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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Books Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Posted by Cate McGehee on Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:10 PM

Together, these six chapbooks look like some kind of bouquet. It is no surprise that something from Alice Blue, an online journal and press, would be beautiful—they are known for their meticulous, artful book production, with work ranging from the recent release Monster: A Glottochronology, by TFD and Thomas Cook, which consists of two hand-sewn signatures of French archival paper and a red vellum slip ($12), to a $500 story quilt which depicts Laked, Fielded, Blanked by Brooklyn Copeland in silk-screen images and hand-embroidered lettering. Their latest project, Shotgun Wedding ($20/$5 each), a chapbook series that highlights the work of Pacific Northwest authors, seems at first like a far cry from their usual production. Shotgun Wedding is just printed pages, folded in half and stapled. In an e-mail, Amber Nelson, the creator and editor of Alice Blue, said, "I wanted to make chapbooks without the usual waiting for handmade paper or picking the right vellum or hand-carving linoleum stamps or hand-carving plastic stencils, without the hours of sewing. Just lo-fi, take it to your local copy shop, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am."

And yet, the series arrived at a look that could become iconic. "The design was kind of slowly built," wrote Amber. "I knew I just wanted to do photocopy chapbooks with saddle staples. But I thought they would just be white." When she decided to publish all six at the same time, with uniform font and design, she thought "it also made sense to do something that would distinguish them from each other. The orange one. The pink one. The blue one. You know?"

When describing her desire to focus on the Northwest, Nelson wrote, "Seattle is fucking vibrant right now," citing the Five Alarms Lit Crawl, the Furnace series, SPLAB, the Breadline, and others. These chapbooks have as much vibrancy as the community they're drawn from...

(Keep reading.)