National Postal Museum. Licensed through Creative Commons

When I first started the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, I had a list of things I wanted to achieve and another list of things I wanted to avoid. At the top of my things to avoid was warehousing. I’ve known too many writers with boxes of their own unsold books in their basements, garages or attics, the pages foxing with mildew, swelling with damp, smelling more and more strongly of mold until the writer couldn’t help starting to think that it was his own writing that stank. In fact, I’ve been one of those writers.

So I was determined to avoid warehousing, and along with warehousing I wanted to avoid packing, shipping, trucking, and all the rest of the services summed up by the all-too-rectal phrase “back end.” I wanted customers to be able to order our books from some printing-plus operation that would do all that dirty work out of my sight, and all we’d know of the transaction was that every so often a check would arrive. I didn’t care if the check wasn’t all that big as long as I didn’t have to deal with the back end.

So the first few books we ushered into being were indeed printed by printing-plus operations—Lulu, Blurb, the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont—and sure enough they took care of our fulfillment needs. My garage filled up with the things that naturally migrate into garages (tires, leaves, squirrel droppings, left-handed gardening gloves), my attic filled up with things that naturally migrate into attics (discarded clothing, overstuffed envelopes of two-year-old business receipts, mice for computers long obsolete), and my basement filled up with the things that naturally migrate into basements (cobwebs, old pairs of ice skates, individual socks dropped on the way to or from the laundry). It wasn’t entirely an orderly life, but at least I wasn’t forced to face shelves of reproachful, unsold, mildewing books.

Meanwhile, my older daughter Zoe was tackling the same problems with her first design line since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. She had created a series of designs that she had transferred to medium plates, small plates, and saucers, and now the Christmas orders were starting to come in, she had to start working out how to pack and ship fragile, inflexible products through the mail at the most insane and brutal time of the postal year.

The strange thing was—she seemed to be enjoying it. She contacted a number of packaging companies and designed her own cardboard sleeves for the plates. She played around with labels and stamps. The orders came in and went out, and we heard no reports that she had tripped over a stack of salad plates and fallen downstairs—or, just as bad, kicked the plates downstairs. She was no longer just a designer: she was an Industry.

Soon afterwards, I self-published my most recent book, Endangered Alphabets. It wasn’t a plate, but it was beautiful and, like all books, somewhat fragile. I couldn’t print-plus it through my no-back-end printers because either they couldn’t handle the 8×10 landscape format or I didn’t trust them to produce anything as elegant as I imagined. So I went with a printer that did excellent work and could offer me a print run of as few as 25 books (Mira Digital Publishing) and in addition decided not to sell the book through bookstores or Amazon, and instead to sell it only through its own website. I resigned myself to the fact that now I had no choice: I had to be my own back end.

To my amazement, I found myself enjoying it. For the first time in a 12-book career, I was now aware of every single book I sold. Not only that, but every book, whether I sold it through the website or at an exhibition of the Endangered Alphabets, became personal. So far I’ve not only signed every book, but in most cases I’ve personalized them with an inscription. Far more than ever before, I know the life of my books after they leave my hands: one is on its way to Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia. Who’d have guessed? And to a remarkable extent, I also know my buyer-readers—and that means every padded mailer, every piece of bubble-wrap, every trip to the Post Office gives a new meaning to the term “fulfillment”: it has the feel of giving a gift.

Luckily, sales so far have been both modest and smooth. I’m not sure how well I’d cope if I started getting a thousand orders a week. But right now the living-room bookshelf has a neat stack of some 20 copies of this beautiful book, and they’ll all be gone long before the mold sets in. I have a pretty good idea when to order the next box, and when to buy the next pack of padded envelopes from the dollar store.

Napoleon taunted the British as “a nation of shopkeepers,” but I’m quite liking the insult.I feel more like a pub-keeper than a publisher: selling involves as much meeting and chatting as it does packing and shipping. The back end is front and center, and I love it.

Lit from within, not defined from without

Having just finished the two signs for the new Perry building on the Champlain College Campus, I had just one more Endangered Alphabet carving on my list. I can’t tell you all the details, as it’s a surprise present for someone, but even so it’s worth talking about.
For a start, I am using an astonishing wood called Padauk, thanks to my daughter Zoe, who knows me well enough to buy me a piece, roughly 30″ by 3 1/2 inches by 1/4 inch, for my birthday. Padauk is very hard and incredibly rich in color: at heart (literally) it is blood-red, but exposure to air and sun turns it darker and darker until it looks like dried blood, and then becomes almost black. A woodworker friend said he cut into a slab of it once and it was like slicing barbecued steak: black on the outside, bloody in the middle.
Padauk turns out to be quite difficult to carve on the small scale at which I’m working. The surface is almost…um…scaly, and it’s easy to take off more than I intend.
But what I really wanted to write about was the writing, which has illuminated (pun intended, and coming up) all kinds of insights into language and the way we see and think of it.
You see, almost everything I create is in a light to mid-colored wood (maple being a favorite, cherry being anther wood I’ve used perforce) with the writing in black. I’ve loved this combination ever since I did my first Chinese piece, on a particularly light piece of maple, and the result looked like black pen-drawn ink on off-white silk–perfect for Chinese.
Black on white is, of course, pretty much the default way in which we reproduce language, and it embodies all kinds of unquestioned assumptions. It means, for example, that a letter is defined by its edges. If I make the slightest mistake along the margins of a letter, it immediately looks wrong, and I have to fix it. The letter, then, is riparian–from the Latin ripa, a river-bank or shoreline–and goes along with cognitive science research that tells us our eyes are drawn to borderlines, and even as babies in our cribs we look for the place where light and dark meet.
What makes this piece different is that, padauk being darkish-and-likely-to-get-darker, I decided to use not black paint but gold. (There’s another reason why I’m using gold, but to tell you that would give away both the endangered alphabet I’m using and the person I’m going to give it to.) And as soon as I started laying the metallic gold paint into the cut letters, something entirely new happened.
With black paint, we see all the paint; with gold paint we see only the flecks of reflective metallic gold in the paint. So straight away the lettering looks less solid but, paradoxically, brighter and more vivid. And that brightness is concentrated not at the edges of the letters but in the heart of each letter. The letters cease to be riparian; instead, they are cordic, from the Latin word cor, meaning “heart.” They glow from within.
Almost as soon as I started painting, I found the word “Nebuchadnezzar,” running through my mind, and then “Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.” I had to look it up to make sure my memory from 40 years ago wasn’t playing tricks on me, but sure enough, there it was: Nebuchadnezzar was the king who dreamed he saw letters, written by a mysterious and presumably divine hand, glowing on a wall, prophesying his downfall.
And at once it all made sense–Neb’s dream, writing as divine communication, the gold-leaf illuminations of biblical manuscripts (I told you we’d come back to that concept of illumination), the notion that in the beginning was the word. Because these remarkable letters were in many ways the opposite of what I usually paint, and the opposite of letters as we usually think of them. Instead of being defined by physical limitations, industrial processes, the paint-by-numbers restrictiveness of writing to get things right, these gold letters were defined by the spirit of whoever was speaking through them, and the spirit of what was at the heart of the message. They glow with the importance of meaning–with the meaning of meaning.
Most of my work looks best in a strong and directed light, like most artwork, like most writing.
This piece looks best in half-light, my desk lamp falling on just a few of the words and making them leap from the darkness. And again I’m reminded of how often the Word is beseeched to lighten our darkness, to give direction to the confused, inspiration to those whose own lights are burning dim.