Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Book: The Farouche Assemblage by Matthew Hughes (2007)

Update to this post: "The Farouche Assemblage" turned out quite well. It's gotten quite a few compliments, which is nice, and is actually now sold out. Check out photos of the chapbook:





The cover was hand-trimmed by myself and Therese Littleton, to fit the profile of Jason Van Hollander's head illustrations.

An interesting thing happened with the limitation page (directly above), primarily because of my ill-planning. As happens with most every project that I do for Payseur & Schmidt, there are long periods of idleness punctuated by concentrated moments of accomplishment. During one of these modes of action, I got the cover printed at Patent Pending Press, the interior designed and printed, and arranged to use my printer friends Lance and Beth Thingmakers' perfect binding machine. I drove down to Tacoma, spent all day wasting Lance and Beth's time by cajoling them into showing me how to score the covers, use their binding machine, and trim all the copies on the huge evil paper cutter.

Then I remembered that I needed to send just the limitation pages up to Matt Hughes in British Columbia so that he could sign them. But, alas, they were already bound. So I thought I might be able to send all the books to Matt, but he was concerned that they may get tied up at the border, and maybe even never make it to him. He's much smarter than I am. I probably would have lost all of the books forever in some U.S./Canada border black hole.


So, I thought of the solution in the last photo above. Hughes' Archonate universe is that Vancian combination of the so-far-in-the-future-it-might-as-well-be-the-past scenario, so I designed a signing strip that felt appropriate, printed them out on a color Xerox machine, all ganged up as many as I could fit on a page, and then sent those off to Hughes. Then I thought it'd be cool if we used a rubber stamp to mimic an official Archonate Seal and use an actual thumbprint to round it all off. Matt Hughes was leery of having his own thumbprint on the piece, which is reasonable, so Therese used her thumprint (consider her identity officially stolen as of now).

I think all in all it turned out rather well. Lots of pasting, stamping, and hand cutting. I really like creating the chapbooks. They're a lot cheaper to make than the proper books, and because I'm working with less quantities, I can get away with crazier packaging. It forces me to think very punk rock DIY-style and find cheap but quality methods to create what I want to create. It's worked out pretty well so far.


Original post:



One project I'm a bit behind on a Payseur & Schmidt is a deluxe chapbook edition of Matthew Hughes' Luff Imbry tale "The Farouche Assemblage". I'm cruising to the finish line, however.

Jason Van Hollander delivered some fine illustrations for the cover, and being me, I'm going a bit crazy with the cover. The cover is going to be a 3-color screen print (by Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending) on a brown/green toothy cover stock. The covers will be perfect bound to the innards at Thingmakers and I will have to hand cut the "die-cut" ragged edge on the edge of the double head illustration. You can see below a comp for the closed cover, and below that the entire cover unfolded.

It's going to be a huge pain to assemble, but I think it will look fabulous. I'm going to have to estimate how the screenprinting inks will color-shift on that dark paper, but that's the fun of screenprinting -- you never really know what you're going to get, especially will different colored stocks, color overlaps, and etc.

I'll update this with examples of the interior layout when I finish.

This should be out in May. Pre-order at Payseur & Schmidt.