HM Enters Early 21st Century

A few housekeeping notes for this post, but first something that might actually be interesting...

March was Women’s History Month. Kelmscott Books has issued three catalogs that mark the event, highlighting work from female artists and printers. For some reason they aren’t listed under Catalogs on the shop’s site, maybe they will be. But the catalog for the New York Book Fair, which is listed on the site, includes some items that reflect the shop’s interest in issues social and political. It’s encouraging to see a business not shying away from these topics.

I wondered if a book that made a big splash when published in 1995 was included in the women’s catalogs: The Ladies Printing Bee. No. Not surprising, it sold out pretty quickly. The edition was just 195 copies, and a chunk of that had to go to the 36 contributing presses from around the world. It was a fantastic collection of work, artistically, technically and intellectually. Published & shepherded by Jules Remedios Faye, I think with some help from her partner at the time, Chris Stern. No copies on Abe, but weirdly there’s one (discounted) on amazon.com.

There were a few collaborative projects like this in the ’80s and ’90s. Aside from some things Codex has done, I don’t know of any more recently (maybe I just don’t get invited, and for good reasons). Printer’s Choice in 1983. Alan James Robinson spearheaded one to celebrate the work of printer Harold McGrath that was very cool. There was one for John DePol, I think organized by Neil Shaver (Yellow Barn Press) that you couldn’t find for love or money for many years, but copies are around now.

Speaking of Neil and John DePol: In the mid-1990s, before the Internet really took off, Portland’s Powell’s Books was a fantastic place to trawl for press books. The poetry section was especially rich (for obvious reasons), but a press book could be found tucked into almost any section. This was before the Internet protected know-nothing book buyers from their ignorance, and books could be found shockingly underpriced. Here’s one of my favorite finds (it was in History-England):

 

 

Interesting two-signature format; maybe the Tovil was in limited supply, which would explain the lack of blanks fore & aft (and the horrible tipped-on endsheets) & ex folius colophon printed on different paper. Very well printed, rectos only. All for $5. A weekend safari to Powell’s every year or so was a lot of fun while it lasted. These days, on the rare occasion I encounter an unrecognized treasure on a shelf, I’m generally inclined not to disturb it.

 

HOUSEKEEPING

 

A new HM web site went up in February. Hopefully more user friendly, definitely better images & fewer typos. 

 

Moving forward, new HM publications will be offered for sale directly from the studio. Distributing books soley through booksellers worked for a long time – it greatly reduced shipping & invoicing work, and the booksellers got the books into collections I never could have reached – but the booksellers have been disappearing and aren’t being replaced by new ones.

 

The tradition of fine press printing I wanted to be part of was already in decline when I started 25 years ago, I just didn’t realize it. I suspect the majority of HM publications will continue to be out of step with what most collectors are interested in today, but my projects have always been simply about entertaining myself; if a handful of others are interested as well, great.

 

The new site’s Upcoming page will be updated with details of what’s in the works. It also has a form for subscribing to emails that will offer pre-publication details and a discounted price. A new project, similar in scope and focus to 2022’s The IdealBook, will be featured in the next blog update (June 1).

 

Finally, should you know someone needing a handpress, the big Ostrander-Seymour Extra-Heavy that most HM books have been printed with will need a new home in the next year or so. (I’ll finally start putting the Albion folio press to regular use.) The colors are horrific but, to the best of my knowledge, original. It could be painted black & shiny, but that seems dishonest. I didn’t want a pretty press, I wanted a good one, and it is. I’ll miss it but not the 2,000 lbs it adds to my life.

 

 

Is it just me or has blogger gotten really awful and impossible to format, i.e. worse than it already was? Like, I'm trying to format this para to align left and it won't. And why do I have to use special characters to insert proper apostrophes? (Which I'm too bored to do at this point.) And why is this para appearing in the editing view as the wrong font, but correct in preview/post view? Unless you're using a phone in which case it is wrong. Because blogger...

It’s a Limited Edition!

The next three months will be spent printing Byzantium’s next book, Textile Designs on Paper: An Archive from Early 19th-Century France. It’s slated for publication in the fall. While I’m doing that, I’ll be working on a few book projects for HM. One is another collaboration with Briony Morrow-Cribbs. I’m going to be updating this blog only every three months, so look for some news April 1 (and we’ll see then if it’s a joke). 

 

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The phrase “limited edition” gets thrown around very freely, from sneakers to drink coasters to rugs. I can’t get into the question of why stating that an object is one of only xxx copies available makes it more interesting or desirable to some people, but it does. Often the actual limitation isn’t even stated, which generally means it’s a big number, and possibly one determined entirely by sale, like any other product.

 

Just about any physical book (or car, or shoe, or...) is limited in quantity because at some point the production line gets turned off. The only exception with books I can think of is POD. If you’re going to make the limitation part of the book’s promotion – only 5,000 copies produced! – it really should be stated somewhere in the book itself. Some people sneeringly label this “manufactured rarity,” and in may cases rightly so: the limitation is governed entirely by how many copies the publisher thinks will sell. There is nothing about the production process that imposes a limit. 

 

I’m interested in the history of books that explicitly state how many copies were printed. The earliest statement I’ve found is from the 18th century, and the limitation was determined by the number of subscribers, so not a production constraint. Some types of intaglio plates begin to deteriorate after some number of impressions have been pulled, and these prints are the true first examples of a production limitation in publishing/printing I know of. This is why for some kinds of intaglio prints, collectors prefer low numbers, based on the assumption that the edition number corresponds with that copy’s place in the printing sequence. 

 

At HM, editions have always been limited by the number of impressions I can pull in a day (and the subset of that number that aren’t flawed in some way). I could print more if I used a press that did the inking and printing for me, but I don’t want to be that kind of printer. Because I print damp, a sheet needs to be worked off over a maximum of three days; that’s how long it retains a reasonably consistent level of dampness. (Redamping is not recommended, as there can be registration issues. Plus it’s just a lot more work.) So I have one day to complete each side, and a third for any extra runs (i.e. color). The actual materials I’m printing with – the type and paper – could produce hundreds more copies; the limitation is how much work I can accomplish in a day. 

 

For the recent Dunwich project, the limitation was based on this production limit, and also by the intaglio prints included. While the plates were steel faced to reduce wear from each impression, deterioriation/degradation of the image still becomes an issue after a certain point. So there were practical/physical limitations to how many copies could have been in the edition. If I was a better or faster printer (the two do not really cohabit well) the edition could have been 10 or maybe even 20 more, but not double. And I’m not a better or faster printer, so 50 (+ 6 h.c.) was the limit. 

 

 

All of which is to say, I wonder at people who tout something as being a “limited edition” but then don’t bother to state what the edition is, or do so in some completely ephemeral way. I purchased David Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time when it came out. Stuck to the shrink wrap was a small sticker stating this was copy 0273 of 2,000, the number having been printed with some kind of auto-mechanism. There was no mention of the limitation inside the case or (separate) book. Why bother? (FYI I bought it because I’d enjoyed Lynch’s other albums, especially Big Dream, but Crazy Clown was something else and I sold it, with the sticker preserved in a glassine envelope...)

 

This expanded version of Eno & Lanois’ Appolo album does a little better, with copies number auto-printed on the back. But there’s still the question of whether an “edition” of 12,000 is worthy of numbering, or even stating. 

 

Here’s a more recent example: Cursed is a collection of Charlie Engman’s AI-generated images. Interesting and provocative work, very cool. A signed edition is available from the publisher, for a paltry £5 premium. But his signature is on a little slip of paper tucked into the back of the book! Practically like an erratum! At the very least put it at the front, and if you aren’t going to spring for an entire leaf, at least maybe mount the signed plate on the title page? At least they didn’t call it a limited edition.

 

The size of an edition matters. There is no denying that a smaller edition run appeals to many collectors. That’s a strategic business decision, not a production constraint. What’s the upper limit for calling something a limited edition before it becomes meaningless? I don’t know. Five thousand copies of a book signed by Bob Dylan probably is legitimate (too bad he didn’t actually sign them); 5,000 copies of your self-published first novel would be questionable (even if not labelled a limited edition).

 

Whatever the reasons a publisher claims for publishing a book as a “limited edition,”, there is an iterative calculation of capital costs, time (labor), anticipated interest (market), and what the book’s combined elements objectively could demand in the current market. Everyone does the math differently, and I suspect the only common element is that people who are actual private printers (vs enterprises issuing “fine press” books produced under contract by others) end up earning a paltry hourly wage.

 

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I wrote most of this post before xmess. On December 27 The NY Times published this article about trade publishers discovering the marketing appeal of “deluxe limited editions.” These boutique lines from major commercial publishers, and a number of smaller imprints that have emerged over the past decade or two, have simply found profitable ways to superficially adopt the mantle of fine press printing without getting their hands inky. It’s no different than all the commercial Kelmscott-knock-off limited editions that proliferated in American and English publishing a century ago. No one confused them for the things they were aping.

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The text of colophons is a related topic that also interests me. The next post might be about colophons.