The newspaper industry has certainly seen major changes in the two decades since I toured that printing plant, but the magic of the newspaper format continues to inspire.

Enter a new kind of Newspaper Club. The Creative Kind.

Founded on a whim three years ago by the British Design firm, Really Interesting Group, The Newspaper Club allows anyone to create and produce their own newspaper, and it has gained quite a following in the past few years.

The types of newspapers being produced range from personal (wedding programs and portfolios) to expressive (limited-edition art projects) to political (such as a local protest about a school closing). Interested participants can order as few as one, to more than 5000, delivery included. It is a based on a group purchase model, with projects going to press twice per week. It is a novel and brilliant idea, and allows public access to a format that is normally only available to publishers or entities with really large print runs.

It feels nostalgic and forward thinking at the same time, using the power of online ordering to reach a large international audience, while harnessing that global momentum to purchase printing at a local level in the UK.

One of the co-founders, Russell Davies, was quoted recently on the Huffington Post explaining, “We’re not saving newspapers, we’re democratising newsprint.”

I’d call that a Really Interesting Idea.

Images courtesy of The Newspaper Club.

As a build-up to next year’s Documenta 13, German publisher Hatje Cantz and Documenta will be releasing a series of one hundred booklets all about notes and notetaking. Drawing from authors, artists, academics and more, the series will be available in August. Each release is $10, and the first is an essay from anthropologist Michael Taussig about fieldwork notebooks and how notebooks become fetishized by their users. What irony,” he posits, “that the anthropologist, namely myself, given to studying fetishism, should have unwittingly developed with his notebooks a fetish all of his own and become not only a slave to that fetish but enamored of it!”

Wow, theory and inspiration about notebooks for a notebook geek who loves theory and inspiration. I do believe I want them all!

Pocket sized reads from yesteryear

Though faded by time, and worn by use, these Little Blue Books still astonish modern-day me with their ability to deliver such a hefty dose of information in the compact 3.5″ X 5″ format. The series was devised by Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius in 1919, and the name changed (along with the color of the cover paper) from the People’s Pocket Series, to Appeal Pocket Series, then Ten Cent Pocket Series, finally hitting its stride in 1923 with Little Blue Books. Their lofty goal was to distribute literature, ideas, and information to as wide an audience as possible via the affordable and approachable pocket-sized format. They strove to create a “University in Print.”

In 1919 The Haldeman-Julius couple purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas from the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason that E. Haldeman-Julius had been editing. Equipped with the printing presses and mailing list of 175,000 names, they sent out a call for subscribers to their series. $5 for 50 titles. A dime a booklet. 5000 readers took them up on the offer, and they had $25,000 to start their endeavor.

Soon the series’ popularity had spread around the globe, and the venture was producing up to 65,000 booklets a day, resulting in a staggering 300,000,000 over the lifetime of the project. Over 2000 titles total. Bookstores stocked special racks with the Little Blue Books, and they found their way into many a person’s pockets (including Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Studs Terkel).

The publishing company lost steam after WWII, when Haldeman-Julius was placed on the FBI enemy list. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s watch, the FBI disliked the series’ frank treatment of topics like socialism, and homosexuality, and that soon led to a decline in distribution at bookstores. The series continued as a mail-order enterprise until the publishing house and printing plant burned in 1978.

I, for one, would love to see a twenty-first century revival of the Pocket Sized University.

By Tom Waits

I will be the first to admit, the power of print continues to blow my mind.

But every once in a while, it REALLY blows my mind. Let’s take for example, a poem that raises nearly $90,000 for assistance to the homeless, and does it prior to actually being printed and released. Simply the promise of the printed piece was enough to kickstart the fundraising.

Of course, it’s not any poem. It’s Seeds on Hard Ground, by Tom Waits. And, it’s not any method of distribution, the two chapbook editions were beautifully designed by Johnny Brewton of X-Ray Book Co., carefully crafted by Pinball and expertly released by the team at Anti-Records. But it still raised $90,000 for people who really needed it. And the chapbooks will endure in collections around the world as tangible reminders of the intellect and generosity of Tom Waits. It’s more than the power of print. It’s the power of print in tandem with great content, big hearts, and a very worthy cause.

The poem was inspired by Michael O’Brien’s photographs of the homeless. A re-arranged version of the poem appears alongside O’Brien’s portraits in his book Hard Ground.

The chapbooks are completely sold out. But you can still donate to charities selected by Tom Waits, The Redwood Empire Food Bank, and Sonoma County’s Homeless Referral Services and Family Support Center operated by Catholic Charities.

Support the 20th Anniversary Issue

Plazm Magazine is celebrating 20 years of existence. Wow! That is two decades of award-winning coverage of design, art, music, literature, and culture. You can help take the 30th issue to print by supporting their Kickstarter campaign. I really wish I had $1000 to give, because that pledge level would be super helpful for the campaign and get my name in Jon Raymond’s next book or screenplay. Of course, there are many other donation levels and all help support Plazm Magazine’s awesome legacy of Print Culture.

Watch the video below to learn more.

From the exhibit Public Library: An American Commons, by Robert Dawson

“I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library.” writes the poet Charles Simic today in his essay, “A Country Without Libraries.”

I’m inclined to agree.

Posted this morning in response to news of closing libraries across the US, Simic speaks of the larger losses that come with shuttering our libraries, primarily our free access to information. He also reminds us of the magical qualities found in these public spaces; books in large quantities on every imaginable subject, and a welcoming zone for adults and young people alike. A rare combination, and one that he argues is part of the foundation of our democracy and also part of the creation of well-rounded people.

Simic says, “It’s not that I started out life being interested in everything; it was spending time in my local, extraordinarily well-stacked public library that made me so.”

Image courtesy of Robert Dawson.

This is what you're thinking.

Portland State University is hosting a free conference this weekend (May 13-15). It’s called Open Engagement and it’s an ambitious initiative of the Art and Social Practice MFA program. This year’s plethora of activities explore five major themes: Peoples and Publics, Social Economies, In Between Places, Tracking and Tracing, and Sentiment and Strategies. Artists Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera will be present, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University will be staging an exhibit called Bureau for Open Culture.

Activities and presentations span the city.

As part of the event, MFA student, artist and general awesome person, Jason Sturgill designed a duet Scout Book + custom pencil (pictured here). I for one would always like to be doing and thinking more and I am very grateful that Open Engagement will assist in that process.

Photo-Lettering becomes more than just a dated catalog of typographic treasures.

Design world, meet Photo-Lettering, Inc.

House Industries, in collaboration with Erik van Blokland and Christian Schwartz, has just re-released the expansive library of display type from the seminal type house Photo-Lettering. The unveiling of Photo-Lettering’s web platform brings long-unavailable typography straight to the desktops of the world’s designers: a series of simple steps allows users to set their headline and then purchase an affordable vector version of the setting with liberal licensing restrictions.

How exactly did House Industries come to release a collection of dated decorative typography? The original Photo-Lettering type house closed its doors in 1985 after 57 years of operation, and eighteen years later in 2003 House Industries purchased the remaining assets and got to work making the typographical treasures available on a mass digital scale.

The website’s extensive history section reveals the passion and energy of the PLINC team; these folks are serious about the resurrection of the type library and have done endess research to power the project. The History, Ideas and Films sections contain enough rich content to keep you busy for hours, and that’s not even considering the time you could spend typesetting headlines in the extensive lettering catalog.

Go forth. Resurrect historical typography. Make beautiful headlines.

Examples of Photo-Lettering fonts from the Ideas section of the site.

When we first set our eyes on this sculptural volume released by Visual Editions back in November 2010, our immediate reaction was, “How did they make that?!”

Here is an answer. This video, made by the publisher, documents the three months of production at Belgian printshop Die Keure. Printing, die-manufacturing, die cutting, trimming, binding: this book took countless hours of people power to manufacture. And that’s not counting the research it required! Visual Editions notes they were turned down by nearly every printer they approached, the stock line being “The book you want to make just cannot be made.”

This video proves that wrong. Watch it below.

Let this guy break it down for you.

We all know how important print is. But this guy? He really understands.

Watch the video below.

Via FOGD.