May 11, 2015 8 Questions With: Publication Studio
Four or five years ago I began noticing a series of small books, distinctly printed using everyday file folders for their covers, popping up around both Portland and New York. They were uniform in design, but diverse in content, ranging from novels to poetry to artist projects.
I often found them in bookstores sitting humbly amongst ostentatious art and design monographs. Some would inevitably pass them right over and continue shopping for their coffee table decorations. In contrast to their neighbors on the display table, the (beautiful) utilitarian form of these books seemed to call for them to be read.
Now of course we know this as the work of Publication Studio, the self described “laboratory for publication” founded in 2009 in Portland and owned and operated by writer Patricia No and artist Antonia Pinter. Publication Studio operates on a unique print-on-demand model, working in true collaboration with writers and artists that they genuinely admire. Today they maintain thirteen sibling studios internationally in addition to their home base in Portland, are sold in over 60 of the best bookshops worldwide, and have conducted residency projects with Yale University, Emily Carr University, Henry Art Gallery and more.
Nurturing the capability for books to produce social experiences, redefining the meaning of “publication” to emphasize the “public”, and making it a point to clarify that this public is not just a market, are the critically thinking cornerstones of what Publication Studio does that made me a great admirer.
Photo by Nolan Calisch
1. How did Publication Studio get its start?
Publication Studio started as an idea that was propelled by the feeling of “well, there’s nothing to lose.” I had just been laid off at the architecture firm I worked at and there was nothing I could find in the field I wanted: literature and books. I was already broke, so there was no fear of going broke. It was clearly a time to experiment in doing exactly what I wanted to do and with no money. Our first location was in the event space of Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon from the hours of 5am-noon. They were supportive of our experiment and understood our need to have a physical space as integral to what we were doing. We bought some janky machines and looted Scrap (an office reuse center) for our materials like file folders, which we use for our book covers. We wanted to be as pragmatic and as transparent as we could in our material practice, and file folders just felt right: their intended purpose is to hold paper; we just take it one step further by creating a spine. We launched a novel and held a big dinner where the book was part of the meal. There was a lot of energy and excitement about Publication Studio’s methods of production and publishing philosophy and we were able to hit the ground running by collaborating with many different people and institutions. It’s very true that it takes a village, we could not have started if it wasn’t for the many amazing individuals who opened opportunities for PS, collaborated with us, built our website, wrote reviews, or picked up a paintbrush and worked hard to help build our own studio space (where we still are in downtown Portland, Oregon). We are not a non-for-profit, we do not receive grants or funding of any kind, we pay our authors 50% of the profit from book sales; we sell books and that is literally how we continue.
2. When Publication Studio was founded in 2009, the conversation about the future of publishing and the physical book itself seemed in flux to say the least. I think the Kindle came out two years earlier and then some big national bookstore chains started closing two years after. How did this factor into your concept for Publication Studio?
It was really an exciting time for the book. The conversation varied from “what is the future of bookstores” to “the death of the book.” Our viewpoint was several degrees off from those extremes: we were interested in changing what we think of as publication, and we did that by thinking of the social life of the book. When we go to make a public out of publication, the marketplace is really outside what we’re doing as we’re attempting to create a direct relationship between authors and readers, not an experience for consumers and sellers. It was a new economy around books, one based on pleasure, desire, and support, and we viewed new technologies as part of how we distribute and circulate books. All our books are available to read and annotate through our website; this shared digital experience is like an on-line reading group, and it’s one of the ways in which we create a social life for the book. Our understanding is that a person’s relationship to the digital is very different to their relationship to the tangible. There is no experience that can replace holding, toting around, and reading a physical book—and then being able to put it on a shelf or give it to someone else.
Our methodology and concepts were guided in part by how dissatisfied we were in making, selling, buying books and how it must have been that way for so many others. Travis Jeppesen wrote recently about PS and it sums up our work articulately: Publication Studio, publisher of 16 Sculptures, uses both the handmade – traditionally associated with the limited edition publication – and print-on-demand technology, a platform rooted in the idea of the limitless edition. Eschewing both the traditional publisher model and the myriad print-on-demand companies that are increasingly used by small presses, but often use mass production techniques to issue unaesthetically-pleasing cheap paperbacks, Publication Studio, a two-woman operation run by a poet and a visual artist, combine the use of their own POD machinery with rigorous standards of editorial control, design, hand-cutting, hand-binding, and hand-packaging. The books they produce, one by one as the order comes in, are thus instances, works of art. Works of art that are, paradoxically, not exclusive, in that they can theoretically never be quantified or contained in a single “edition.” The edition thus becomes both collectible and limitless.
It was such a shame to see our independent bookstores close with the advent of big bookstore chains like Barnes and Nobel or Borders Books (late 90s, early 2000s)—and now we’re seeing those bookstores close due to powerhouse Amazon. I could go on forever about how incredibly damaging Amazon is to publishers and to our community of independent booksellers, but I’ll go in a different tangent. There are, now, so many small bookstores and publishers launching shops, publishing platforms, spaces, etc. Oscar Tuazon wrote in his essay for Paraguay Press’ The Social Life of the Book Series, “…a few years later there was Amazon.com. It was a bloodbath, a dark time for all those little bookshops we sold to, which were shutting their doors one after the other. What would becoming of all the little bookshops? For all of us it was pretty inconceivable. But now that the dust has settled it seems clear, and maybe not such a tragedy after all: the little bookshops will become little galleries.” And it certainly happened. There are these little gems of shops that cater to a very discerning book buyer.
There are problems that I find with the “bookshop as gallery” model as it doesn’t necessarily translate to readers (which are the people I’m interested in reaching), but overall, it’s incredible to see artist run spaces that function to find and sell books by even the smallest presses out there. There’s a new space and energy in books and how to have them reach their audience. It doesn’t mean that it has created a flourishing economy for the people involved (did you hear the one about how to make 1 million in publishing? You start with 2 million), but it has created a sustainable culture that looks to a new generation of readers for support. Readers that are involved and continue to seek and support entities that are producing valuable contemporary literature and art books.
3. Although Publication Studio produces work from diverse voices, approaches and subject matter, it does seem to all hold together by a certain perspective I think, even with all your satellite branches making independent publishing choices. What qualities are you looking for in potentially working on a book with someone?
We’ve always been democratic, but we also have a certain philosophy and aesthetic. Poetics, and the ways it exists within artistic, technological, and even ephemeral works are important. Experimental literature, emerging artists, work that doesn’t necessarily have the largest audience—but is still essential and should be made public—is work that interests us. We definitely live in an age of profound limitless information. What of that, and how, do we distill and disseminate? In the end, it’s pleasure. The choice to publish can be political, but it needs to move us. It starts with a conversation between people.
Photo by Nolan Calisch
4. The social function or potential around books seems central to your ethos. How is this implemented into your approach?
We always try to make a party for the book, which is a way to say that we want to invite people in. Reading books is deeply personal, they don’t talk back to you, they go away when you close them, it’s a singular experience of reading (unlike, say, commenting on blogs). Of course, they’re the best way to share work in a totally economical way—it’s difficult for people to buy a painting but they can afford an artist book—but they’re limited to being one book, an object, in a sea of books. How do we create a life for the book? One way is actually digital. All our books are online to read for free in their entirety in our “free reading commons” where anyone can annotate and read the notes of others. It brings a life into the margin of our books, like finding a living, breathing representation of a books in a used bookstore with the last readers’ notes in them. It’s an online ongoing reading group that is easily accessible.
We’ve launched books as a dinner party or as a concert or as a boozy lunch—this is one of our alternative methods of distribution—and it’s to celebrate the author in a public and palpable way with lasting effect. Our studio storefront is also essential to us in implementing a social life to our books. It’s an architecture for making and gathering. Technically, we could do all our work in a basement. Having a space is essential to being an active and visible part of our community, to host our events (we hold several events in our space every week), to open up our space to other people’s events, and to be open for conversation. All our meetings take place here, and it’s an active space of making books, meeting new people, reading, readings, parties, dinners, concerts and more work. We welcome anyone to come and use our space to work on any projects. We travel several times a year to other places to make books in their spaces are part of a social experiment. We participate in panels, give talks, workshops, lectures, we try to bring as many of books to everything we do. Basically, we try to bring the personal experience of reading that we all have and which is an essential relationship, to a larger context of social gathering and understanding. As Christoph Keller says, “Books Make Friends.”
5. Your model has resonated in a particularly strong way with artists, and you have operated in artist-like ways you could say, participating in residencies with different institutions. But last year Publication Studio was included as artists in your own right at the 2014 Portland biennial at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. What did that mean to you?
It was definitely a bold move. That same year, Semiotext(e) created 28 publications for the Whitney Biennial. I think the way publishers are working right now, and how important books are to the art world, it seemed as if publishers have a practice the way that artists have a practice. And there are many conferences, craft talks, (and books!) about “Publishing as Practice.” It’s kinda sexy to call a publisher an artist, and certainly someone who is a publisher can be an artist and vice versa (and to incredibly exciting ends). But as an entity, Publication Studio is a publisher. In the end, what we did as an artist for the Portland Biennial (and what Semiotext(e) did for the Whitney) was to make and distribute books, books that ended up not being art but being of art and about art. There’s a difference.
Recently, we were asked by INCA to exhibit at their Seattle space and we thought really hard about it. We were not going to make a publication as our exhibition, we decided, but would create an exhibition out of all our publications. Here’s the artist statement for the show “Proofs and Failures”: How do poetics function in today’s structure of the digital, of the art world, of publications seen as ephemeral or even marginal, within institutions, within the deeply personal sphere, and within the nexus of public connectivity? How do we distinguish between the signal and the noise, between ambiguity and double meaning; how does language reveal itself to have a consciousness and how do we present an architecture or object to translate that about-ness into an actual-ness?
We showed all our proof books and had a stack of our failed prints. I thought it pretty successful.
Photo by Nolan Calisch
6. How is the role of the book in cultural life evolving?
The role of the book is always evolving, and yet is always the same. About two years ago it seemed as if the book was becoming a bit more of an object: displaced from readership and displayed as a beautiful thing as a signifier for a cultured life. This is different from book art which is book as art (Aubach, Spector, Kassay, Carrara, etc), but was about artist books becoming super collectable, editioned and immediately beyond affordable. I shouldn’t be allowed to have nice books because they get slowly destroyed from use. I’m ok with collecting and showing off books. I drool on instagram and tumblr—I love people sharing books, the instagram @book_thing is wonderful. But as a marker for status, it seems silly as they are, in the end, a functioning object that only gives if you open it.
7. What are your hopes for the future of Publication Studio?
We hope to be able to support writers and artists more. Pay them more than we’re able to at the moment for the work that they do.
8. Perhaps most importantly- best things you have read read recently?
In the last few months, these are some of the readings of late that have just stuck:
Two Augusts in A Row In A Row by Shelley Marlow
The New York School by Joseph Bradshaw
94 by Joon Oluchi Lee
Cinema Vernacular by Peter Nickowitz
Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman (republished by New Herring Press)
Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines
Your Time Has Come by Joshua Beckman
Commentary by Marcelle Sauvageot
Cunt Norton by Dodie Bellamy
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Xeclogue by Lisa Robertson
and reading the new poetry of Emily Kendal Frey, Ben Estes, Dana Ward, Anne Boyer, Rae Armantrout; the old stories of Flannery O’Connor.