Chin Music Press: Fine Prints From Tokyo And Seattle
16 May 2008 Category: Arts & Crafts, Features, Japan, Worldwide
Chin Music is a term Mark Twain used to describe the eloquent sermons of a preacher. Chin Music Press is a Tokyo/Seattle-based publisher with quite a melodic output in the last six years: their four handsomely elaborated books made in Japan knock us out with their love for every detail – not just the content that aims to bring some aspects of Japan closer to a Western audience, but also with a fine printing, engraving, embossing and hardcover art. Their latest treasure, Art Space Tokyo, is something we will introduce to you in a second part… For now, PingMag has an intercontinental chat with founder Bruce Rutledge in Seattle and art director Craig Mod in Tokyo.
Written by Verena
When did you first have the idea to start a publishing company? Was there something that sparked it?
Bruce: It was as I was finishing fifteen years of living in Japan and thinking about what my next step should be career-wise. I had worked all sorts of media jobs in Japan, like a white-collar Louis L’Amour, and I was pretty burnt out on all of them. But I still loved writing and reading about Japan.
I finally decided to take the plunge and establish my own small press in Seattle after talking with my wife Yuko and Craig, who was a college student at the time. I was looking for community, and I figured the best way to find it – or to create it – would be to build a small publishing house like Chin Music Press.
Also, I needed a city in the US that would support this kind of venture, and Seattle was it. People in Seattle are genuinely interested in Japan, plus the city has excellent independent bookstores and a thriving cafe culture thanks to the rain. It’s a city that loves books. In the end, I think I had just the right mix of arrogance and naiveté to take the plunge.
And you, Craig?
Craig: I was working out here doing some journalism at the same magazine as Bruce, at Japan Inc. At the end of that summer, he said I’m planning to start a publishing company. Do you want to help? That was in 2002…
… and you just did it without much experience…
Craig: I knew nothing about book production, so it was kind of a ‘learn-as-you-go’ sort of thing. There was no five-year business plan; we knew almost nothing about marketing, distribution… I had always loved books and literature and had these images about how I thought a great book should look. I’d always been involved with the web, with digital things…
One reason we make books the way we make them is because we feel that there is a digital shift, online – with newspapers shifting online, e-readers, etc. There is this really palpable sense of the book, in this form, as we know it, dying. Its eminent death.
But there is always a need for beautiful things to hold in your hand. The Internet or a screen will never replace that, for sure. Why worry?
Craig: It’s not a worry; we embrace it! We try to do as much online-related, progressive literary work, like with Canned Coffee [literature and reviews of Japanese coffee in cans], and Hitotoki [user generated content about specific moments at specific places] in collaboration with the AQ agency.
Books are great for certain things: the book format is beautiful and in terms of aesthetic, it’s about a visual rhythm. You can’t get that online.
Again, to the concept: How do you decide what you want to publish?
Bruce: Chin Music Press is a literary press with a newsroom mentality. What I mean by that is that we end up publishing works that hit us in the gut, that seem to be screaming to us that they are ready for the world. We look for something that captures the zeitgeist. We look for the stories that aren’t being told by the larger presses.
We also look at the way certain things are reported and try to turn them on their heads. That was very true with Kuhaku and Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, our first two books. With Kuhaku, for example, I often got the feeling that foreign writers would come to Japan and tell stories that wrapped everything up nice and neat, explaining Japan for the outside world. So we went for the opposite approach, telling stories that contradicted each other or that had murky endings or that showed Japan in a mundane light. We went for messy when the typical approach was for nice and neat. (Of course Craig’s design is never messy!)
Craig: We didn’t really have a game plan. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? came out organically. This is the advantage of being small: you don’t have to play by anyone’s rules; you can adapt. Hurricane Katrina hit, and Bruce’s brother was displaced. Bruce and David [Cady, our director,] were talking, and the idea for it came out. We went from having an idea to connecting with all the writers, to having a fully-designed and printed book in basically a month and a half. It was very intense.
Obviously there is also a strong focus on Japanese topics and society, like with Madame Butterfly. Since you publish in English, do you want to serve as mediator between the Japan and the Western world?
Bruce: We would like to do just that. Like Stonebridge Press in Berkeley, California, and other over the years, we’d like to bring new stories about Japan to the West.
You mentioned earlier that publishing in English only is a matter of money…
Craig: Yes. And it’s also a distribution problem: We don’t have one in Japan. Here, you almost need a license to get your books out there, if you’re a publisher. So the easiest way to do it is to connect with a publisher here. I’m using their publishing code and their distributor code. However, individual stores can be receptive; it just takes a lot of time. Unless you have a salesperson to do it, it’s almost not worth it, what you get back. My hope is, with Art Space Tokyo, it will help connect us to publishers…
Then, how do you share the work across two continents? Who does what?
Bruce: Ideally, we find writers and artists in Japan, especially Japanese writers, then translate their works here in Seattle while Craig does the artwork from Tokyo. We print our books in Japan too. So aside from editorial work and the day-to-day business, the rest of our production work takes place in Japan.
So, there aren’t many of you tackling all that work. How do you manage?
Craig: It’s become full-time. Making books doesn’t pay the bills, it doesn’t pay the rent, so we’re always doing stuff on the side — design or editorial. But we’re putting out four books this year, so it’s a lot of books! This is the year we’re pushing to make this economically sustainable.
And how do you chose these marvellous book cover designs and prints?
Bruce: Probably more than most presses, we bring everybody — designer, translator, editor, writer, illustrator, proofreader, et al — into the conversation right from the beginning via collaborative software such as Basecamp. We talk about the ideas in the book, and then an illustrator or designer will start to whip up possible versions of the cover. Everyone critiques, and it can get a bit chaotic. But in the end, we feel we come out with something that speaks strongly to the book as a whole.
How do you approach that, Craig?
Craig: In terms of design, I’d like to look back on older publishing methods. With Kuhaku, the title page mimics old title pages, with strange maps or boxes. With Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, I found its illustration at the Waseda University Library: a 150-year-old travel guide to New Orleans, with beautiful, delicate etchings, and it was a first-edition. I couldn’t believe it! Gorgeous, leather-bound – and falling apart!
That’s very distinctive to Chin Music, that you pay so much attention to every single detail: not just the content, but the exterior. This is also a characteristic of Japanese manufacturing.
Craig: Japanese people don’t have as strong a reaction to what we’re producing as Westerners do because, especially in America, this type of book is pretty rare, in the mass market.
How come? Because everything is paperback?
Craig: Yes. If it’s a hardcover, it’s big. There is a lot of beautiful design and, in the 1990s, there was even a renaissance. In America now, you have these book design superstars, like Chip Kidd. In the last twenty years, the book designer has become someone with a face, as opposed to this anonymous guy.
In general, in America you don’t see anything like this. Maybe in independent stores; McSweeney’s does some beautiful stuff. They pushed the design of the book in a way that was visible to the mass public — quarterly, originally playing with the format of a journal since it doesn’t have to be fixed. We were completely inspired by them when we were starting off.
… and your books have some beautiful embossing, like on the back of Madame Butterfly!
Craig: In Connecticut, there was this place called The Book Barn — literally a barn filled with books. They had this old, used book section and there was this guide called “The Overland Guide to Asia.” A guy in the 1800s took a Russian bobsled trip through central Asia and he wrote this account. The design of it was just gorgeous, with gold embossing. So, the embossing on the back of Madame Butterfly is a throwback to this idea of the publisher’s stamp being on the book.
Ah, beautiful! Lastly, what are the next steps for Chin?
The delicate embossing with Chin Music’s initials on the back of “Goodbye Madame Butterfly.” © 2005-2008 Chin Music Press
Bruce: Our goal is to be a sustainable small press that is big enough to regularly employ three or four staff and put out four or five titles a year. It’s a modest goal, but it’s still difficult to get there. This year, we will publish three new titles and one reprint, so we are starting to get closer to our goal, but we need each book to do well so that we can bring on a couple of key staff members, especially someone who can help us with marketing and promotion.
I guess the thing that should be said is that we do this because small presses have always been on the front lines of culture. Small presses are the ones that bear the brunt, take the financial risk to get a new voice out there. Often you’ll find that somewhere in a great writer’s background is a stint with a small press. Typically, that stint is what allows a writer to hit his or her stride.
Very true! We are awaiting your next book about Japanese politics, which is coming out in July. Thank you, Bruce and Craig of Chin Music Press!
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None found
wow…good looking books.
Thanks for the nice article!
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Posted by: diego lara on May 17th, 2008 at 12:15 am
great content in a delicate and beautiful “body”
thx for the article,
hugs from Uruguay
Xime
Posted by: ximerba on May 17th, 2008 at 12:31 am
This is why print is always beautiful. It’s so gorgeous. And the photos are perfect. I can almost feel and smell the paper.
Posted by: Christopher on May 17th, 2008 at 12:44 am
very sophisticated and beautiful. wonderful covers.
Posted by: Tomek on May 17th, 2008 at 3:12 am
The editorial design in Japan is amazing, so powerful and clean, a real lesson of good design for us. Thanks for the article.
And hugs from Colombia!
Posted by: Pulpo Designer on May 17th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Don’t judge a book by its cover? Pah! If editors don’t even take the step of choosing (and paying) a good (amount of money to a) designer, what can we then await from the stuff written within? Nowadays no-one has the time to go through a bookstore and read the first chapter of each book before choosing, so distinction has to be made. What is wrong with the idea that caring about what you publish looks awesome? Always worth a purchase!
Posted by: Dávid on May 17th, 2008 at 7:53 am
nice, nice.
def the quality of hardcovers and magazines in Japan outstrips the average in the US etc.
too bad that this means I have a wall of books that I either won’t read, or am not interested in reading…. nice covers tho
Posted by: s.kokubo on May 17th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
hi,
great interview and very beautifull cover,can wait to purchase the art space tokyo. very nice illustrations ! can wait to read the book.
congrats
Posted by: jp kalonji on May 17th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
I really like this interview and the books are ace! But I disagree with the statement that the book as it is now will vanish in the near future. I’m originally a bookbinder and I held books in my hands which are over 500 years old and still readable. We already know that any digital medium is not capable of doing so either because it will decompose (DVD) or because the technology of the reader will be overhauled and long forgotten (tapes). But we will be still able to read in a thousand years… So keep the books coming!
Carlo
Posted by: Carlo on May 17th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I bought Tokyo Art Space recently and I love it! It is truly a pleasure to hold and to read. The contents are top-notch too. I was never able to find books about contemporary Asian art when I was a student, so now I collect them compulsively - this is a great addition to my collection. Now I just have to go to Tokyo and visit some of the galleries profiled!
Posted by: Claire on May 18th, 2008 at 2:53 am
beautiful work!
Posted by: dailydesignspot on May 18th, 2008 at 6:44 am
I’m looking forward to picking up Tokyo Art Space in the near future. Reading this article has only increased my desire for it!
Posted by: rey ortega on May 19th, 2008 at 12:57 am
thank you!
Posted by: tugla on May 19th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Thank you all for the kind words and interest in our work!
My portion of the interview was conducted in a somewhat noisy cafe and I think some of the transcription may have been cut, mistranscribed or misread. So I’d just like to clarify my comments on the ‘death of the book’:
To be perfectly clear: I don’t think the physical book will ever cease to exist. I do, however, think that because of the digital shift, certain types of books will cease to be distributed physically. We are already seeing this most visibly in computer books (see O’Reilly’s Safari online book service — computers books being both bulky and read non-linearly are especially welcome in digital form) and the shift is creeping, albeit slowly, into the trade paperback market (see Amazon Kindle). In fact, we just got back from a publishers conference in New York last week and some small presses are already beginning to report non-trival profits from Kindle sales (I know, we were surprised too!).
Of course there are certain books (art books most notably, and other non-standard formatted publications) that will thrive in the printed, physical form, but for many (99% of all trade fiction and non-fiction releases) the format and physicality are indeed secondary to their content. These are the books that I believe we’ll be reading in ‘digital’ form in the not so distant future.
In a sense there will be a very clear point where the technology of the reader, the cost savings and the convenience will converge in a way that will trump the average fellow’s sense of romanticism for the printed book in certain instances.
So when I talk about embracing this shift I’m talking about both embracing in an online context (i.e., through (hopefully!) progressive and entertaining online literary projects (see Hitotoki)) and in a physical ‘book’ context. We like to think our production quality and attention to physical detail is tangible manifestation of this response to the digital shift.
I hope that clears up some of the above and if anyone has any other questions please feel free to leave a comment or mail us directly at speak@chinmusicpress.com.
Craig Mod
CMP
Posted by: Craig on May 19th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Havent actually read any of these books yet, but they do look super and nice on the old eye!!!
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