News:
Porcupine's New Wordless Imprint
A recent, noticeable trend in the Canadian small press landscape is for publishers to veer off from publishing the written word altogether, or at least, nearly. Conundrum Press publishes more graphic novels and comics now than ever before, with visual books outnumbering their fiction publications by at least three to one. This spring BookThug launched a virtually wordless graphic book by Caurosel’s Mark Laliberte called BrickBrickBrick,while Vancouver’s Anvil Press has added some comic strip titles in recent seasons. Add new upstart Invisible Publishing’s dabble into illustrated texts with Stacey May Fowles 2008 Fear of Fighting, and Toronto’s Tightrope Books’ Dealers, a portrait book of Toronto gallery owners, as well as a graphic poetry anthology Boredom Fighters, and you get a pretty decent sample of how publishers are trying out new ways of branding their outfits through visual arts.
In keeping with the aforementioned moves into the visual publishing sphere, Wellington County’s Porcupine’s Quill has taken things to a slightly different level with its new wordless imprint. Using an aesthetic that is a throwback to 19th-century linocut printmaking techniques to create “extended visual narratives,” the press scans, digitizes and subsequently prints work in a format that uses modern printing technology to emulate the 19th century letterpress product. The labour-heavy result is a graphic novel without words, which is now entering its second year of production.
The concept for these woodcut graphic books rose out of a 2008 discussion at the Wayzgoose Book Fair in Grimsby, Ontario between artist George Walker and Porcupine’s Quill’s Tim and Elke Inkster, who Walker credits for being “visionaries” and getting this new imprint off the ground.
Known primarily as a traditional literary small press which has published many well-established writers early in its existence, Porcupine’s Quill hopes the series will interest readers who would otherwise ignore Canadian fiction and art. “In the past you’d never find a Quill book at a comics convention – but this series has opened a door to a new market,” says Walker.
The process for an aspiring author in this series goes beyond a simple doodle and a cover letter. The press demands a considerable amount of their time and it can take up to a year to complete the 100 or so engravings each book requires. “I help our artists to fulfill the potential of their project through reworking sketches, revising or redoing woodcuts, suggesting additional images and sequential arrangements, and suggesting historical references on which to build and develop their concepts,” says Walker, who also spends his days teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design where a lot of his authors are discovered.
Success for the new imprint has been obtained seemingly upon launch,when Stefan Berg’s Let That Bad Air Out, the first book in the series, was shortlisted by ForeWord Magazine for their Book of the Year prize. This year Marta Chudolinska’s Back and Forth was shortlisted for a Doug Wright award at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year prize.
The press is confident that all this hard work will pay off in the long run, and hopes the series will thrive in the current book market. “Many people are frightened away when they see how much work is actually involved in the project,” Walker says. He asks that artists submitting their work to the press cut their images out of wood or linoleum and print them, as well as provide sketches and storyboard for the entire book. “It is a considerable commitment, but it’s also what makes our series of wordless novels so unique, valuable, and interesting.”
Take a look at Back and Forth, recently excerpted in Broken Pencil.
July 29, 2010
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