ugly duckling presse

oriana on 14 Dec ’11

space type: nonprofit press | neighborhood: gowanus | active since: 2000 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit letterpress printing and bookbinding studio with a pretty long and fascinating history, which you can read about over on their site here. In the late nineties the Presse was a zine called Ugly Duckling, and in 2000 the group started 6×6, which was put together in various living rooms and printed at a tiny Manhattan Valley letterpress shop whose primary business was making church newsletters. Since then UDP has lived in three states, four countries, the Nest Space in Dumbo, near a pier in Red Hook, and now at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. They’ve got twelve editors and have printed over 200 beautiful handmade books, not to mention dozens of broadsheets, tons of chapbooks, and all kinds of paper ephemera. They’re beginning to explore ebooks too, and they even have a podcast!

this & all photos in this post by Maximus Comissar

One of the cool things about a volunteer-run press is the amount of opportunities to let the community in. If you sign up for the UDP mailing list, you’ll get invited to their headquarters every couple of months for bookbinding, hand-stitching spines, letterpressing covers, and all manner of classy, functional arts and crafts. Maximus and I went by for a visit to help bind copies of the chapbook “Mr. Z., Mrs. Z., J.Z., S.Z.” with thick twine, met some lovely interns and volunteers, got to see the antique-looking machines in action, and hung out with Matvei, the Presse’s founder.

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?
Matvei: When I moved to New York in the late nineties, a bunch of my writer friends started making one-of-a-kind books for each other, little artist projects, simple things. Then we started to print larger runs of things like chapbooks, hand-bound books, zines, stuff like that. We started 6×6 in 2000, and just before that, we’d started putting Ugly Duckling Presse on the spines of all our little books, even though Ugly Duckling Presse wasn’t a place, it was just our living rooms. But it stuck. We wanted to publish our peers and poets we admired. There was a lot of labor involved, hand-stamping and rubber-banding and binding, so we already had that sense of making stuff, of zine culture and collage and hand-pasting and book arts and things like that.

brooklyn spaces: When did it become more a more formalized press?
Matvei: In the early 2000s, we moved in with a bunch of other arts organizations in a large space in Dumbo called Nest Space for eighteen months. We all got to be there practically for free; all we had to do was clean it up and build some walls. It was one of the early Two Trees buildings, and of course it was part of their plan, to bring in arts people to make the neighborhood more desirable and drive up the real estate values. Now there’s a crazy expensive boutique where our little workshop was.

brooklyn spaces: That’s so depressing.
Matvei: Well, it was fun. And there were lots of other arts groups there, some of whom we’re still in touch with, like Collapsible Giraffe, NTUSA, Paul Lazar Big Dance Theatre, Brooklyn Underground Film Festival. We had a huge common space that we used for events and performances and crazy parties, which was really inspiring. It helped people to know who we were and also helped us bring a certain kind of energy to poetry. Poetry’s really versatile, you can listen to it in a library in a stiff chair or you can go to a reading in some underground place and have it performed with crazy music. It was a very vibrant scene at the time, and that really influenced the way we wanted the to press work. It wasn’t just a publishing house, it was a place for people to come together, and to learn how to make books.

brooklyn spaces: Was it hard to leave that scene?
Matvei: In Red Hook we were holed up in one of the buildings near the Coffey Street pier, and it was a little lonely. But that’s when we were really making the press into something serious, so maybe we needed that kind of focus. And then we came here and became part of the Can Factory community, which has been really great. Issue Project Room is here, Rooftop Films is here, there’s a letterpress studio upstairs, Swayspace, they do beautiful work. There’s other publishers here too, One Story, Archipelago, and Akashic. There’s great energy, it’s a wonderful environment for us.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any favorite books, or books that were a particular pleasure to make?
Matvei: We’ve done some very labor-intensive accordion projects, like 5 Meters of Poems, which really is almost five meters long. There have been a number of projects that I’m really proud of, like The Drug of Art by Ivan Blatný. He’s a multilingual poet who wrote in a lot of languages at once. Ana and Veronica, who edited that book, they put together pretty much a critical edition, with solid editorial backing, annotations, footnotes, all of it. It’s something that even a university press isn’t necessarily going to take on these days. And then on the other hand, we just did a chapbook called “Surprised by French Fries” by Joe Dailey, which is totally irreverent and funny, it just sings in a particular, ephemeral, non-serious way.

brooklyn spaces: I also noticed one called “Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane.” That’s a great title.
Matvei: Yeah, I love that one, that’s Lawrence Giffin. We’ve working with him for years. We published his work in 6×6, then we did a chapbook of his poems, and we’re going to do a full-length book of his next year. That often happens. We like to have longer relationships with writers.

brooklyn spaces: Is there any overarching artist statement that unites all of the Ugly Duckling Presse books?
Matvei: Aesthetically we’re very eclectic, but some of that has to do with the structure of the collective. Each editor really has to want to do whatever they’re going to publish, and also it’s their choice; it’s not democratic, we don’t vote on which books to do. But we all come from similar sensibilities. We all want to publish books that no one else is doing. And there’s of course the handmade aspect. We’re not luddites by any means; sure, we’re a letterpress shop, but we also have two computers and we’re doing online books, exploring things that you can’t do in a print book. We just really believe in the book as a technology that works and that hasn’t been exhausted yet, one that is still interesting and immediate, and that it’s important how you make the book, not just what’s in it. I think we’re okay with the idea that we publish things that aren’t commercially viable, but we’re still engaged in cultural activity. It’s possible that our books will be read fifty yeas from now, and it’s possible that they won’t. But it continues an idea of culture that probably isn’t part of the general American or even global notion of what culture is anymore.

***

Like this? Read about more books and book art: A Wrecked Tangle Press, Central Booking, Books Through Bars

a wrecked tangle press

oriana on 23 Sep ’11

space type: art press | neighborhood: prospect heights | active since: 2007 | links: website, facebook, myspace

There’s no doubt that Brooklyn is a literary utopia. We’ve got writers winning all the most important awards, we’ve got a massive annual book fair, and we’ve got some of the hardest-working, most innovative small presses in the world, like Akashic, powerHouse, Soft Skull, Archipelago, Melville House, and Ugly Duckling Presse.

Alaska & Jessica

Another thing we’ve got is artists’ books. At the intersection of DIY crafting, zine culture, writing, and art, artists’ books are limited only by the imagination of the maker. I covered artist-book gallery Central Booking several months ago, without realizing that gallery assistant Jessica was one half of the artist-book micropress A Wrecked Tangle. In their Prospect Heights apartment, Jessica and her partner Alaska make tiny editions of gorgeous books of poetry, prose, and photographs, using a crazy amount of different materials, from dirt to teddy bear eyes to hair to eggs. Their books have been exhibited at Proteus Gowanus, Dog Eared, The Extra-Illustration Project, 139, The Human Book Project, Rutgers University Book Arts Symposium, and more. Unsurprisingly, they’re smart, fun, engaging women, with lots of ideas about books and art and the way Brooklyn makes it all possible.

[all photos by Maya Edelman]

brooklyn spaces: What made you decide to start making art books?
Alaska: We both spent a ton of money going to Pratt for creative writing and then realized that we were doing nothing with it, so one day I brought over a typewriter and all this scrap paper, and we just made a book. It was called Objects Hiding Access to Sanctuaries. We made seven copies and mailed them to people whose work we liked or who we felt were kindred spirits. Each book had the same pages, but we used different materials for certain elements, and they all came with an engraved skeleton key.
Jessica: There’s always a souvenir with our books. It’s supposed to be an experience that you take something away from.
Alaska: The first year or so that we were making stuff it was for fun, just to make the world a more beautiful place, that thing D.H. Lawrence said about how artists create a world for each other that’s fit to live in. But eventually we decided it’s not selling out to be in galleries, and also we wanted people who love books to see our books. So we started trying to find more people in the book community who were interested in seeing our work.

Beginning

brooklyn spaces: How many books have you done?
Jessica: I don’t know. We’ve done a lot of really small editions, and there are books we’ve made that we haven’t kept any record of.
Alaska: If I had to ballpark it, I’d say thirty.
Jessica: Working in book art also makes you question what really qualifies as a book. One of the things we did is called The Bee Does Not Keep the Honey, which is a honeycomb made out of packaging and stuffed full of rolls of paper. Is that a book?
Alaska: We just went through a really book-object-y phase, where things got kind of sculptural for a while, and I think that that still affects how I look at making books or just what a book is. We did this book Beginning that’s a dozen eggs with poems and objects inside that all relate to kinds of beginnings, and you have to break them open to read them. That has chapters that relate to a theme, but it’s not a book exactly.

brooklyn spaces: So what would be your definition of what makes a book?
Jessica: It’s funny but we’ve never actually been asked that.
Alaska: I feel like I’ve been avoiding that question.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, well what unifies all of your books?
Jessica: We try to have the form and the concept and the text all working off of each other to express the idea. So if we’re making Tremblement, a book about an earthquake, we want the title to be off-kilter, and we want a book that is about beginnings to be inside eggs. It’s the interplay between those elements that makes it successful to me.
Alaska: We’re both really into the idea of making moments or making memories, and experience-based work, so we try to add elements of that to all of our books. We want the book to be an experience that changes with you as you change it.

Loosies

brooklyn spaces: Do either of you have a favorite book you’ve done?
Alaska: Winter is one of my favorites. That one was one of those books that was sort of painless, sort of cathartic. We wrote it in winter, basically dealing with that winter sad where you’re like, “This is hard and awful. Where is everyone?” It’s sort of a little attempt to reach out and be like, “Hey, I’m here. Hope you are too.”
Jessica: I think that’s what a lot of our books do. One of the ones I really love is called Loosies; we did for this zine festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum that was put on by Susan Thomas, a really awesome librarian from Pratt. We brought this 250-pound cigarette machine and filled it with a series of “loosies” that were letterpress poems rolled up to look like cigarettes. You could put in a quarter and dispense a poem.

brooklyn spaces: Do you think making art books in our internet age is an important rebellion?
Jessica: I feel like artists’ books are becoming much more popular as a result of the way that publishing is going; books are now more precious because there’s not going to be as many of them.
Alaska: A lot of our work is in celebration of the book as something awesome that you get to hold and smell and flip through and spill stuff on, and I think that means more now than it used to.

brooklyn spaces: Is there a community of art book people that you’re inspired by, or does living in Brooklyn affect the way you make your art?
Jessica: I don’t know a lot of people who do what we do. In the niche of book arts, which is itself a very small community, writing collaboratively is really rare.
Alaska: But we are surrounded by a bunch of really talented people, so I make books and send them to my friends in the band Toothaches, and they send me their music in return, or they’ll send me music to make books to. There are a lot of really culturally and artistically rich things happening in Brooklyn.
Jessica: There’s a grassroots artistic movement here that’s very unironic. People plant and cook and do things because they love them, because they think that it makes the world a better place. People are getting past the idea that the artist has to be this suffering lonely person slaving away in their hovel. You don’t have to be miserable to be a writer, you don’t have to isolate yourself in order to be passionate.
Alaska: We’re writers, so we obviously think too much and become depressed about the world, but our books always end up having this hopeful note, partly because the actual process of making things is so empowering. I remember reading Deleuze & Guattari, they had this thing in Capitalism and Schizophrenia where they talk about how everything is so messed up in the world that being able to make stuff and create is the only way to be in control and process our own lives. I see a lot of that in Brooklyn and in the people I know. Everyone is using what’s around them in creative ways.

brooklyn spaces: What are some projects you’re planning to do in the future?
Alaska: We want to do more projects for strangers. We’re going to make little blue nests and hide them around Brooklyn. It’s sort of a shout-out to this book Bluets, where she talks about these birds that build blue nests. I read that and thought, “I would shit my pants if I saw a blue nest!” We want to do things where someone who doesn’t know us can find it, just random acts of beauty. I love the thought of someone sitting down on a subway bench and seeing this little blue nest and being like, “What? Is this for me?” There aren’t enough things like that, and when you do find them it’s so exciting.
Jessica: I think we’re scared to use the word “magic.” But you grow up thinking that maybe magical things could happen, and when you realize that’s not true, it’s pretty much soul-crushing. So making that magic for people is just so incredibly rewarding.
Alaska: And making those things is just as good as if they were spontaneously created in the universe. It doesn’t matter if your friend who has keys to your apartment is the one who left the awesome thing in your kitchen, it’s the fact that you came home and it was there. I feel like nothing is too small to make someone a little bit happier.

***

Like this? Read about more makers: Twig Terrariums, Ugly Duckling Presse, Pickett Furniture, Better Than Jam, Arch P&D, Central Booking, Hive NYC, Screwball Spaces, Urbanglass