19 Nov 2016 — In pursuit of risograph

From Nuphap Aunyanuphap to Silviã Lãnfrãnchi

Selected pages from the fanzine Persona #3 by Rosa Carmen and Lentejas Press (using risograph printing technique)

Greetings from a (super) cold and foggy day in Milan! :-)

First, thanks to you and Stefano very much for yesterday’s meeting at Mare Culturale Urbano. We can now understand more about the direction and actions we must take to take the project forward. ;-)

So … Let’s roll!

ps. for those who are wondering about what this project is about, please see here for the project info.

Regarding your previous posts

Here, I’ll add up my discussion together with what we talked to Stefano yesterday.

About distribution and sell

I liked very much the idea of crowdfunding. Let’s see what the research can takes us and we can take decisions together. :-)

Also, please don’t forget to tell how the workshop at mare on the crowdfunding went.

About the Open Source and entering the Public Domain

Thanks alot for sharing about the license expiration period. This is something new I learned, as I used to understood quickly that everything published before some amount of years (eg. before 1960) are considered public domain. Here, in this case, it is before 1923, and any book that are published after 1923 will have 70 years expiration period.

About the open archive

Thanks alot. I also looked up and found similar lists to yours.

Here, from the list, I personally think project Gutenberg and Archive.org is the best option for now . The reason are:

• They clearly stated that the books are open for public use and reuse.
• Have various resources on public domain literatures for us to use as a test

Here, I would be able to find the book we are looking for — Alice in Wonderland (project gutenberg, archive.org)— in various formats: texts only, texts with illustrations, etc.

I think we could go for these and use it as a resource for our first experiment. ;-)

Regarding the Production

After a quick survey of several print shops in the past weeks, I found out that digital printing is good for low volume production (maybe from 1–50 copies) since there are no set up costs and the time required to produce the book is fairly short (from 1–7 days). Another good thing about digital print is that they usually includes book binding service. Some shops are also extremely eager/helpful with not-so-normal binding that I showed them. Something like one here:

Section Sewn (with exposed details) binding technique used by the book Candide 4: Journal for Architectural Knowledge

However, the cost for each copy is still too high and we have to invest quite an amount of money to produce even small amount of books.

Offset printing, in the other hand, is interesting because we can print in large volumes with less costs. One of the shop suggested that we better go for offset if we are looking to print more than 250–300 copies (because of the price is now lower than using the digital technique). However, still, the price would be too high for us to effort in the initial phase of our project.

The light then shines to one of the technique we’ve recently discussed: RISOGRAPH.

Logo of “RISO KAGAKU CORPORATION” — the company that produces the risograph machine.

Here are the reasons:

• Our initial book is currently pretty much self-published in terms of volume, budget, and scale. Something at which risograph are intended for: self-made publications.
• The technique provides us with a design constraints (mostly sizes and colors), which is very good for us to make further design decisions. Also, the results of these production constraints are extremely astonishing and beautiful! :-)
• Since the end product of the risograph process is the paper, we also have to explore more on how to bind a book (which is really good because we will also learn something new).

Example of Risograph prints produced by Bellevue Press — via peopleofprints.com

I’m now in the process of contacting several risograph design studio / printing places within reach to learn more about their experiences and the printing process/technique.

I’ve just sent an e-mail to Atto, one of the Risograph printing consultanacy and service here in Milan that we found together online. Let’s see what they reply. :-)

I’ll keep you posted soon for any further updates from the production side! ;-)

It’s great that alot of things now have been defined for our project! I’m very excited to see our first book taking shape in no time! :-)

Thanks alot and see you soon!

N.