WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING (3)

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)

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

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

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]

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): as of June 28, 2012, all money from sales of this and other NewLights books will be donated to the Red Cross to assist people displaced by Colorado wildfires.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (23): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (8)

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)

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)

ANALOG


VS.


DIGITAL

TRANSITIONS

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

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)

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.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (19): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (4)

One theme or question that keeps re-emerging (for me) as I work on this book and daydream about others, is the question: why letterpress? What is it about that particular method of printing that makes it the best choice for the production of these books? How can the “best” choice be qualified/quantified? And as I work through this project (designing, proofreading, kerning, emailing, sweating over the paper cost, getting nervous about the cost of the film & plates) this question, “Why letterpress?” keeps coming back into my mind.

And if why letterpress, why use digital designs and photopolymer plates? Why not use lead type?

And, related: How does digital design translate into physical letterpress printing? Does the printing process influence the design (in a way beyond the limitations of the physical medium) or is the process of printing a mechanical-technical execution, a transparent rendering of a transparent design?

Why all this time and all this money on this process? Because it’s “nicer?” Because it’s “finer?” Because it’s more “expensive?” Because it’s “older?” If it is better, or even more appropriate for these projects, let’s figure out why.

***

A friend once commented that one thing she liked about the NewLights books is that “there was a reason for them to be letterpress.” She observed something that I want to be embedded in every book (and strung through the form-content-reception): a series of observations & reflections on, and experiments with, the chosen mode(s) of production. This series of “Production is Reception” is literally that. But these explorations must be enacted in the objects, and re-enacted every time a reader interacts with the books.

I think that an interesting way to address these “Production is Reception” posts for ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is to look at the project specifically in terms of letterpress printing, of letterpress working with and against digital design. So we’ll probably flicker back and forth between exploratory posts on the “why” of this kind of printing and technical descriptions of the processes of working between the analog and the digital.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (18): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (3)

This whole weekend was spent dwelling in and on the minutiae of typography. The image above shows a piece of that—the pink highlighted dots are character combinations that needed kerning. (Translation: the space between the letters looked wrong, often too wide, and it needed to be adjusted manually.) I will spare you the details of this process (at least for now) and let’s just say that I am trying to be thorough, careful, and thoughtful, on a micro level, about the typography of this new book. But the important question is: why?

And I have been asking myself that same question between each 1/1000 of an inch adjustment. Why? I certainly enjoy the work (most of the time) but that may not be enough to justify this activity, which 99.5% of the readers of the book will never notice, as the time for printing and binding shrinks. & time is our primary joy, our primary tragedy.

It’s partly about “doing a good job” or “doing it the right way.” It’s also important to remember that typographic decisions are aesthetic decisions, and so the “right” way is always culturally determined and needs to be interrogated in order for the discipline to grow. The discipline. But of course a part of that interrogation entails a thorough understanding of the rules to be questioned. Part of doing this is about educational self-discipline. And no art disciplines the producer like typography.

Why is the spacing important, just in terms of aesthetics & functionality? The space between and around the letters, words, lines and paragraphs, the negative space, is the glue that holds the text together visually. It’s a matter of balance, of the shapes of the letters being made to sit in and move through that space. The type always relies on the negative space for its articulation. It can also be overwhelmed by that space and disappear into the blankness of the page. Making type hold weight, compositionally, spatially, temporally, is one of my primary concerns as a designer and maker.

But back to process. Why the kerning? Another attempt: I am an advocate of meditative rigor, of looking and working hard. (Side note: in these descriptions the matter of “depth” keeps reappearing in my initial writing, but the postmodernist me carefully edits those out, suspicious of such things. What is depth? Why is it bad? Or good? Is it spatial? Or can it be temporal?) Again this idea of discipline emerges.

Why are you worried about the kerning? This kind of fine tuning kills the immediacy of production, the “make it & get it out there” ethic that keeps an energy flowing through this kind of literature. If I wasn’t concerned with the (choose one: ethics, politics, aesthetics, economics) of process, and only cared about “getting it out there,” I definitely would not be messing around with the spacing. Can you read it? Good. It’s fine.

You’re not just spending time and energy on the spacing itself, but also in debating its ethics. Is it that important? Maybe and maybe not. But I think it’s a key or point of departure towards a larger discussion about practice. And that discussion is maybe the point of the practice. As always, to be continued, as always.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (17): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (2)

One of the first things that the group of presses agreed to keep consistent across all of the books was the page size: 8” x 5”. That’s the largest size one can comfortably get out of a folded 8.5’ x 11” sheet and have a little space to trim the edges of the book. And we wanted to size them for convenient digital printing. So based off of that page size, I started working on layouts. I began with splitting up the space of the page/spread into regular divisions:

(The process for this is explained in more detail here and here.)

Those divisions are then used to determine the margin scheme of the book. When I was working on drawing the schema to divide the pages I was intuitively drawn toward dividing the page into thirteenths. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but it sounded like fun—it’s an odd number, with cultural resonance, it’s prime, etc. So I built a grid, based on the page/spread, that is divided into rectangles that are each 1/13 of the dimension that they are made out of. (Note: all of my divisions are based on the 8 x 5 page, which is then just doubled into the spread.):



And after the grid was built I started playing around with margin schemes, and settled on this “reversed” scheme:


I wanted the text/book to look and feel heavy. Breaking the traditional margin set-up helps to draw the reader’s attention to the book as a made object, to the materiality of the text, and to the overall proportions of the book and how it sits in their hands. That lowered text block gave me an idea for the title page sequence. And it just seemed to “work” with the story and the 1/13 based division.

And speaking of 1/13, as I worked more on the design I realized that the number 13 makes other appearances: the sum of the two dimensions of the page: 8 + 5 = 13. Also, when the phrase “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” shows up in the text (which it does a lot) the default number of Z’s is 13. Intuition in design often links up to “real” properties as the design progresses.

Then it was that old, favored question of the typeface, and the proportions of that. After much waffling, I settled on my old friend Palatino Linotype, because it was the only one that seemed dark enough—all of the other standard, serifed text faces just looked weak on the page. After some playing with scale and proportion, I settled on 10 pt. Palatino with 12.4 pt leading. The .4 points on the leading brings the baseline of the bottom line perfectly in sync with the margin scheme. Being able to easily make fractional, minute adjustments like that is one of the nice, expansive things about digital design.


The face on the left is 10/12.4 Adobe Jenson Pro. The face on the left is 10/12.4 Palatino Linotype. And then I think somewhere around this point in the process I decided that I was going to letterpress print the whole thing.

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (16): ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (1)

Somewhere around a year and a half ago the writer J.A. Tyler contacted NewLights and a few other small presses to see if we were interested in a project idea. Mr. Tyler had written a story that existed in five different versions or iterations—not five parts in a sequence—one story realized five different ways, all based on the same “core.” And the idea, after the stories were written, was to see if he could get all five iterations published, each by a different small press, all at the same time. The main title of the project was ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. The proposed release date was May 15, 2011. I said yes. The time is drawing near.

The other presses involved in the project are:

Greying Ghost
Warm Milk Printing Press
The Collagist

We had a fifth press, but they folded in the interim between conception and execution. And now it’s too late, so we are down to four for now.

The idea spoke to me for a few reasons. First, it involved a group of presses all working together. Anything that expands and deepens the community I am all for. Second, the project relies on the idea of repetition and difference for its shape. I’ve been experimenting with multiple iterations of my own texts/books, so it’s interesting to see how someone else approached the same problem. And third, the story fit the specs for more chapbookish type production that I was looking to do. Good timing and a good fit.

Right now the book is towards the final design stages. Future posts will go into more detail about the individual steps.

BROADSIDE PRE-SALE ENDS THIS WEEK

This Friday, April 15th, 2011, will be the last day that the 2009 - 2011 NewLights Press broadsides will be available for purchase at the pre-sale price of $50 for one, or $220 for the set of five. Click here and scroll down for more info and images.

WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING (1)

I wants to be:

[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]

I is not:

[...]
a standard level of quality [...]
a certain field of conceptual or theoretical coherence [...]
a stylistic uniformity [...]
a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge
[...]

What I is is not that. The world?


The quotes are from: Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 128.

WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING (0)

A month or so ago I received an email from a poet/printer that I admire, and in that email he wrote:

[...] I want to say however how much I admire and value your enterprise - for me, the book has to stay alive, and while I appreciate the argument (I have other reasons for being forever grateful for some writings of Roland Barthes), the author has to stay alive also - for who benefits by the death of the author, of individuality, of specific agency - well, it's money, power, and monopolistic enterprise of every sort [...]



And I realized that he had a good point—the "death of the author" is a dangerous idea. I realized that in my, shall we say, postmodern zeal I had dismissed the author entirely, had not looked at the concept critically, and had not, very importantly, examined how that concept is playing out today in the cultural field. A regular reader of this blog (if such an angel exists) would know that the work of NewLights is deeply concerned with the problem(s) of making. In fact, it is that activity of making, that problem, the risk and danger of it, the absurdity of it, the absolute necessity of it, that drives the whole enterprise. So there is something worth recovering in the idea of authorship, at least of authorship in the sense of “one who makes things.” But there are aspects of authorship worth shedding as well—that are necessary to shed—namely its links to authority and the power that denies the very act of authorship.

And of course where there is danger, there is something at stake, and that is where the interesting discussions are.

Mr. Beckett, via Mr. Foucault, provides our title for this series. The full quote:

What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.

MORNING, RUTHLESS, MORNING

I feel like I am just waking up, bleary-eyed, and seeing this screen after a long, long sleep. It is 6 AM, figuratively and literally. I have been away. A new day/week/month/year of work beckons. I hope that I am up to the task.

(Too many “I”s on this blog lately. This is not about me. This is about the work. (What is “this?”))

There have been two main threads of discussion-dissection-re-presentation here lately: the series of posts on hand-mechanical processes (“Machined, or the Hand-Mechanical”) and the series on the democratic multiple (“The Return of the Democratic Multiple?”). Soon, there will be a third, untitled as of yet, about authorship and based in a close reading of at least two essays. Probably bits of more, as these things are always constellations, shimmering. And all three threads will be braided together, albeit unevenly. Albeit barely a braid. Perhaps a series of clumps. But they will be there, together. And isn’t being together what counts?

And of course all of those things will be here with these things, the documentation of and elaboration on the processes of making and distributing. And somehow all of it goes together, and we see, here, now, a system chaotically unfolding, perpetually cutting out its own heart. This is the only way for us to operate.

UPDATE: BROADSIDE PRE-SALE

The pre-sale on the 2009 - 2011 NewLights Press broadsides will be ending on April 15th, 2011. On that date they will go up to full price: $80 for a single broadside and $350 for all five (Sirois, Evenson, Trommer, Iijima, and Yau. The Al-Mutanabbi broadsides are not for sale.). Obviously those are high prices for broadsides (why do broadsides sell for less than prints?), but there is an enormous amount of time sunk into and peeled away from every single copy. For a full documentation of the process, scroll down or click here.

The pre-sale has been going on for a long time, and now the editions are almost to a point where I will have enough complete to readily fill orders.

MEAT COVE, CAPE BRETON

Text by KC Trommer
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200

THE TRAGEDY OF CYMBELINE

Text by Brenda Iijima
Letterpress with hand-mechanical printing and delamination
Variable edition of 25
12” x 18”
2011
$200

THE eBOOK USER'S BILL OF RIGHTS

The following was brought to my attention via See Also, a library blog authored by my colleague Steve Lawson, as part of a response to Harper Collins placing a limit of 26 library checkouts on its ebooks. "The eBook User's Bill of Rights" comes from a blog called Librarian in Black. This is a big issue, and I hope that I will be able to post more about it soon. Anyways. here's the Bill:

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work

MAKING FACES: METAL TYPE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Buy the DVD here.

2011 SOUTHERN GRAPHICS COUNCIL CONFERENCE

The NewLights Press/The Press at Colorado College will be at the Southern Graphics Council Conference Publisher's Fair, which takes place on Saturday, March 19, from 8 AM to 3 PM. If you're going to be at the conference (in St. Louis this year) stop by and say hello. Both presses will have a bunch of new work to show and sell. It will be great to see you again.

SPEAKING OF WRITING AS TECHNOLOGY, THIS STUFF JUST GETS MORE COMPLICATED EVERYDAY

A friend sent this to me the other day. It's fun, one of the smarter and more successful versions of this argument that I've seen:

DEMOCRACY=HOMEWORK

I'm really excited that a writing/book class at the Corcoran College of Art & Design is using The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press and the recent "Democratic Multiple" posts on this blog. The professor, Casey Smith, asked me to write a question for a 15 minute free writing exercise for the students, on the theme of the "democratic multiple." And what's more democratic than a school assignment?

So here they are, answer one or more. You have 15 minutes. When complete, please post your writing to the comments section.

What are the qualities of the multiple that allow for its possibility of being "democratic?"

What is the relationship between fine art and functionality? How does the idea of the "democratic multiple" complicate, change, and/or enrich that relationship?

What are the particular qualities of books and a reader/viewer's interaction with them that allow for an exploration of the "democratic multiple?" Of functionality and art?

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (8)

There is a good post on Printeresting about the use of screenprinted signs, made by Nicolas Lampert and Colin Matthes of Justseeds, during the recent protests in Wisconsin. The signs are great—graphically and textually effective. The post provides some links, some background info, and it specifically mentions that in this case we really see the “democratic multiple” in action, helping to make democracy happen. The “democratic” may not be just about accessibility (Is it cheap? Is it multiple? Is it easily understood?) but may also be about functionality (Can I use it and how and why?)

MACHINED, or THE HAND-MECHANICAL (9)

Thinking through those “Democratic Multiple” posts, and reading some essays over the weekend, I’m beginning to see the points of intersection between different discursive paths. Everything is, of course, related. The hand-mechanical emerges again, as a practice, as a practice of the inside as well as the outside. From the essay “Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness,” by Walter Ong:

[…]

Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer. Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves, as Plato’s age had not yet made it fully a part of itself, we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing (and especially alphabetic writing) is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment: styli or brushes and pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints […]. Writing is the most drastic of the three technologies [writing, print, computer]. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.

By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. […] Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious. The process of putting spoken language into writing is governed by consciously contrived, articulable rules: for example, a certain pictogram will stand for a certain specific word, or a will represent a certain phoneme, b another, and so on. […] To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.

Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, proper interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it. The modern orchestra, for example, is the result of high technology. A violin is an instrument, which is to say a tool. […] Beethoven’s score for his Fifth Symphony consists of very careful directions to highly trained technicians, specifying exactly how to use their tools. Legato: do not take your finger off one key until you have hit the next. Staccato: hit the key and take your finger off immediately. […] The fact is that by using a mechanical contrivance [tool, technology], a violinist […] can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance. To achieve such expression of course the violinist […] has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of ‘practice’, learning how to make the tool do what it can do. Such a shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life. […] [1]

1. Walter Ong, “Orality and Literacy: Writing Restructures Consciousness,” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 107-108.

NOW WE BE BLOGGIN'

The Blog of the Press that is The Press at Colorado College is really up and running now, with posts from my deputies (apprentices), as well as myself.

THE RETURN OF THE “DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLE?” (7)

Let’s try to leave the sources to the side for a bit, outline some questions, see if we can open up something new. One question/problem that comes up when thinking about and working with the “democratic” multiple is the idea, accepted as common truth, that the “general public” is not interested in, or not capable of understanding, art that is “intelligent” or “sophisticated.” I really struggle with that idea, and I’m not sure it should be accepted as always 100% true—large generalizations about large groups of people often aren’t. Reality will always be more complicated than our methods of understanding it.

And that idea, that art for the public can’t be smart, is implicit in the discussions of the artists’ book as democratic multiple outlined earlier—the artists’ book fails as a democratic form not because of its affordability, but because the content is not geared towards a general audience.

[This is a difficult problem, one that runs through and influences our culture everyday. There is probably no solution, and I have no idea if we’ll even be able to get close to one in these posts. But maybe we can open some windows.]

In the last post we looked at the idea of “the failure” of the artists’ book as a democratic multiple. The question of failure remains an important one: what defines the “failure?” Are we equating the success of an art form with its success in the marketplace? Are there other ways to measure success? Who or what set the deadline that this “failure” is judged against? Can there ever be a complete “failure” in the world of discourse?

Does it make sense to separate artists’ books out from longer histories of independent publishing? From art and literature in general?

What demographics make up this “general audience?” How do we define this audience? People who are not book artists? People who are not artists? People who ordinarily aren’t a part of the art world at all? [What makes one part of the art world? How does one get in?] Is this general audience diverse, or are they implicitly homogenous, defined in terms of the dominant class/race?

What kinds of content are normally considered “appropriate” for a general audience? What kinds of formal structure are normally considered “appropriate” for a general audience? [What’s with the word “appropriate” here? It makes it sound like the general audience needs to be treated like a child.]

Who is responsible for the quality of cultural production—the culture industry or the culture market?

One thing we can agree on: the amount of people buying experimental literature/artists’ books is small, when compared to the amount of people buying movie tickets, watching certain television shows, or buying and reading copies of genre fiction. The actual audience is actually small. Is that bad? How big is the potential audience, and does that matter?