Sunday, June 20, 2010

About Collin and his "Pressbengel"

Ernst Collin (1886–1942) was a writer whose father, the well known Berlin-based bookbinder Georg Collin (1851–1918), occasionally provided bookbinding lessons to the 2nd son of the Prussian King and German Emperor Frederick III. The elder Collin was also very involved in training women to become full-fledged bookbinders. Because of this paternal connection with the trade, Ernst maintained a strong affinity for bookbinding, demonstrated by his publications about and for the bookbinding trade. Among them areVom guten Geschmack und von der Kunstbuchbinderei (1914), a treatise about aesthetics and fine binding included in a monograph about the Spamersche Buchbinderei, Leipzig; Deutsche Einbandkunst (1921), the catalog to the Jakob Krause Bund’s exhibition; and the Bund’s newsletter, Die Heftlade (1922–24). The Jakob-Krause-Bund, a precursor to Meister der Einbandkunst (MDE, the German association of masters of the art of binding) , included some of the most influential German binders of the late 19th and early 20th century, among them Paul Adam, Otto Dorfner, Paul Kersten, and Franz Weiße. Collin also authored Buchbinderei für den Hausbedarf ([1915]) and Paul Kersten (1925), the latter a biography of one of the most seminal German fine bookbinders, whoseDer Exakte Bucheinband (1923) helped define German fine binding.

Der Pressbengel (1922), Collin’s best-known work, was first republished in 1984 by the Mandragora Verlag and later translated into Italian as Dal Relegatore d’Arte (1996). Conceived as a dialogue between a bibliophile and a master bookbinder on all aspects of the bookbinding craft as well as specific techniques, the original German has a charming if somewhat pedantically formal “school primer” tone, in keeping with the time in which it was written. The question-and-answer format has long history in pedagogical texts, whether for catechisms (see Nicolaus Cusanus’ Christliche Zuchtschul) or trades, as in Friedrich Friese’s Ceremoniel der Buchbinder (1712), which introduces the reader to all aspects of the bookbinding trade and its traditions. First published in 1937, Oldrich Menhart’s Evening Conversations of the Booklover Rubricius and the Printer Tympanus is the letterpress equivalent to Collin’s Pressbengel, and there is considerable overlap between the two, as might be expected. Evening Conversations was later translated into German (1958) and then English (1980), the latter by the Crabgrass Press in an edition of 100 copies bound by Fritz Eberhardt

Throughout the work, Collin himself is very frank in addressing the conflicts between quality and cost, as well as the positive and negative impacts of “machines” throughout the work. In his introduction to the 1984 reprint of Der Pressbengel, Gustav Moessner, author of and contributor to several German bookbinding texts, states that he sees the Collin’s work in part as a reaction to the growing industrialization of the bookbinding trade and the loss of the skills and techniques connected with this industrialization. In many respects this trajectory continues today, accelerated by the decrease in formal bookbinding apprenticeship opportunities, the increasing simplification of structures, changing aesthetics, and ultimately changes in the perceived value of books and the general economic climate. Until recently, Germany’s strong guild system required one to complete a formal apprenticeship and become a master binder to order to open one’s own shop and train apprentices. Unfortunately, this system has been in decline over the past decades, and many shops are closing or no longer training apprentices – a completed apprenticeship and “meister” are no longer required to open a business if no apprentices are being trained. Concurrently, a network of centers and alternative programs, such as “master-run” shops offering instruction to amateurs, is not developing in a way that would provide the high quality, rigid training critical to sustaining the craft over the long term. The apprenticeship system declined even earlier in the United Kingdom, another nation with a strong tradition of formal craft training. In other countries the trade system was not as formalized to begin with. The United States represents the most diverse environment for the trade, with a blending of the dominant English, French, and German traditions brought over by immigrants, but a formal career path, like that in the European tradition, never developed. Instead, less formal apprenticeships (on-the-job training) became the norm. This did not, however, hinder the development of some very fine American binders.

Samuel Ellenport’s The Future of Hand-Bookbinding (1993) provides an excellent if sobering overview of the changes experienced by the hand bookbinding trade in the United States, but leaves out the explosive growth among amateur binders and book artists. The past thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest in all aspects of the book arts, with centers offering workshops springing up across the United States. Formal programs have been developed, including the North Bennett Street School in Boston (a two-year trade model), the American Academy of Bookbinding in Colorado (a series of workshops), and the University of Alabama’s MFA in the book arts (an academic degree). These programs are doing much to preserve many traditional skills, but the contemporary book arts craft risks losing others that may be deemed too anachronistic or, like gold tooling, simply unaffordable and therefore not regularly practiced.

This is the first publication of Der Pressbengel in English, and while I have attempted to remain faithful to the original text, it should not be considered a scholarly translation , nor was it ever intended to be a “technical manual.” Like the German original of 1922, it is intended to be a general introduction to the bookbinding craft and trade as it existed in Germany when the work appeared. The title change from Der Pressbengel, an esoteric tool used to increase the leverage when tightening a German backing press (Klotzpresse), to The Bone Folder, an iconic tool that represents bookbinding as no other can, was undertaken both because “Pressbengel” has no “clean” English equivalent and to help make the text more accessible to today’s binders and bibliophiles. In a very few other cases, references to brand names have been made more general where this had no impact on the essence of the text. The result, I hope, is in keeping with the spirit and essence of the original German.

Monday: A Discussion about Bookbinding

BIBLIOPHILE (looking around the studio of the master bookbinder): Master, what is this wonderful tool that you have here? It looks intriguingly dangerous.
BOOKBINDER: That, my good sir, is a harmless but important tool. We call it a bone folder. I use it to fold paper, make signatures, rub down the linings on the spine, and work leather and any number of other materials that I encounter every day. With it I can take a collection of papers and craft them into a book. It is an extension of my hands and serves as a continual reminder of the value of good craft work, even if the aura of the trade is no longer what it once was.
BIBLIOPHILE: Quite right, Master. As a bibliophile I know how to value a finely handbound book. I just can’t find pleasure in reading an ugly, poorly-bound book that falls apart as one is reading it. In contrast a well-bound, indestructible book helps bring me to the time and place of the story and gives me the sensations I need when reading. If I were to ask you, Master, could you tell me about your work? Please don’t think idle curiosity is my motive or even that I want steal ideas from you. 
I think I will be a better client if I understand your craft and can judge its complexity. My opinion is that a bibliophile who doesn’t understand books is following a trivial pursuit. However, someone who isn’t interested only in the content of the work but also understands how a book is made—beginning with papermaking and through to titling the finished binding—has embraced book collecting with his heart and soul. So, won’t you introduce me to the secrets of your craft in a few short discussions?
BOOKBINDER: I would be willing to do that, but you can’t expect me to teach you everything, as that would require an apprenticeship of three to four years, plus as many more years of work and experience in order to become a competent master bookbinder. A master binder doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Why don’t we do it this way: I’ll tell you about some of the most important binding styles first, and tell you only enough about the structure so you can visualize it. We’ll talk about the specific details that interest you when you bring me your books to bind.
BIBLIOPHILE: That sounds fair. So, Master, why don’t you start?
BOOKBINDER: All right, let’s start with the paper case binding, whose covering is made of paper, either plain or decorated. We’ll talk about it again later because it is the most beautiful of the simple bindings, and you will certainly have me make many of them for you. 
Next is the quarter-cloth binding, in which the spine and the corners of the book’s cover are in colored book cloth. Book cloth is woven from cotton, and we can get it in many attractive textures and colors. The parts of the book not in cloth are covered with plain or decorated paper. These are simple bindings, and I want to emphasize that this style is not as much for the bibliophile as for heavily used items in public libraries.
And now we come to the first of the finer bindings, the quarter-leather binding. What on the quarter cloth binding would be fabric is now covered in leather. It is a finer binding because leather is the most noble of covering materials. Also, the structure as a whole is much more involved.
BIBLIOPHILE: I understand completely. If leather is the most beautiful and best material, than the binder is obligated to adjust all aspects of the books to the demands of that noble material. Noblesse oblige!
BOOKBINDER: Exactly, and finally we have the best binding structure, the full-leather binding. As the name suggests, the whole book is covered in leather. These are the main binding styles. We also have the quarter- and full-vellum bindings. You could cover books in silk or velvet as well, but that is not something that you as a bibliophile would want.
As you can imagine, the binding of a book is broken down into a sequence of many individual steps that build upon each other. When we are at the conclusion, you will recognize that from the moment a binder takes a text block in his hand until the title is stamped on the spine—how should I say this—all these things occur in a logical sequence. Ultimately, if you miss just one stitch while sewing, it will all come apart.
Particular attention must be paid when preparing to sew. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but I will say that we must first disbind books that have been sewn by machine. This includes breaking the book down to the individual signatures, removing the old thread (or, heaven forbid, those awful staples), and then scraping off the glue left on the outsides of the folds. Next, we need to put the signatures in a press in order to compact the text block. Before we do that, though, we may need to refold the signatures and collate them to make sure everything is there and where it should be. If there are plates, they will usually need to be trimmed to size and tipped back in or hinged in with a thin strip of paper or jaconette.
After the signatures have been in the press—like this one, which gets opened and closed using this iron bar—for a good long time, then we will make the endpapers. Endpapers are what we call the folios that come before and after the last signatures of the text block, made of a white- or cream-colored paper that is matched in color and texture to the paper of the text block. There are many styles of endpapers, one of which I will describe for you. We’ll start with a double folio of paper as tall as the text block and slightly wider. Applying paste in a very narrow bead to the back of the fold, we attach a five-centimeter-wide strip of paper that will serve as a reinforcing strip. When the paste is dry, we fold the strip around the back of the signature, just as pharmacists once used to attach the labels to medicine bottles. We place the endpapers on both sides of the text block so the strip of paper faces to the outside and put the book in a finishing press in order to determine how to divide the spine for sewing.
We sew over twine that we call cord. The old bookbinders used to place these cords on the outside of the spine, so they were raised and visible under the leather. Today we rarely sew on raised cords. The cords are recessed so as not to be visible, and if in the case of a quarter- or full-leather binding we want raised cords, we will make false ones later out of strips of card.
BIBILOPHILE: Master, if I may comment, aren’t these false raised bands deceptive and a betrayal of good craft? They are certainly fake.
BOOKBINDER: We can debate the pros and cons of this argument for a long time. That said, in the end people just aren’t willing to pay for the level of the craft that I love. If you know this kind of simplification need not be at the expense of sound structure, then I see no reason why one should abstain from the attractive appearance of raised cords on principle just because they aren’t real. However, if the client wants real raised cords and is willing to pay, I am more than happy to oblige. But let us move on. 
First, I need to divide the spine into fields to determine where the cords go. Usually we sew on five cords, and the fake raised cords are placed directly on top of these. With smaller or simpler books we’ll reduce the number of cords to three or four. In addition to the cords we also have the kettle stitches that are set back slightly from the head and tail of the spine—that is what we call the top and bottom of the text block. The sewing thread connects the signatures at the kettle stitch with a link stitch that looks like the links of a chain. Next, we saw into the folds of the signatures so that we can recess the cords.
BIBLIOPHILE: What? Saw into the text block? You’re cutting into paper with a saw? Isn’t that barbaric? Paper isn’t wood! You’re not a carpenter! Master, my bibliophilic conscience can’t abide by that.
BOOKBINDER: Well, it’s like this. I don’t have a problem just lightly cutting in to the spine of the book, especially if one doesn’t deepen the cut with a rasp as some do. One can also avoid sawing into the spine if one untwists the cords and flattens them so that they don’t show when the leather is on the spine. If you wish, I’d be happy to sew your book on frayed-out cords if we aren’t sewing on real raised cords, but it will cost more.
BIBLIOPHILE: I will gladly pay if it keeps the saw away from my books. 
BOOKBINDER: We sew the book on a sewing frame, a tool that is almost as old as bookbinding itself. Here, take a look at my sewing frame—the board upon which the signatures are laid during sewing. At the front are threaded wooden dowels that go through a cross bar, which is slit for the hooks that will hold the cords taut during sewing. Below that, in the board, are nails to which the cord is attached. Sewing is a very important step. You start with the last signature (the back endpaper) and insert the threaded needle through the fold at the kettle stitch, come out and over the first cord, then back into the signature, then out and over the next cord, until you get to the other kettle stitch. Then the next signature is placed on top and we repeat the process, always remembering to connect the signatures. After we are done, we cut the cords so they extend several centimeters beyond the spine on both sides. Then we fray out the ends of the cords, fan them out, and adhere them to the waste sheet. Next, we tip the endpaper signature to the adjacent text signature with a thin bead of paste. Finally, we glue up the spine and round it with a hammer.
BIBLIOPHILE: Do we have to round the book? I feel that a half-round spine detracts from the overall appearance of the book. A square back just fits better with the right angles of the boards. I want only square backs on my books.
BOOKBINDER: Then you won’t enjoy your book in the long term. I know from experience that with use a square-backed book will have a tendency to develop a concave spine, causing the individual signatures to jut out. That looks very ugly. Can we compromise? I will only slightly round your book so the signatures don’t jut out, but it also won’t end up with a half-round spine. I can promise you that a lightly rounded spine will not look ugly.
BIBLIOPHILE: Agreed. I am glad we can combine the expertise of a professional with the ideals of a bibliophile in a sort of marriage of convenience.
BOOKBINDER: Next, we back the book, one of the most important steps in giving the text block structural integrity. I’ll need to explain this step to you in more detail. First, we replace the book in the backing press, but this time between two boards, with the rounded spine extending beyond the edges by a few millimeters, a distance determined by the binding style and the thickness of the cover boards. Then we tighten the press very securely and begin to work the spine with a backing hammer, so that the signatures begin to fold towards the boards. We call this the shoulder, and the covering board will sit flush with the edge of it. Before hammering on the spine, we use paste to soften the glue we applied earlier, so the signatures will move more easily into their final shape. After backing, we paste up the spine again and smooth everything out before allowing the book to dry in the press overnight. The next day we take it out to trim, add a colored or gilt edge, and cut the cover boards to size.
The text block is mostly finished now, and the next step will be to attach the covers and then cover it in nice paper or leather. Those steps I’ll explain to you when you bring me your books, because the next steps are dependent on the desired binding style.
BIBLIOPHILE: Many, many thanks, Master. I want to continue to be your attentive apprentice. Until tomorrow.

http://centerforbookarts.blogspot.com/April 26, 2013

Friday Insights: CBA Artist Member Interview

We are reviving the Friday Insights interview segment to spotlight our artist members and their work. Center volunteer Kate Burns compiled her first interview with Brooklyn-based artist Chris Perry. She asked him the following: 
Did your educational background focus on book arts? If so, how has your work evolved over the years? If not, what did you initially focus on and how did that lead you to book arts?

I studied to be a painter but found that I spent as much time, if not more drawing. Book arts never entered into the picture until much later, after a disappointing collaborative effort that I didn't wish to repeat with a new project. I decided the best way to avoid this was to learn bookbinding. I had a large format set of drawings I wanted to make into an encyclopedia of sorts and felt that the only way to get what I wanted was to hand the printer/publisher a book, something that would demonstrate exactly what I wanted to happen inside with the drawings. Before I knew what was happening, the binding process took over. I painted less and less, more and more reluctantly taking time away from the books. Now that's all I do.What inspired you to become an artist member at the Center for Book Arts?
I joined the Center for Book Arts after hearing of it online. I was looking for venues that supported book-making and associated disciplines, preferably in the New York area. There are lots of groups and organizations in the country, but the Center for Book Arts was the primary one here. It is mentioned in nearly every website I came across at some point. The first show I had a piece in was through the Center for Book Arts. 30 Ripples appeared in I will cut thrU: Pochoirs, Carvings, and Other Cutting, which ran from July 7, 2010 - September 11, 2010. [Find this exhibition in our archive here.]

http://www.philobiblon.com/guests/moore.htm

http://guides.library.vcu.edu/print_content.php?pid=117427&sid=1012444&mode=g

 

As techno-science increasingly reaches into every aspect of life, formerly fast held distinctions between the inert and the active, the human and non-human and life and matter are cracking. From biotechnical engineering to the cataclysmic imminence of climate change, our very notions of what and how we consider life are under fire. What are the ethical, aesthetic and political stakes in understanding a world view in which humans are no longer at the centre?

The Vibrancy Effect is the result of a closed expert meeting organized by V2_ and Chris Salter that brought together artists, social scientists, natural scientists and humanities experts to explore the question of what matter does, to us and the world, and to bridge the gap between different disciplines conceptualizing and working with new notions of ‘vibrant materiality’ (Jane Bennett) and ‘material agency’ (Andrew Pickering).

Concept by Chris Salter/Erik Adigard/M.A.D.
Edited by Chris Salter, Harry Smoak and Michel van Dartel
Designed by M.A.D./Erik Adigard, Patricia McShane & Htet Win

http://www.naibooksellers.nl/art/the-vibrancy-effect-ebook.html

 

Materials

Animated ePub, Illustrated with video fragments.

Collaborators

With: Andrew Pickering, Timothy Lenoir, Tagny Duff, Sundar Sarukkai, Dmitry Gelfand, Evelina Domnitch, Arjen Mulder, Sally Jane Norman, Peter Cariani, Mariam Fraser, Maurizio Martinucci, Joel Ryan,Tomasz Jaskiewicz, Harry Smoak and Chris Salter

 

To see a variety of presses visit

http://briarpress.org/museum/browse?t=4

Artist's Biography
Dolph Smith is a book artist from Memphis, Tennessee. His home/studio of thirty years in midtown and the Memphis College of Art where he taught for thirty years were only ten minutes from where he was born. Until he moved with his wife Jessie to a new home/studio 50 miles away in the countryside in Ripley, he had, as he says, "not come very far in life." At Memphis College of Art Dolph taught painting and drawing in early years, and, in the late 70’s, developed a Hand Papermaking and Book Arts program called "The Flying Vat." Dolph's art works ranged over the years from watercolors and drawings into years of paperworks and sculpture. Currently he is involved with creating one-of-a-kind handmade books.

Artist's Statement
If I pick up a book and it has 25 pages, I see them as 25 moving parts. My approach to the book is as if it were a small kinetic sculpture with moving parts. I do this without compromising the anatomy of the book: text block, binding, cover.

My books have visual and textural content but also plenty of blank space. This is with the hope the book will be used, held, entered, explored, added to.

If I am attempting anything unique, it is the effort to find a niche dealing with movement somewhat separate from the traditions of pop-up, altered books, etc. - hence the windows with objects moving about in them.

There is also the issue of sound - going beyond the rustle of the turned page.

To feel surfaces and parts is important, too.

I hope to engage all the senses.

Therein lies the story.

 

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Adaptive Learning and Postmodernist Literary Theory?

In April of 2013, McGraw-Hill Higher Education is releasing the first, ever, adaptive digital book: SmartBook.
While many of people may be suspicious and wary of ebooks, and their inevitable future, I am fascinated by an adaptive ebook. I studied English in college, and SmartBook is the logical extension of Post-modern literary theory. Postmodernism...I know, crazy, right? Allow me to explain. 


While I could quote to you some references to some print books that cover critical theory (say…David Richter’s The Critical Tradition 3^rd edition), I know that most of you will go where most of us do, to Google, and Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation, I feel, but I came across a decent website.http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-postmodernism.htm


Read it for yourself, but the basic knowledge you need about Post-Modernism is that it rejects the idea of a grand narrative, of any singular definition of “Truth”. Think about it this way: have you ever told a “had to be there joke”? Well, that just proves that a story, in itself, is not, the “whole” story.
When writers began to take into account this basic understanding, storytelling became blurred with the telling of the story. They began to make blatant references to the audience; in film, this is called “breaking the fourth wall”, where the actor/actress talks directly to the audience. In the TV show, LOST, the writers killed off two characters because they were “universally despised” by the Internet fan base.
This represents a loop between creation and consumption. This constant online feedback, called “Web 2.0”, is an extension of Post-Modernism: a blatant disregard for classic conventions of story-telling.  Anyway, back to McGraw-Hill’s SmartBook. The idea of a book interfacing directly with the audience, and adapting to them, real time, is incredibly Post-Modern. To be realistic, the purpose of reading content in a class is to learn the content, to pass the class, not to be able to spout off quotes (maybe at one time, but not anymore).
Additionally, the SmartBook disregards limiting concepts like “a visual learner.” SmartBook breaks down the idea of a singular text that all students must learn from. Adapting to the audience is an inherently Post-Modern idea, something embraced by TV shows, Movies, and Social Media. Now, it is time for one of the most basic building blocks of human knowledge to follow the trend. 

Posted by Daniel Binkholder

http://bloggingbink.blogspot.com/2013/03/adaptive-learning-and-postmodernist.html?spref=tw

 

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/publishing-industry-next-chapter/2/

While working in a bookstore in Boone, North Carolina, back in 2011, a 36-year-old college dropout named Hugh Howey started writing a series of sci-fi novellas called Wool. His stories were set in a postapocalyptic world where all human survivors live in an underground silo, a microsociety where resources are so scarce that one person has to die before another can be born. Howey had already published a book with a small press, but he wanted to retain creative control, and he didn’t want to go through the arduous process of finding an agent. So he decided to put out the new books himself, selling digital downloads and print editions through Amazon. In the first six months he sold 14,000 copies. Each new installment met with immediate enthusiasm. Within hours he’d receive emails from readers hungry for more.

 

By January of last year, agents were calling Howey, looking to publish the books through more established channels, but he was reluctant. At that point, the Wool series was already making him close to ,000 a month. Nelson Literary Agency founder Kristin Nelson won Howey over when she admitted that she wasn’t sure traditional publishing could offer him anything better than what he was doing on his own. (When she recounted this remark at a recent industry conference, the publishing professionals in the audience shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.) By May, Wool was bringing in 0,000 a month, and Howey and Nelson had sold the film option to 20th Century Fox and Ridley Scott. A couple of publishers made seven-figure offers for the rights to sell the book in hardcover, paperback, and ebook, but Howey and Nelson turned them down. He’d make that much in a year of digital sales alone.

Then Simon & Schuster’s president sent Nelson an email that opened the door to a six-figure deal for print rights only. It was an extraordinary concession—the publisher would agree to put its full marketing muscle behind Wool despite having to forgo the ebook revenue stream that has generated the bulk of the series’s earnings. It’s often said in publishing that with a blockbuster book, everybody wins. But with Wool, it’s Hugh Howey who has won biggest.

After centuries in which books and the process of publishing them barely changed, the digital revolution has thrown the entire business up for grabs. It’s a transformation that began with the rise of Amazon as an online bookseller and accelerated with the resulting decline of the physical bookstore. But with the shift to ebooks—which now represent upwards of 20 percent of big publishers’ revenue, up from 1 percent in 2008—every aspect of the existing framework is now open to debate: how much books will cost, how long they’ll be, whether they’ll be edited, who will publish them, and whether authors will continue to be paid in advance to write them. It’s a future that Amazon doesn’t control and one where traditional publishers might eventually thrive, not just survive. The only certainty is that the venerable book business, a settled landscape for so long, is now open territory for anyone to claim.

Of all the worries in the publishing world these days, the king of them is cultural irrelevance. “The fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Steve Jobs told a reporter in 2008, blurting out the secret fear of bookish people everywhere. But consider this: In one week, people who don’t read anymore bought about half a million copies of a really long book called Steve Jobs. In the past year, Vintage has sold one book from the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for every six American adults. The Big Six publishers—Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins—all make money, and at profit margins that are likely better than they were 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, readers have an unprecedented array of options. E-readers have gotten consistently cheaper and better since the first Kindle shipped in 2007, giving customers instant access to millions of titles. For a couple of dollars you can buy a self-published sensation or a Kindle Single rather than a full-length book. Add it all together and you have a more vibrant market for literary material than ever before, with nearly 3 billion copies sold every year. Amazon likes to point out that new Kindle buyers go on to purchase almost five times as many books from Amazon, print and digital, in the ensuing year as they did in the prior one. “I believe we’ll look back in five years,” says Russ Grandinetti, VP of Kindle content for Amazon, “and realize that digital was one of the great expansions of the publishing business.”

For all the digital optimism, not even Amazon is ready to declare the traditional model dead. In May 2011 the company announced that it was going head-to-head with the Big Six by launching a general-interest imprint in Manhattan, headed by respected industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum. It signed up celebrity authors, paying a reported 0,000 for a memoir by Laverne & Shirley star Penny Marshall and winning over best-selling self-help author Timothy Ferriss. Tired of being undersold by Amazon and wary of its encroachment into their business, many brick-and-mortar booksellers refused to stock the titles. The boycott has worked so far: Marshall’s book flopped, and Ferriss’ undersold his previous offering. Ferriss says he doesn’t regret his experiment with Amazon Publishing, but he allows, “I could have made more money—certainly up to this point—by staying with Random House.”

Still, it’s not clear that traditional publishers are well positioned to own the digital future. They are saddled with the costs of getting dead trees to customers—paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping—and they cannot simply jettison those costs, because that system accounts for roughly 80 percent of their business. Ebooks continue to gain ground, but the healthiness of the profit margins is unclear. J. K. Rowling’s latest book helps illustrate this bind. At a rumored advance of million, Little, Brown essentially backed up an armored car to Rowling’s house to pay her before seeing a nickel in revenue. The publisher then paid highly trained people to improve the novel and well-connected people to publicize and market it until it was inescapable. Little, Brown’s landlord in Manhattan occasionally asks for rent too. If a reader can buy the Kindle edition for .99, the public might eventually find it absurd to pay .99 for a printed version, let alone the that Little, Brown wants for the hardcover.

 

What’s more, awarding huge contracts for books that may not even be written yet creates tremendous risk. The industry is plagued by what indie-publishing entrepreneur Richard Nash has called the “pathology of unearned advances.” An author who gets a book deal is paid an advance against royalties, and if the royalties end up exceeding the advance, the author starts getting more checks. But that doesn’t usually happen.

The uncertainty about a book’s potential value cuts both ways. Daniel Menaker, former executive editor in chief of Random House, told me what happened when a fellow editor there presented a case to his colleagues for making an offer on Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: “People just laughed, and someone said, ‘Talk about beating a dead horse.’ ”  Good one! The editor, Jonathan Karp, luckily won the argument, and Random House bought the rights for only five figures. More than 2 million copies were in print even before the movie came out. Unfortunately, the more common scenario is that a publisher opens the vault for a book that tanks. Bantam paid a reported million in 2005 for two novels from a sci-fi writer named Gordon Dahlquist. If the title The Glass Books of the Dream Eatersdoesn’t sound familiar, you’re not alone.

The disappearance of the physical bookstore would endanger the entire book business—even Amazon.

The publishing houses stay afloat only because the megahits pay for the flops, and there’s generally enough left over for profit. Predicting the success or failure of any given book is impossible. Menaker recalls Jason Epstein, who led Random House for four decades, telling him, “Make no mistake—this is gambling.” Which is why the pricing pressure on ebooks is so scary to publishers: If they are the gambler at the slot machines, placing scores of bets and relying on the winnings to trump the losses, Amazon represents a casino that offers smaller and smaller payouts.

Beyond the immediate concern over prices, publishers also worry that the disappearance of the physical bookstore could endanger the entire book business, even (ironically) Amazon. Research has shown that readers don’t tend to use online bookstores to discover books; they use them to purchase titles they find out about elsewhere—frequently at physical stores. (If you want to see a bookstore owner get angry, mention Amazon’s Price Check app, which allows customers to scan an item in a physical store and buy it for less from Amazon then and there.) With no stores to browse in, publishers fear, book sales everywhere could take a significant hit.

This is one reason that, in 2010, five of the Big Six publishers worked with Apple to institute a new model to keep other retailers competitive with Amazon. In an attempt to win customers, Amazon had been routinely selling ebooks at a loss, paying, say, to wholesale for a popular ebook and then selling it for .99. Under the new so-called agency model, the publisher would have the power to set the price everywhere—between .99 and .99 for most best sellers—but the retailer would take 30 percent. That is, the publishers agreed to a scheme in which Amazon would make significantly more per book and they would make less. They were playing the long game, trying to protect physical stores and print sales and chip away at Amazon’s overwhelming ebook market share.

After fighting the plan, Amazon caved. But the Department of Justice sued the five publishers and Apple for collusion, and Amazon described one of the resulting settlements as “a big win for Kindle owners.” The recently announced merger of the two biggest of the Big Six, Random House and Penguin, is widely seen as a move to build an entity that can stand up to Amazon’s market power.

In the long term, what publishers have to fear the most may not be Amazon but an idea it has helped engender—that the only truly necessary players in the game are the author and the reader. “I was at a meeting God knows how many years ago at MIT,” former Random House chief Epstein says, “and someone used the word disintermediation. When I deconstructed that, I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the end of the publishing business.’ ”  At a time when a writer can post a novel online and watch the revenue pour in by direct deposit, the publishing industry’s skill at making books, selling them by hand to bookstores, and managing the distribution of the product threatens to become irrelevant. In Epstein’s vision, the writer may need a freelance editor, a publicist, and an agent who functions as a kind of business manager, but authors will keep a bigger share of the proceeds with no lumbering media corporation standing in the way.

So far this phenomenon has largely been limited to previously unknown writers like Hugh Howey. Amanda Hocking, a 26-year-old Minnesotan who worked days at an assisted-living facility, grossed about million on ebooks in a little over a year with her paranormal romances and zombie novels for young adults. John Locke, a self-published crime writer, had already beaten Hocking to the 1-million-ebook mark on Amazon. And then, of course, there is E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as self-published Twilight fan fiction but wound up making 2012 so bountiful for Random House that it gave a ,000 bonus to each employee.

But these are the exceptions. In general, new writers gain much more than they lose by signing with a major house. Most self-published authors have trouble selling a copy outside of their immediate family. Even if they have talent, they lack professional help or the imprimatur of quality that a publisher can bring. Indeed, Fifty Shades, which some have taken to be the definitive evidence in favor of self-publishing, is more accurately a demonstration of the opposite: The book became a massive commercial success only after Random House got involved, placing giant stacks of paperbacks in bookstores everywhere and buying huge ads in the London Underground.

The real danger to publishers is that big-ticket authors, who relied on the old system to build their careers, will abandon them now that they have established an audience. As Howey says, “When that happens, all bets are off.” The John Grishams of the world already manage to extract excellent deals in the traditional way because of their huge and reliable sales, and few writers relish the work of being their own publisher. But as that work grows easier—as complex print distribution loses ground to low-cost digital delivery—the big names are starting to get tempted. Stephen King has been experimenting with bypassing his publisher, releasing his latest essay as a Kindle Single directly (albeit with some editing and promotion) through the Amazon store. The popular suspense writer Barry Eisler turned down a 0,000 book contract with the intention to self-publish—but before he could do so, Amazon Publishing offered him a sweetheart deal.

Pretty soon one of these famous writers will step up to the cliff and actually jump. Maybe it will be Tim Ferriss. His less-than-stellar results with Amazon might push him back to a traditional publisher—or in another direction entirely. A great deal of money hinges on what he and his fellow best-selling authors decide to do next. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I self-published in the next few years,” Ferriss says. “Wouldn’t remotely surprise me.”

Evan Hughes (@evanhughes) is the author of Literary Brooklyn.

Brother, Can You Spare a Stack , Organized by Yulia Tikhonova 

Brother, Can You Spare a Stack presents thirteen art projects that re-imagine the library as a force for social change. Each project constructs a micro library of sorts that serves specific economic or social needs within the community. Each project proposes an alternative politicized realm, which can be imagined and formed to explore the social dimensions of contemporary culture. Small and mobile, these projects resist the limitations of a controlled, highly organized system that governs our society. In contrast to subjective libraries formed by the artists picking and choosing book titles, these projects take a pragmatic and rational approach, using the library model as an interactive field. Selected projects update the principles of relational aesthetics, and shift them towards all-inclusive and useful cultural production. "Brother, Can You Spare a Stack" borrows its title from the lyrics of a popular depression era song, claiming that the artists invent alternative models of questioning, inspiring new perspectives on social transformation. They insert themselves into the most unexpected situations and spaces, in this case libraries, to propose social and cultural improvement. The exhibition includes projects by: Arlen Austin and Jason Boughton; Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune; Stephen Boyer; BroLab (Rahul Alexander, Jonathan Brand, Adam Brent, Ryan Roa, and Travis LeRoy Southworth); Valentina Curandi and Nathaniel Katz; Finishing School with Christy Thomas; Anna Lise Jensen and Michael Wilson; Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden; The K.I.D.S. with Word Up Collective, Eyelevel BQE, Launchpad, NURTUREart, Weeksville Heritage Center, and individual partners, as well as with Emcee C.M., Master of None; Annabel Other; Reanimation Library; The Sketchbook Project; and Micki Watanabe Spiller. Special thanks to Build It Green NYC! for their in-kind donation of materials used both in the Bronx and at the Center for Book Arts.  Support for BroLab provided in part by BRAC and NYPL. Support for Curandi/Katz provided in part by nctm e l’arte and the Canada Council for the Arts. http://www.centerforbookarts.org/exhibits/archive/showdetail.asp?showID=235

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