NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

William Nicholson’s Queen Victoria handcoloured woodcut.

William Nicholson in a letter to publisher William Heinemann:  ‘I have often wept in the dawn to think I only got £10.10s. for my little queen with which you have papered the world. I remember so well how you hated the idea of her and predicted failure and often  I have wondered that you haven’t send me £1,000 hush money by a black-masked messenger boy – even now I would pay the boy at this end’ 

Success in book publishing has to do with straddling…technologies. Coach House Press/Books founder Stan Bevington reiterates this truth in these excerpts from Roy MacSkimming’s ‘Perilous Trade Conversations’ [conducted back in 1998], now found in the latest edition of CNQ magazine:

 "Bevington: …I was fascinated by the photo-offset available at the time. I had done silkscreen and photo silkscreen, so I understood photography. I’d learned a lot about photography with an old wooden camera I used to make printing plates for pictures. so that mix and match of technology worked right from the beginning of our press. We had a linotype machine and a hand letterpress, then we bought a small photo-offset press. We were able to put real-looking type into nice pictures and started doing books – photo-offset illustrations and letterpress type. With that production facility, we were able to crank out quite a variety of books."

Bevington: …now [1998] we’re in a transitional period where people are reading computer manuals and instruction manuals online and getting information that uwsed to be inthe print-only world. so that a transformation. And when you see our website, and you see the liveliness of some of hte poets, you’ll see that paper couldn’t accommodate what they’re writing. So they’re able to communicate in ways that are indigenous to the new media. I think it’s a terrific time.

MacSkimming: But clearly you haven’t abandoned paper.

Bevington: It’s an and/also argument. We won’t get involved in the either/or arguent. this is why I think t’s so strange that no other publisher has picked it up. We find we can make limited-edition fetish objects, we can make a cheap paperback, and we can gie it away ont he web, and people will still buy the expensive one. They”ll complain about price, but they’ll buy it. conventional marketng wisdom doesn’t seem to be in place anymore.

MacSkimming: Is this because they’ve encountered the book on the web?

Bevington: And they want the real thing! The web has been the most terrific advertising source for us. Just terrific. "

Exactly what Cory Doctorow says here eleven years later.

I recently picked up a copy of In Art or Instruction, a limited duodecimo-sized edition published in 1969 as a greeting to friends of Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. on the occasion of its fiftieth year.

Here’s what then president William Jovanovich had to say in it about publishing:

"Publishing, too, is steady work, for there can be no end to the constant, perdurable need to instruct and to engage by art and entertainment the whole of society no less than every one. By its best humanistic definition, publishing is a major means by which we conceptualize ourselves, by which we find our what the world is and what it wants of us. Books and journals and films and other media that inform, that tell what is knwon and intimate what is not – these reveal the identity of the reader and viewer no less than that of the author or producer. Assuming that men will always be curous about themselves, publishing must be, like awaiting the millenium, the longest-lived of professions."