William Drenttel, "The Designer as Publisher."
The AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, 11:2 (Spring 1993) 3.


In my spare time, I'm a publisher. About a year ago, I decided that my many book compulsions needed a common outlet: a way to bring together an interest in certain writers; an ongoing desire to do "projects" with friends; a remedy to my accumulating, collector instincts; and, a place in my life where design is not the starting point.

In my not-so-spare-time, I work at Drenttel Doyle Partners, a studio in which hundreds of books, book covers, and book-inspired things have been designed. In fact, it was the idea of designing books that originally drew me out of advertising and into partnership with Stephen Doyle and Tom Kluepfel. Later, we figured out how to design more than books and magazines. The "more" is good, our partnership is healthy, and books are still ever-present. Yet seven years later, I wanted to make books happen, not just have them assigned; I wanted to initiate printed projects that weren't firm self-promotions; and I wanted to work more closely with writers. So, in late 1991, I created a publishing imprint named William Drenttel New York, and began working on two books. What follows is the story of these projects and my first year as a publisher.

The first project, December 14th, resulted from a desire to print the two poems read at my wedding in 1985. In the tradition of the private press, there is a place for personal projects that commemorate private occasions. I asked Jerry Kelly of the Stinehour Press to help me because of his skill as a letterpress designer and his experience in working with poetry. (Working with letterpress printers tends to be more collaborative than working with commercial printers, since they are often designers in their own right.) The book featured two poems, The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams and Epithalamion by Amelia Wood. Kelly designed a twelve-page chapbook in an edition of 100 copies printed letterpress from Emerson type on Arches paper. I gave this, my first book, to my wife on our sixth anniversary, and then to 100 friends and family for the holidays. On this sentimental foot I was off and running.

The second project was also personal. One of my favorite writers is James Salter, described as a "writer's writer" in a profile last year in The New York Times Magazine. In 1988, I commissioned Salter to write a short story about New York as part of an ad campaign we created to launch the World Financial Center. Four other stories ran in magazines like The New Yorker and Time. However, the series was killed before Salter's piece was published, and it sat in a file drawer for three years, haunting me. This exquisite piece of prose, which Salter would call a prose poem, I caused to be written and failed to get published. When I called Salter and told him that I was going to publish it myself, he sounded pleased but incredulous. I asked my partner, Stephen Doyle, who had originally designed the ad series, to design the book; he wanted to re-interpret the idea of the "fine press" book, and designed the type himself--in Adobe Sabon on the Macintosh. Duane Michals contributed a photograph. It was printed in six-colors offset by the Stinehour Press on Mohawk Vellum as a trade paperback, and on Rives BFK as a special signed edition. Titled Still Such, the finished book captures the tender rhythm of the text through chromatic surges of large type crossing the gutter.

I, of course, discovered that such projects take time and cost money. I had promised myself that WDNY would minimally pay for itself. In the case of the Salter book, which inherently wasn't a short-run letterpress edition, the economics of the project required that I take the plunge and produce a trade edition. So I have both a limited number of signed copies for supporters, subscribers of WDNY and rare book dealers, and hundreds of books that must be distributed on trade terms to book stores. (With prices from $12 for the Salter paperback to $200 for a leather-bound Auster edition, there is a great disparity in potential customers.) I also needed to sell, track invoices, manage inventory and returns: suddenly, I was running a business, too.

Not discouraged, I went on to other projects. My roommate from college, a Renaissance scholar, sent me an excerpt from the course-of-study description for a school in Milan in 1571. It reads like a litany of all conceivable knowledge--and in beautifully descriptive prose suggests that understanding the workings of the universe was actually thought possible. I asked Brian Cronin to create an accompanying illustration of an erupting volcano, which I would later adapt as the logomark of WDNY. I then spent a weekend in West Chester, PA at the Aralia Press, operated by Michael Peich, a letterpress designer in the tradition of Harry Duncan and Kim Merker. A good teacher, Peich had me set the type myself, and then we damp printed 75 copies letterpress of A Proposed Course of Study on Johannot paper. These were distributed to friends and supporters of WDNY.

My biggest project in this first year grew out of my book collection. Some years ago I stopped collecting modern first editions in general to focus on specific writers such as Don Delillo, James Salter, Ian McEwen and Paul Auster. Some time ago, a friend sent me a Christmas story by Auster (albeit a somewhat quirky, post-modern one) that had run on the OpEd page of The New York Times the year before. I had missed it, like every reader of Auster I know. So here was my next book! I called Auster and asked if I could publish "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story." He said yes, except that an Englishman named Peter Baldwin of The Delos Press was already planning to publish it. I called Baldwin, and we talked, mainly English-style via regular mail; after a couple of months, we agreed to publish this book together. It then took nine months. Andy Gray, now an art director at Hal Riney & Partners in Chicago, designed the type to capture the pulpy, detective story feel of the piece within a classic letterpress format. Brian Cronin created a evocative frontispiece illustration. It was printed two-color letterpress from Bembo type on Zerkall paper by Michael Mitchell of the Libanus Press in Marlborough England. We made 450 copies: 50 bound in full goatskin and slipcased, 100 quarter-bound in buckram and 300 in marbled wrappers.

So I published four projects, two real books and two more personal keepsakes, in a little over a year. Now I'm resting, selling the Auster and Salter, and trying to figure out ways to find readers for such projects. Many small publishers exist by building an audience around a narrow focus: a type of writing or an area of interest. Most other small publishers just lose money. I'd like to crack these barriers by exposing the world of fine printing to regular, smart, well-read people, and by exposing innovative, interesting writing to graphic designers.

In the works are about ten projects, which probably means two or three books a year. My next book will be a formal bibliography of the writings of Paul Auster with over 700 citations of primary and secondary works. Jerry Kelly is designing this book. I've negotiated the English-language rights to a book of 100 short satirical parables by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, and am now commissioning a translation. Here I will grapple with how to do a full-length book, both from a design and distribution standpoint. I'm also working on a story by Jamaica Kincaid with unnamed artist to make my first "artist's book," and on a keepsake chapbook with lyrics by The Cure treated as letterpress poetry. A final project is a collection of aphorisms by the essayist David Rieff, who has written extensively about the movements of peoples (immigration, refugees, etc.) and the role of cultural and national identity.

The real surprise is how much of a world I've entered. I have new friends. My Auster correspondence with Peter Baldwin includes hundreds of letters and faxes, and I will soon take a vacation visit him in Birmingham, England. I read Bookways and go to exhibitions at The Grolier Club. People who buy my books often write me long letters, which I answer. A collector wrote me last week because the boyfriend of an old girl friend, a rare book dealer, wrote him to recommend me because of his interest in Salter, Auster and Bernhard, an unlikely trio that matched my own trio. Such are the reasons I became a publisher.

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