"Publication is the creation of a Public"

Matthew Stadler, founder of Publication Studio, based in Portland, Oregon. The studio prints and binds books on demand but moreover is "a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense — not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being."

THE THING QUARTERLY

We've just made a pack of double fronted playing cards in collaboration with the artist Ryan Gander. They were published by a quarterly periodical based in San Francisco called The Thing. The reason I mention it is because as a publication The Thing is quite unusual. In the words of their website: "The Thing Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers"

This is Issue 6, by Allora & Calzadilla. It consistes of a blank book, entitled "Problems and Promises", which is attached to a tennis shoe. One of the tennis shoe laces is sewn into the spine of the book.

WHY PUBLISH?

From the book burnings of China's 3rd century BC Qin Dynasty to the recent censorship of google.cn the control of published information has been a preoccupation for those in power across the world.

Book burnings in Berlin, 10 May 1933.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1873, an institution supposedly dedicated to supervising the morality of the public.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Complete Broadcast

Here's the whole radio drama by Orson Welles, broadcast in New York on 30 October 1938. The radio play was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and part of a series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

The headline on The New York Times the next day indicates the effect the broadcast had. The way Welles plays on the format of radio and in doing so demands that listeners question what they hear on the radio in future is an approach that could be taken to any medium.

Inside Nobrow

Sam Arthur and Alex Spiro will be coming in this Wednesday to talk about Nobrow, their young-but-already-influential independent publishing venture. Their print ethic makes this a platform both for the craft itself and for emergent voices.



These two films (via Creative Review) give a good idea of their set-up and process. Thanks to our own Natalie Kay-Thatcher for the link to this. And special mention to Clark Keatley, who graduated last year with some amazing printmaking , now spending a portion of his time with Nobrow.

Some Publications #1

A glimpse of some publications available via Stand Up Comedy, based in Portland, Oregon. All quotes from the site.



"Veneer (or, alternately, Ve) is cultural critique via gesture, phenomena, documentation, and detritus. It's also the arithmetic of print and its possibilities, with an emphasis on technical minutia stretched to the edge of absurdity as its epistemological approach."







"The Kingsboro Press is operating out of New York and is edited by Megan Plunkett and Daniel Wagner. It's without imprimatur, that is to say, it's without judgement."



And so it has curiously judged. It's raw art and lit, and it changes formats each time. It is winding through a certain underground path."



"Sasa Annual Report 2007. The Korea-based conceptual artist compiles annual reports of his activities, purchases, and general living. An on-going archival project that takes a different form in each volume."



"This year's report is interpreted in a series of bar graphs. Strange how analytical information takes on an abstract quality. Folded poster in dust sleeve".

Irma Boom

Irma Boom on 'The Most Beautiful Book in the World' from D&AD.

The page as an alternative space

We recently visited the legendary Printer Matter in New York. It exceeded expectations. I bought 'I See / You Mean' by Lucy R. Lippard and subsequently find that she was one of the founders in +/- 1976. Alongside her was Sol Lewitt. Throughout his career, he acknowledged and used the book format on merit, with a recurrent nine-or-sixteen-square-grid, as seen above (in Autobiography (1980)) and below (in Four basic kinds of straight lines (1969)) (via).



An excellent interview with Lippard here, where she describes the original motives for setting up Printed Matter; useful for us looking in the 'Publish' project, for propellant beyond the churn-out of a showcase 'zine. And also the importance of distribution. She says: "We were all into artists'' books at the time because they seemed yet another way to get art out of the gallery/museum, to give artists control of their own production, and to get art out to a broader audience. Somebody wrote about 'the page as an alternative space.'"

Books that lie open

Robin Kinross, typographer, writer and proprietor of Hyphen Press, writes here on the 'vexed issue of book-production: binding techniques. He discusses paperbacks, the advantages of the relatively new 'Otabind' process, where the book-block is free of the cover sheet spine, allowing for a flat opening (pictured above) and the problems with the 'hot-glue' binding (pictured below), which cracks when the book is opened by the 'serious reader'.



He goes on to say: 'One might remark also that a book open on a table – while the reader holds a cup of tea in both hands (for warmth and comfort), or sews a button on a shirt, or carries a young child – is no more than a mark of decent civilization. So the binding should be strong enough to withstand this opening-out.'

the Glacier Project

Series of books by Elizabeth Jackson that explore and explain the nature of glaciers through the books' physical qualities. Click here for more information

Two Colour for Seven Colour

An invitation card by Duncan Hamilton for an exhibition by Sarah Crowner of Dexter Sinister. Under his working name, The Uses of Literacy, he designs, publishes, workshops and lectures. Explore the non-hierarchical index for his span of interests and actions. In terms of independent publishing, his use of the Riso and Ricoh digital duplicators, is very interesting. A build-up of solid and halftone colour with overprinting, passing the card back through the machine with changes of colour cartridge (see sequence here), arrived at the result which cites Max Bill's classic cover design for Johannes Itten's Die Farbe (via Reference Library).

Japanese binding

An alternative to the 'case-bound, multi-sectioned binding' you've made in the workshop is a simple, classic Japanese binding (via). It works especially well with a landscape-format and with thin paper-stock.



The 'stab' technique to make holes in the book is traditional but we've found it works well to clamp the book between two pieces of mdf cut to the book size, then pin-drill in the workshop using the pillar drill.