holy shit it's a chance press book by CAROL ES (1 Viewer)

jordan

lothario speedwagon
not may details can be released at this juncture. suffice it to say that you WILL want this book when it is released, because it WILL be amazing, and it will make everything else we've ever published look like a piece of shit. a few pre-release copies will be available in october, and the full edition will probably come out sometime in 2011. yes, it's going to take THAT long to make this baby.

here's a teaser shot from some color tests i printed out today:

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I have been wondering for a while now when a project from Carol would hit the Chance Press "TO-DO" list :)

Very glad that it did.
 
we really had to twist her arm... it got kinda awkward, but she finally relented and is throwing us a bone.
 
Great. Now the other books I've bought from Chance Press are going to look like pieces nof shit. More the reason to keep them in plastic bags!

Seriously, congrats.
 
Very few publishers in the small press GET IT. The idea is to WOW them with design and words; spare no expense to make it special. Graham McIntosh & Noel Young GOT IT, Jon & Lou Webb GOT IT, John & Barbara Martin GOT IT, Jordan & Justine Hurder GET IT. I'm honored to know them.

Bill
 
twist my arm, eh? if that is what you would call my pathetic begging and pleading, stalking, whining, nudging, sobbing, screaming, and those middle of the night home invasions.

needless to say, i am beyond grateful! :)
 
Let that be a lesson to you kids out there who think just sending in some work is enough. Hone your home invasion skills if you want to see any success.
 
The binding is only 6 inches. But you're going to need a forty inch deep shelf. Start building the new bookcase now.




(I gues I should say, not really, so as not to blow any sales...)
 
we're accepting preorders for this book, even though it won't be ready for 6 months or so. anyone that preorders gets a very limited edition print in a handmade folder as a thank-you for your support - details here http://chancepress.com/2010/06/announcing-scribbles-in-a-sandstorm-by-carol-es/

also, for those that won't be able to afford this book - we won't be doing a trade edition per se, but we will think of something to offer in the under-$10 price range from Carol - we just haven't figured out what it is yet.
 
Thanks, jordan, for the update. 6 months? At the rate I drink and drive I'll be lucky to last that long.:) Incentive to keep MADD happy and me alive.
 
i put a couple more teaser photos up on our picasa album. the final version will be purple - i'm using this cheaper starched stuff for the mockups. and it's nowhere near complete, but you can see where we're taking this thing...

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I can't help but ask: is that a glue stick or a chapstick on the upper right? Acid free glue sticks are one of mankind's greatest inventions. They should not, however, be used on chapped lips.
 
that's my desk at work - we can't find the camera cable in our apartment, so i took the book to work, since i wanted to post pictures of it right away.

aren't you glad you asked?
 
next iteration of the mockup - this is how the actual ones will look, but there will be a little more to them, so to speak.

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so, for those of you who are curious how to bind a book like this, i posted a painstakingly long explanation of it on our blog. i now have 3 bound up, and i'm hoping as the technique becomes more familiar, i will get faster at it. i mentioned in the blog that i ripped this binding off of another small press, but they didn't exactly teach me how to do it, so it took a bunch of trial and error before i could make it really work for me.
 
Thanks, Jordan. I'll study that. I'm a self-taught binder and will steal any techniques I can.

That looks like a complex binding to pull off well.

A couple of things caught my attention, although I just skimmed it for now. "Scoring with a dull knife" sounds risky. Do you ever accidental get a cut in the cloth that way? Secondly, you're using dry adhesive instead of PVA glue. I think Bill Roberts uses dry adhesive for a lot of his bindings. What I've wondered about that (and this is no doubt just my endless paranoia at work) has there been any study on how that holds up over time? What would worry me is will it lose it's adhesion years from now, and the binding fall apart? Will it age badly (discoloring, warping, etc.) I've used PVA since it was invented and it stays the same seemingly forever. Not to disparage dry adhesive -- just wondering how stable it is. I could Google that and find out in a minute, so pardon me if that's not an issue. Thanks for sharing your details.
 
Hi David.
The dry adhesive that I use is acid free and permanent. I have heard of no time tests, although 3M came out with it years ago and i have heard of no problems. If it ever did fail, it would be a catastrophe, of course, and i would sue the shit out of the manufacturer as would all of the scrapbookers that use it. I wish that there was a way to test it, but time is the only test. That being said, it bonds like the dickens and I can see no reason why it would change over time.

Bill
 
Thanks for the info, Bill. I realize it's an idiot move on my part, asking a question that Google can answer in a minute, but this way I have your expert testimony.

It would indeed be a catastrophe if the dry adhesive suddenly failed after many years. I think about stuff like this because I deal with old books a lot and the ways they fall apart interest me. With the majority of 19th Century leatherbound books, the main problem is that binders pared the leather too thin, plus the way the leather was tanned made it dry out and disintegrate over time (called red rot). The result is that most leather bound books from that time have cracked joints, loose covers, loose or missing spines. Binders did beautiful work in those days, fine gold tooling on fine leathers, but much of it is now in ruins. They could have avoided this, had they but known that their methods weren't safe for the long term. On the other hand, they're all dead and so are the readers who originally bought the books, so it's not their problem, it's ours.

A mistake I made in the 70s - 80s was using rubber cement to glue down labels/cover art on my publications. It dried out, turned the paper brown, and the labels came loose. Bad choice, but I had no clue.

Anyway, no reason to think the dry adhesive isn't okay.
 
Rubber cement likely has a very high acidity. That being said, it is used to attach laminate tops to particle board and works very well for that. Laminate is made out of pressed paper (yep your laminate countertops are made of paper, not plastic). and once it is bonded, if bonded well, it will never come up. Still, it probably discolors below the surface, and if the laminate was super think, it may burn through with time...

Bill
 
when you're scoring with the dull knife, you're really only scoring the backing paper on the adhesive - but you do need to experiment a few times on some scrap sheets to get the pressure right, or you will cut through to the cloth. for some of the trimming required, you need a very sharp knife too, so i keep a sharp one and a dull one handy while i'm working.
 
It would indeed be a catastrophe if the dry adhesive suddenly failed after many years. I think about stuff like this because I deal with old books a lot and the ways they fall apart interest me. With the majority of 19th Century leatherbound books, the main problem is that binders pared the leather too thin, plus the way the leather was tanned made it dry out and disintegrate over time (called red rot). The result is that most leather bound books from that time have cracked joints, loose covers, loose or missing spines. Binders did beautiful work in those days, fine gold tooling on fine leathers, but much of it is now in ruins. They could have avoided this, had they but known that their methods weren't safe for the long term.

"Books fall apart; the binding cannot hold
mere anarchy is loosed up on the world"

or something like that...
 
Of course, it's natural for books to wear out and fall apart. I kind of like that. But if the life of the book gets prematurely shortened by bad materials, that seems like a shame.

I think small press publishers on average probably care more about using good materials than do mainstream publishers. There have been some real crap bindings used by big publishers. In the 70s, there were really bad glued bindings on some hardcovers that cracked the first time you opened the book and after one reading, clumps of pages fell out. That went on for quite a while until something made the publishers give a damn. Maybe sales fell off?
 
Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (The book that they based the movie GETTYSBURG on) is never found in very good condition because of poor quality binding and production. That book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, so finding a truly mint copy is super rare.

Bill
 
What I do when I have one of those crappy 1970s hardbacks with loose pages is I take it out of the case binding, scrape off the bad glue, straighten out the pages as well as I can, and then reglue the spine and when that's dry, glue the text block back into the covers. It'll never be mint, but works pretty well.

By the way, hope no one thought I was dissing the materials/methods used by BOSP or Chance Press -- not at all. I'm sure they've both given far more thought to quality than I have in any of my publications.
 
no worries - we also use a lot of scrapbooking tape (incredibly strong dual-sided tape), and i've often worried what would happen if it dried out and stopped working. but it's acid free and supposedly permanent, so hopefully that won't happen. if it did, then "a common thread" would be the only chance press book that wouldn't fall apart.
 

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