Container Corps

Container Corps HQ

Container Corps is powered by Gary Robbins, a print master and publication wonder. Located in a tiny storefront in North Portland, Container Corps has been quietly making moves in the local publishing world, generating new publications and experimental printing projects. When we caught up with Gary to hear his thoughts on starting Container Corps, we had no idea we’d be so moved by his responses. His eloquent, thoughtful explanation of his intentions with his creative publishing project got us jazzed. If entities like Container Corps are the future of print, we’re all going to be okay.

Read below for an interview with Gary. We’re impressed. We think you will be too.

Who exactly is Container Corps? Tell us about the individuals directly involved and the community of artists you work with. Have you found your time in the publishing world to be a community-based experience?

Container Corps is a book design studio, printshop, bindery, and exhibition space that serves as a platform for the creation, discussion, and distribution of new art publications. It was started by me, Gary Robbins. My background is in book design, bookbinding, and printmaking, so Container Corps is a way to combine all these disciplines into an everyday practice. I started the press because I saw a lot of talent that I felt was deserving of publication, even in my group of close friends. So I started out knowing that I could convince at least my friends to work with me on book projects, and hopefully it will grow from there.

Publishing is definitively a community based experience. I’m not much more than the middle man that facilitates communication within the community. On the one side of this line of communication are artists with something to convey, and on the other side are the consumers of art that are seeking these viewpoints.

Rainbow posters offset printed by Container Corps.

“Books are containers for culture,” “Cultivate a local canon,” and “Print still matters” are three sayings you printed on gorgeous rainbow posters that popped up around town last year. I read this series as a sort of manifesto or statement of purpose. Tell us about this project.

Those posters started out as a call for entries, but they were also the first public thing Container Corps made, so I thought it was important to define its position to the world of potential readers and artists we might work with. In that way it was a manifesto. Since I was planning on putting up posters all over the place, I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time or anyone’s trees, so I decided to think of the posters as public service announcements, hopefully something positive. And I kind of love the rainbow roll (when you use multiple colors of ink on the press at once, and let them blend together on the ink rollers). The colors start out fairly separate, and slowly blend together as the print run goes on. No two are exactly alike, and if I do a reprint, those will be different too. Its kind of a nice metaphor for what I’m trying to do, because its something that can only exist on paper. Its kind of like a record of this analog process that happened once and can’t be repeated.

You define yourselves as an Arts Press. How do you see the content you publish as different or unique from more traditional publishing houses?

Hopefully by staying small I will be able to publish stuff that is more of a time and place than the type of books bigger art book publishers put out.

I’m inspired by the scale of your operation. I find the concept of publishing much more approachable when it’s at a scale that allows face-to-face interaction between artist and publisher, publisher and bookseller, bookseller and consumer. Do you see yourself as a pioneer of a new scale of publishing house? How does the current decline of many large, print-media publishing companies influence or not influence your practice?

Something like 80% of all the books last year were made by one of 5 huge media congomerates. In order to meet the profit margins that their shareholders demand, they make books with mass appeal. Thats fine, but it misses a huge part of the cultural conversation. I feel like its the stuff that the huge publishers wouldn’t take a chance on that’s pushing culture forward, and that’s what im interested in finding. And even if it has a much smaller audience, its an audience that has been left behind by smaller publishers as they were swallowed up by conglomerates.

I feel like I am going to learn that there is a scale at which this organization is able to accomplish what I want it to, and its probably not much bigger than this. Any bigger and you start falling into the trap of having to water down the quality of your output in order to sell more books. There are a lot of smaller scale publishing houses that have been cropping up in the past couple of years that I’d like to think of myself as a part of someday. Places like Nieves in Switzerland, Picturebox in New York, Kaugummi in France.

Poster for The Disappearing Book, a collaborative project edited by Melody Owen and published by Container Corps.

Tell us about Disappearing Book, a project by Melody Owen that you recently published.

For several years, Melody has been passing around an edited version of the “red list” of endangered species to all sorts of artists, writers, illustrators, musicians, etc, asking them to respond, in any way they see fit, to these species. She started putting the work up on a blog, and then when she had a nice big chunk of work, she had an exhibition of it at Reading Frenzy, which is when I first saw it. I floated the idea to Melody that it could be a great project for Container Corps to publish. It’s a nice book because it has essentially an environmental message, but its the opposite of preachy. None of the work asks you to do anything other than consider these animals that are disappearing and which you might never have even heard of. In a way its a lot more effective at getting the message across, but its also way more interesting.

Current and past projects at Container Corps' studio.

There are a number of things I really appreciate about your approach, one being your dedication to creating cultural content using materials that last throughout time. As I understand it, the point of your approach is not only to consume resources responsibly but to create durable, lasting artifacts of information as a means to contribute to the progression of human culture. Tell us about books as containers for culture.

That’s sort of the secret mission, to preserve these moments of culture for the future. There’s so much talk these days about the end of print. But one of the things you learn when you study the history of bookbinding is that humans have yet to design a more durable unit of information storage than the book. Examples of the first books ever printed still exists and are perfectly readable. Also there’s the manuscripts, scrolls and the like that are still around from even earlier. Books, unlike Kindles or iPads, don’t need batteries and they don’t suddenly stop working one day. The information on CDs, floppy disks, hard drives, flash memory and the like might last 100 years or 200 years, provided you keep them in a clean room and are able to access the information on them after years of technology advancing away form these formats. If a book needs to be repaired, it only requires a needle and thread and a hammer. If Amazon’s Kindle “whispernet” shuts down, and someday it will, every Kindle in the world will stop working. Books don’t require their publishers to exist in order to function; once they are in the world, they can make do on their own, provided a nice shelf. Its important, because the corporations that produce books (and now e-books) have never been and will never be in a position to preserve them. That’s what libraries are for.

So, given all that, Container Corps sees each of its book projects as part of a larger mission, and that is to call into question the push towards digital publishing and the “death of print.” In order to move culture forward, its important to look back, and the only way we can insure that is to publish our books in a way that is purposefully durable. So for instance, all the books are sewn by hand, because a handsewn book is the most durable way to make a book, and the most easy to repair. Most of the bindery consists of tools similar to those that have has in use for literally thousands of years. Its interesting because the a lot of the artists I’ve met don’t want to hear about this stuff. They think of their work in the past or present tense. Its either “the stuff I’m working on right now” or “that old stuff I’ve moved away from.”

Xylobooks, reusable notebooks crafted from reclaimed wood.

I first ran into you guys at the Publication Fair put on by the Publication Studio last December. You were selling beautiful notebooks with wooden covers. These Xylobooks, as you call them, are a fantastic union of “traditional bookbinding methods and a clean, modern aesthetic.” Do you often seek out this symbiotic relationship between old and new in Container Corps projects?

I feel like “handmade” can refer to an aesthetic as well as a method, but most of the time the word is used to mean both. I try to separate the two in the stuff I do. I use some pretty old school bookbinding methods, because of the quality you get in terms of longevity, but try to use these methods to create books that are contemporary objects, not nostalgic. In the case of blank books, its not hard to find a hand-sewn blank book at the Saturday Market, but they always fall into the renaissance fair category. We try to use these proven, old timey methods of production, but only as a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Projects from Container Corps on the shelves of the shop.

You refer to Container Corps as a two-part experiment incorporating cultural and socio-economic facets. Your thoughts touch upon many things we’re thinking about over here at Bangback: in October of 2009, you wrote and asked yourself things such as, “What place does printing have left in our culture? What can it do that other media cannot? What would we lose if it were to disappear?” Eight months later, have you come to any conclusions? Any unexpected truths revealed through your work thus far?

Printing has a different echo than other media. Its quieter but with more sustain.

The view out Container Corps' window onto North Killingsworth

You’re located in a little storefront in North Portland in a residential neighborhood. This was important to you as you sought your space, to be located in a community that would nurture your project’s aims and benefit from the cultural creation coming out of your storefront. How much does location effect the goals and outcomes of Container Corps? Would Container Corps be the same publishing project in a different locale?

It was important that Container Corps occupy a semi public place. Part of the mission is to promote the discussion of art publications and contemporary art in general. People come to our openings or just stop by to see whats going on, and a conversation can happen. People can see the machines running and find out about the offset printing process. Thats the best way for new publications to be born, through these everyday conversations with a community. I also wanted to be part of a neighboorhood, because I feel that if the consumption of books and art is a part of everyday life, then so should the creation of them. So now my neighboorhood has a grocery store, a hardware store, schools, doctors offices, and a publishing company (actually, TWO publishing companies, because Publication Studio is right around the corner). It’s what publishing has been moving away from over the past 200 years, and now that Publishing with a capital P is in its death throes, maybe its time to bring it back to neighboorhood.

Gary Robbins runs Container Corps on a Hamada offset press.

Container Corps very much nurtures a craft, in the sense of a practice based in both intellectual development and manufacturing that is seemingly rare these days. Do you see a widespread backlash against the loss of this model? Are there other creative practitioners that you look to as inspiration for nurturing your craft?

I looked to design-build architecture practices as a model for Container Corps, especially the Rural Studio at Auburn University. Their process is like a perfect combination of community development and site-specific installation art. They go talk to people in their community, looking for needs that infrastructure could fill. Their use of materials (mostly upcycled waste) and form is improvisational and playful in a way that really can only be accomplished by making inseparable the design and production phases of making a building. Most importantly, their practice reintegrates architecture, both the product and the activity, into everyday life. They are members of the community, and in that way their responsibility towards the client doesn’t end when the ribbon is cut. People have to live with buildings, books, whatever, so the creation of those things can’t be something that’s inflicted from above. I also think of books as little buildings. There’s a lot of similarities to the way people interact with both. I actually studied architecture in school.

Gary hand-built this bookshelf.

You handle tactile materials and operate “analog” machinery everyday. Yet you’re not afraid or opposed to the internet, as demonstrated by your comprehensive site and blog. Do you have a defined approach to incorporating technology into your practice? What does digital mean to Container Corps?

Its kind of funny that a lot of my philosophy, at least on the production side of things, is anti-technology, but we couldn’t exist without the internet. The fact that anyone anywhere in the world can buy a book from our website is pretty remarkable. We’re catering to a niche market that is diffused all over the place, the internet is the only place where we’re able to reach all these people. I also think that as we spend more time on the internet, where everything is constantly in flux and shifting and untouchable, it has made the time we spend with printed material maybe more special than it was a little bit ago. So I would say that the internet has been the death of a specific kind of publishing, but it has really been the birth of entirely different kind of print publishing that couldn’t have existed before. That dichotomy of Container Corps being anachronistic but completely of its time is really exciting to me.

Past projects line the walls of the shop, and Gary prepares illustrations from Alisha Wessler for his next publication.

What projects do you have planned for the summer months?

Alisha Wessler is working on illustrations for an edition of Der Struwwelpeter. We have a book by Corey Lunn coming up. Josh Pavlacky is working on a book of new collage work. Oh and a couple of cool projects by Avalon Kalin.

A poster printed for Appendix Art Space.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks for the hard questions, and thanks for the saddle stitcher!