Over at Narrow Books we’re starting to experiment with carrying books by artists that we like that we didn’t actually have anything to do with pressing. This began as a very casual step when we started selling hand-made books and zines by artists we’d worked with at events, notably Travis Millard’s Who Let the Gods Out and Bite the Bedbugs Back books, and the amazing Chillo Chillo by Mel Kadel
Then recently came Megan Whitmarsh’s Yeti Logic, published by Rojo. Since Rojo’s in Spain, and the book is a limited edition, and we like Megan’s work so much, we thought, let’s get more of these books over the sea before they sell out. And Rojo very graciously agreed to letting us become another “distributor” of the book, though in fact I suppose we’re more like a store without a storefront.
The thing is the public events we participate in allow us to power-up into store mode, and showcase and sell anything we like directly to the public. There’s this jargon-y term now, “pop-up” stores, which basically you can just substitute the word temporary for “pop-up” and not have to sound like a douchebag. The upshot for Narrow Books is, from time to time, temporarily, we’re a store, not just a publisher. Which is great.
For example, it means that we’ll be able to show people Esther Pearl Watson’s Unlovable Vol. 1, which was a book we’ve known would come into existence for years (always secretly wondering if we might one day be able to press it), and but we weren’t surprised or chagrined when the awesome Fantagraphics put it out this year. The book came out and they did justice to it with a really nice hardcover release and plans in place to print the future volumes. It’s rad. And Fantagraphics is going to let us sell it at the Unique LA event on May 2nd and 3rd. Because now we’re sometimes a store.
See? Awesome.
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