Here's what happened

During design school, I realized that I was going to be a book designer. As a vocation, book design combines my dual interests in graphic design and architecture. I imagine a book to be a tiny building whose rooms are pages. The reader, using hands and eyes, visits the book and travels through it in whatever way suits their purpose. Some books are to be strolled through, others purposefully navigated. If the book is designed well, the reader will enjoy their visit, get what they came for, and maybe even want to come back, or move in.

Another way I think of books are as containers of culture. It seems weird, but old-fashioned books are the most durable mass-information storage media we've come up with. Compare books to digital media, and there's no match. For books, no one ever has to change the batteries or keep the electricity on. Dust and magnetism aren't a problem, nor is obsolescence, that perpetually looming threat. What if Macbeth had been a Kindle Exclusive E-Book? Or if Plato's dialogs were stored only on ancient 5.5 inch floppy disks? The point is that if you think whatever it is that you've got to say deserves to last, so that it can be communicated through time, you had better get it printed and bound into a book. We live in a time when it seems to a lot of really smart people like the right thing to do is ditch printing as a relic and fully embrace digital publishing as the new way to do things. But if human culture is a product of language and a result of its transmission through time and space, then this seems to be, to put it mildly, a bad idea.

Something else I realized about myself in school is that my ideal practice is a craft-based one. I use the word craft only insofar as it means a combined activity of designing and manufacturing. If I'm going to be making books, I want to be involved in the whole manufacturing process. And why not? That's the way it used to be done when printing was invented. A "Press" was a shop that combined the intellectual, white-collar editorial aspects of publishing (finding work to publish, editing it, designing it, and funding its production) with strenuous, blue-collar manufacturing that is now the domain of a distinct printing industry. But what's a book "crafter" to do without a printing press? Bide his time, and learn. Which is what I've been doing until recently, when an unemployed press that had belonged to a family friend who passed away found its way into my life, and I poured all my energy into starting this business.

Container Corps is a double experiment, one cultural, the other socio-economic. The first experiment asks: 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? The second experiment asks: what has been lost or gained by the separation of the industries of publishing and printing? Can a press, in the word's original sense, be a viable business today? What can it do that large corporate publishing houses cannot, and vice versa? What are the rewards and hardships of a practice that combines design with manufacture, the publisher with the pressman and the binder? I'm going to find good work, design it with respect, replicate it in a durable way, throw it out into the world and see what happens.