On the Making of Books

Stephanie Sauer

 

I cut my thumb with an X-acto blade. It bleeds. Blood stains the paper. I throw this copy away.

To do: correct layout, check mock-ups, produce catalog, translate inches into centimeters, pounds into grams. Design packaging, calculate royalties, finish contract for a book that is already in print. Bind review copies, send out. Fold press releases. Tighten text blocks. Calculate sales tax, collect, send to state. Organize release parties. Keep cover price accessible.

A final printing is finished. My eyes move to the one, two mistakes that made it through. I feel devastated, like I’ve betrayed the artists who have trusted me with their work. I’m inclined to throw the whole imprint out, start over. But no one else I show the copy to notices. Seasoned publishers assure that this is part of the process, that there is no such thing as an error-free book.

In California, I send digital files to the print shop twenty minutes from my studio, check the proofs in person. The printers send the letterpress order off with a man who comes into town from the mountain once a week on Wednesdays. He returns my order the following week. I run my fingers over the ridges and recesses. Perfect.

Now when I visit a bookstore, I scrutinize each title I find to see where it was printed. China, mostly. Some, Canada.

In New York City, I pick up a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” It is small, pocket size, with a two-color letterpress cover. Down at the bottom I see the Penguin Books logo. The back cover tells me, “Now PENGUIN brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.” This book is part of a line of “classics” printed to look like they are independently published and printed by hand.

I find this aping by one of the largest publishers on the planet of an aesthetic made popular by scrappy, independent publishers both clever and disgusting. The attempt to edge in one of the fastest growing book markets without undertaking the financial risk of finding and affirming new writers or paying royalties (all work in the Penguin classics series, for example, is in the public domain) rings empty. There is no contribution to culture, only a one-sided feeding.

At a Livraria Cultura in São Paulo, I spot an entire display case of porcelain penguin figurines nestled amongst a new line of trade edition paperbacks of European and North American “classics” from Penguin Books. The display celebrates Penguin’s new partnership with Companhia das Letras, one of Brazil’s largest publishing companies. It strikes me as odd that they would advertise this partnership.

In the studio, I snap a ruler in place, run a bone folder along the fibers, crease a cover. Finger pads become raw from ten hours of this. Knuckles stiff.

The many rooms of one author-artist’s house are filled with artwork and sketchpads, brushes and pens and paint-stained canisters that once held yogurt, tomatoes, beans. He shuffles me from room to room in his socks, showing off recent work. We sit next to a table with a stack of notebooks piled high, each one only several months old. He flips through these and I notice an ongoing conversation at the bottom of each page: two quickly-rendered dogs who talk shit in dialogue bubbles about whatever the artist has drawn. I ask him about these characters, and he tells me he sketches them every day because they ground him. He started a series of drawings on napkins that tells their whole story. He springs from his seat and rummages through a stack of papers on a TV tray, then finds a photocopy of his original cover sketch. The skin on my neck prickles. “This one! I want to publish this story.”

To do: Orchestrate social media posts. Consider starting a Twitter account. No, no time now.

The first imprint is no longer selling, not much anyway. When I have a chance, I need to think up a new marketing strategy. When I have a chance.

I spread out on the kitchen table PVA glue, horsetail brush, letterpress covers, codex interiors (two sets), book board, sandpaper, scrap paper. Then I open a beer.

One hundred and eighty DVD covers scored, folded. Seventy more to go.

It is now going on the ninth month that I have lived with my mother and stepfather. In the U.S., I am much too old for this.

13 5/8” x 7 5/8”. 13 5/8” x 7 5/8”. 13 5/8” x 7 5/8”. 13 5/8” x 7 5/8”. Shit, re-measure.

My brother and I design a homemade nipping press out of wood from our mother’s cabinet shop. We rummage through our grandfather’s scrap pile after he dies and find large bolts, square nuts and use them to secure it. My brother engraves his initials and the date into the unfinished wood.

I make a morning for my own writing. It turns into a whole day. I resent publishing other people’s work. I worry about this feeling. Then it goes away. It just needed to show itself, I think.

I begin contacting other artists, telling them how much I enjoy their work when I do.

Bologna, Italy: Children’s Book Fair. Rows and rows of carefully crafted Italian imprints, highly artistic books from countries all over the world. We try to negotiate for the rights to translate a well-known Finnish comic strip into Portuguese. We fail. We discover we were invited to the table only to be used as leverage in another press’ bid for the same text. We have no idea how to navigate this world of corporate rights acquisition. We think, after this, that maybe we don’t want to. Maybe we will just contact the artists directly, like I do with Copilot, and see what happens on an international scale with our new Brazilian press. Maybe, just maybe, this will work.

A tactful rejection letter comes in the mail from Printed Matter in New York City. They receive an overwhelming amount of artist book submissions, you see.

I try a new approach: the book as collaborative process.

At dinner, someone says, “Nobody reads anymore. Books are obsolete.”

At the drafting table, storm outside. Hot coffee. A podcast playing. A book makes itself in my hands while I’m playing around with a darting tool from my sewing cabinet. I dart a strip of paper and it looks like a perforation. I fold the strip, then open at the perforated line: the perfect way to play hide-and-seek with a poem my girlfriend and I call, “it’s fun to be naked.” I make a mock-up, then an entire first run. I break for more coffee.

Museum of Arts & Design, New York City: “Slash: Paper Under the Knife.” I want to step inside these pieces. I want to bite them, lay down naked inside them. I buy the catalog.

I return home, open the studio door. A magic pours out. I giggle.

66 sheets, double-sided + two photo inserts + one hand-folded letter + die cuts. Perfect bound, detachable cover, exposed glue. Score at 5 1/2”, 5 7/8”, 11 3/8”, 11 3/4”, 17 1/4”.

I should be doing my work. Isn’t this my work? Why does the art made by the lone artist hold more weight than work made together, in collaboration? Aren’t I the one to decide if the distinction even needs to exist?

Fuck, what am I going to do for dinner?

I receive an email from an artist’s son saying his father’s publication, in his estimation, is not a book. The project fell short, he tells me; it is not the financial windfall he had expected.

A letter arrives in the mail from a student who attended a book arts presentation I gave at the local state college last fall. Enclosed is one of the five copies of his first handmade book and two paragraphs on how the presentation changed his life.

Amazon.com’s monthly rates for “Pro Vendors” are beyond my reach at the moment. And who wants to give money to Amazon? PayPal it is.

First release party for book three. Five copies are stolen from the display table. The bookseller refuses to take a percentage from sales; she and her husband are into creating community.

The writer of this new book was just diagnosed with cancer.

A vendor with 10 books on consignment tries to cheat me out of money by claiming that I’d left fewer books than I’d claimed. I’d been too trusting and hadn’t drawn up a formal contract, however, so am left with no way to prove the amount. I pull all copies that remain, warn other makers who in turn share similar stories about this vendor.

I register ISBN numbers, opt not to buy a $50 bar code.

Walking from our apartment to Rua do Lavradio, Rio de Janeiro’s famed antique avenue in the old city center where A Bolha Editora co-founder, Rachel, and I are going to hunt for shelving, we pass a narrow shop with dusty furniture stacked up to the ceiling all the way to the back. We peruse the collection, find an old wooden cubby holder once used in a schoolhouse. The vast girth and smallish compartments are perfect for our limited stock of many titles. The old man in a holey t-shirt at the counter will even cut it down to fit the space left from renovations in our soon-to-be bookstore. It is the first piece of furniture to be installed there. We have big dreams for this space.

I consider cutting down edition sizes of all the books I handmake. The next one, though, will be the largest yet.

I need an assistant.

My author, the one newly diagnosed with cancer, drives west for an hour along the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, turns right at the stop light, left past the feed store, and puts his car in first up the hill on his way to my California studio. He’s come to check the mock-up of his book I’ve printed and pressed and sewn and glued. I take him through the turning of each page, the interactive elements. We discuss the way the cover unfolds and detaches as an integral part of the book’s desire toward exposure. We agree to several alterations and then go for a walk.

Sixty-six sheets, double-sided + two photo inserts + one hand-folded letter + die cuts. Perfect bound, detachable cover, exposed glue. Score at 5 1/2”, 5 7/8”, 11 3/8”, 11 3/4”, 17 1/4”.

▱

Two and a half weeks before I am to deliver the forthcoming book to a confirmed release party crowd at the CSU Summer Arts Festival, the printer calls to tell me the vendor doing the oversized offset covers has backed out. My printer tells me they found another vendor, but that they cannot provide a press proof. At such late notice, I have to trust. So, I trust, then vow to myself to avoid oversize offset orders when possible.

Two weeks and three days before I am to deliver the forthcoming book, the printer calls to tell me that the machine they are running this job on is on the floor in ten pieces with two technicians working to fix it. They are finishing up, he assures, almost done.

Two weeks and a day before I am to deliver the forthcoming book, the printer calls to tell me that he has made a mistake. He tells me they will reprint all the books if I need, but asks me to come look at these.

My printer tells me this job is giving him an ulcer.

My intern and his wife drive up the mountain to my parents’ cabinet shop to help edition all 500 copies of the book on the eve of its release. He scores in five places and folds each oversize wrap-around offset cover. She slides the loose photo into place between pages six and seven, fixes photo corners to a non-photo insert and adheres it to page 29. I cut a rectangular frame out of page eighty-nine, then fold and insert copies of the handwritten letter after page 106. We take turns sharing music, stories. When the parts are ready to assemble, we eat something, then take a walk in the woods near a defunct mine. We turn our shirts into apron pockets to gather madrone bark for a paper-making project they’re trying at home. We return to the shop and share in wrapping the oversize offset covers around the text block, hooking the left flap around page three.

I receive an invitation to the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, a 1902 Arts and Crafts utopian-experiment-turned-artist-residency in upstate New York. I go. In a studio there, I touch my hands to the walls and the built-in furniture as if drawing out human fluids absorbed into the wood upon its construction. When I enter this building, when I move my body through its quiet, I feel surrounded by past makers. The presence they’ve left in the structures they’ve crafted protects and fuels the whole of my work—the writing, the designing, the binding, making public. Their century-old presence assures that mine and those of the authors I publish will be felt in the hands that hold open our books.

Several years after I started my first press, news outlets commit coverage to the fact that, in the United States, e-book sales have not outpaced those of physical books, as had been expected. Instead, reporters find that readers have gravitated toward publications with more artisanal aspects. They call this tendency a symptom of nostalgia in the face of obsolescence, say it is reflective of a larger craft movement, and report that small press culture accounts for the literary market that has grown most since the advent of the e-book.

The lines on my self-healing cutting mat have bled where I passed the bone folder over them in the production of the fourth book.

My thumb cramps.

I read for a few hours and remember I love it.

 

Stephanie Sauer is the author of “Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family” (Noemi Press) and “The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force” (University of Texas Press). She is the founding editor of Copilot Press, a co-founding editor of A Bolha Editora, and currently teaches prose in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas program.