’s text be communicated as clearly, quickly, and cleanly as possible. Multiple voices of authorship are noise in the channel. Noise complicates things. Noise makes for an impure experience. Noise is the murmuring of the crowd, or the grinding of the machine, or both. Noise is confusion. Noise is public. Noise is the penetration of the world into the hermetic realm of art.

Noise is figure/ground ambiguity. Noise is far worse than figure/ground ambiguity, it is work/frame ambiguity. One never leaves, the ringing in the ears persists. The experience of the work does not stay within the reader’s interaction with the work, does not remain separate from, or other. Noise cuts right through to the receiving subject in body, space, and time. Noise speaks to the individual as one individual among many.

Silence is a myth.

The body is a noisy machine, always present.

THE 10TH ANNUAL SF ZINE FEST IS OPEN FOR REGISTRATION

2011-05-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

The 10th year! Amazing! You can get all the info about exhibiting at this year's bigger & better show here.

JAB 29 IS OUT & AVAILABLE

2011-05-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

The new issue (#29) of JAB, the Journal of Artists' Books is out. I got my copy in the mail the other day, and it is, as usual, an impressive production. I was looking through it thinking, I can't believe that they print this. Offset printing is amazing, and there are some choice "offset moments" in the magazine. For the contents and colophon pages they used proof sheets overprinted in many transparent layers of black, with silver text and image printed over that. The silver text is amazingly crisp and clear despite the heaviness of the background. And extra artists' books in the back! Get it here.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [AN ISLAND]

2011-05-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

The NewLights Press is very excited to announce the release of J. A. Tyler’s ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]. As detailed in earlier posts, this is a collaborative project done in conjunction with other small presses and one online journal, all who are releasing their part of the project today.

Below is the author’s description of the project, with links to the other pieces:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is wreckage. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ takes place as five distinct works, all built around the same core story. Each narrative is that of a girl who holds the last water in the world, a herd of chaos that takes it from her, and the boy who comes to resuscitate it all. But each story takes this kernel and shreds it in a new direction, incorporates other elements, reshapes the narrative in its own image. And each press that came aboard this project, releasing this wreckage into readers’ hands, worked on the same principle of core unity with distinct press-specific alterations. All that is left is the beautiful static hum: zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thanks to the following presses and their editors and journals, where you can gather
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [a well]: Greying Ghost (Carl Annarummo)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars]: Warm Milk Printing Press (Ben Spivey)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [this town]: The Collagist (Matt Bell)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]: NewLights Press (Aaron Cohick)

And I would also like to take this opportunity to thank J.A. Tyler, Matt Bell, Carl Annarummo and Ben Spivey. This whole project that has been a lot of fun, and I feel like some corner has been turned for NewLights, as we find our footing in our new home.

Story by J. A. Tyler
36 pages, soft cover, pamphlet stitch, 5” x 8”
Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates
Edition of 200
2011
$15 (plus shipping)

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (23): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (8)

2011-05-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Figure 05.11.01
Prospectus for Color for the Letterpress, a book by Jim Trissel/The Press at Colorado College, made in 1987. An elegant book demonstrating the possibilities for color in letterpress and relief printing. Similar in many to the screenprinted plates of Josef Albers's Interaction of Color.

Last night as I was printing I was thinking about color and I was thinking about physical, viscous ink. I was thinking about the concept of making letterpress printing the books necessary and integral to them, and the black text that I was printing seemed to disappear, to retreat into processes that we all know and do not see.

The process is not completely removed from the text—when comparing it next to a digitally printed piece, the letterpress obviously has more heft to it.

Figure 05.11.02
Text from the book printed digitally (from one of the mock-ups). The typeface is 10 pt. Palatino Linotype.

Figure 05.11.03
Text from the book letterpress printed from photopolymer plates (from one of the many proofs).

Figure 05.11.04
A close-up image of the letterpress printed text. Overinked.

There is the impression, and there is also the irregularity of the print—the ink squishes over the sides of the letterforms, the solidity of the strokes varies with the amount of ink and the arrangement of the fibers of the paper. The edition breathes.

Figure 05.11.05
A close-up image of the digitally printed text. Nothing is perfect. The key is to decide which imperfections one wants and can use.

Upon close inspection it can be seen that digital printing is also highly irregular (it’s also often more subject to environmental degradation than other printing methods). But digital printing is a generally more “transparent” medium than letterpress (“transparent” in the sense of being unobtrusive and not being noticed on most occasions) precisely because it has no impression—the interaction of digital printing with the paper’s surface is far more subtle.

(The planographic, chemical process of offset hangs somewhere between the two. Offset, on most occasions is also very “transparent.” But it doesn’t have to be.)

Figure 05.11.06
Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please

Ostranenie.

The chaotic forces of the process of printing threaten to burst through every printed word. The irregularity of the printed letter is language’s link to the physical world.

The trick is to get the reader to experience the book on multiple levels—to make a book that employs multiple legibilities that are all accessible to the reader. Accessible, not necessarily concise and clear—there will hopefully be something to dwell in.

So maybe black text on white paper doesn’t make sense anymore, or at least doesn’t make sense for the future. “Make sense” in terms of being apparent to the senses.

(Those of you who know my work and the extremely limited palette that I use will understand the statement above as being a big deal, at least for me.)

The next book will be in “full color.” The next book will be in techno-color. Pure color and four color. Not black but not quite. Is there such a thing as neutrality?

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (22): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (7)

2011-05-09T08:40:00.001-07:00

Less than a week until the release (5/15/2011) and production is drawing to an end, though there’s still a great deal to be done. This past weekend was spent printing, with Saturday being a smooth, easy day (800+ impressions/4 runs) and Sunday being exactly the opposite (200+ impressions/1 run). Both days helped to remind me why I enjoy letterpress printing, and why I’m using it for these books.

The following disjointed musings on letterpress printing, and on the analog processes of the book vs. the digital processes of the book, will be interspersed with various photos of the production process. As seen above, as seen below.

This book seems significant to NewLights from a production standpoint: it’s the largest edition done of a substantial chapbookish project (200, 36 pages), it’s the first book in more than a year, and the first to be done entirely in Colorado, it’s all letterpress printed, it’s all printed on Vandercooks (as opposed to the Heidelberg that I was printing on in SF), and it’s a new (but simple) structure/binding for NewLights. And it’s all being made relatively quickly—a little bit more than a month of focused design/production time.

This weekend brought the earlier comment “letterpress seemed to me to be a natural way of deliberately (and often painfully) connecting one's entire body to the words on a page” to mind.

Printing these digitally (or having them printed offset) would have been easier, but the thought of sitting at my desk, waiting for my laser printer, choking on its fumes, just collecting sheets, makes me existentially nauseous. I want to be an active participant, on all levels.

That being said, there are issues of clarity, of legibility. I am not as consistent and accurate as the laser printer. Usually I try to be. I almost always fail.

The printing of this book is becoming more about lack of control, or about a kind of chaotic control, than I had initially planned. Its physicality will be readily apparent, will be an integral part of the book.

The network of small impressions on the cover feels like woven cloth.

There are parts of the design that require more accuracy in registration than a laser printer can provide. I at least have a fighting chance of pulling those off.

Loud music helps.

These books don’t make themselves. Somehow, that’s important. I am struggling to articulate why.

Second wind, third wind, fourth wind, fifth wind. & so on. To be continued.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (21): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (6)

2011-05-06T08:03:00.001-07:00

ANALOG

VS.

DIGITAL

TRANSITIONS

2011-05-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

Isn’t that above image amazing? It’s a poem by Robert Creeley, with accompanying German translation, published in 1962 in issue #7 of the mimeo magazine Rhinozeros. Jed Birmingham recently posted it to the Mimeo Mimeo blog. There is some wonderful freedom in that approach. Seeing it today makes me realize how much more great stuff there is to do.

Today is the eleventh birthday of the NewLights Press. I was just reading my post from a year ago, and as part of that I had a list of what I hoped to publish in that coming year, Year 10 as it has been “officially” known. I managed to do a handful of things on that list. Not too bad, considering I had no idea that I would be moving to a new state and starting a new job when I wrote that. Not too bad. Could’ve been better. Could’ve been worse. The important thing is, I think, that things are getting made, and that the pace & engagement has been able to increase since the move.

It feels really good to be in the thick of production on the current project. Sure, there have been some late nights, some sore muscles, and some confused, slightly late mornings. But in less than 2 weeks there will be 200 more books. The first NewLights book in more than a year and a half. Year 10 was the first of 10 years that NewLights did not release a book. But that year is over, and now things are going to get going & going.

And summer and some focused time to work around the corner.

Things are good. Books are being made. The eternal questioning and wrestling continue.

Thank you for reading, thank you for the future.

LESSONS FROM BILLY JOEL: SMALL PRESS ECONOMICS

2011-05-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

This song is what inspired me to get into the small press game.

The line "talk me into losing, just as long as I can win" really resonated with me.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (20): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (5)

2011-04-28T08:20:00.001-07:00

Speaking of the interplay between analog and digital techniques, one thing that I do quite often is make digital mock-ups of something that will be letterpress printed. It’s a quick way to work with multiple colors, transparency, and sometimes, depending on the discrepancy between a face in lead and a face in bytes, the computer can be used to rough out what type set by hand will look like.

(Side Thought: Might it be useful to have a digitally rendered version of certain faces in lead, at an accurate scale and set width? One of them main advantages of digital design is the “bottomless typecase” and how it allows for the breaking of one massive barrier to book design: the ability to see the book and the text as a complete sequence before all the time is spent setting it in lead. A printer might have enough type to set a small book of poems up in its entirety, but it is rare that one printer has enough of one face to set even a short (10 or more 5” x 8” pages) prose piece. One could have one’s book Monotype cast as a whole thing, and then refine in the stick from there, but a) that’s expensive and time-consuming, and b) you end up with a lot of Monotype afterwards.)

I start the design process with the color digital mock-up, testing out a bunch of ideas, usually moving from very drastically different overall approaches to very small refinements once a general design has decided upon. (The mock-ups are usually made as multi-page InDesign documents so that I can click through and compare different versions rapidly.)

The images above show some of the mock-ups for the cover/jacket of ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]. The long images are what the cover will look like completely folded out (there are flaps that wrap around to the inside of the book) and the smaller images are what the front cover would look like on its own. The paper I will be using is orange, and the printing will be in a bunch of different colors, at varying degrees of opacity, all overprinted closely. The transparent gray circle is actually a digital rendering of an already existing relief block. (We have lots of interesting shape blocks at the Press at CC, and I often make digital versions of them. Which goes back to my earlier comments about a digital lead type.) This cover, despite all the colors, will actually only be printed with one polymer plate and the single circle relief block. It will be 7 or 8 runs (there’s printing on the interior too). It’s always interesting to see the real, physical print slowly emerge at the press after I’ve become so familiar with the screen version. I am always surprised by how the printed thing looks, by how much better it looks, by how real it is someone’s hands.