Visiting Professional - Village Books

Ben Holmes from Village Books came in for a talk about his store, making publications and general advice for students. Village books was started in 2012 for the purpose of being a contribution to the creative community in Leeds and a space for young creatives to gain exposure. It is non profit, meaning the areas like the exhibition space upstairs can’t be hired, and they are purely for the benefit of young creatives. 

Holmes described 5 different purposes for self publishing a book:

1. Promotion - Everything is digital now which means your work can be seen by so many people but that is also the case for everybody else. Creating a publication, a physical object, can catch peoples attention in a way something on a screen can’t do.
2. Book as an Artefact  - Creating a physical and covetable object, a nice way to culminate a project or more permanently group a collection of images.
3. Book as Art - A book in which every physical and visual aspect of it is considered and contributes to the overall concept.
4. Book as a Collaboration - It’s great to work with other people and to step out of yourself so to speak and get someone else perspective.
5. Book as a Product - To make money. 

He then pointed out that ideally, a book should have all of these purposes and traits.

Holmes then went through a series of publications and talked through them. It was very intriguing to here the relationship between design and production in each of them and how one effects the other. In “Gold Dust” a publication featuring 3 photographers work in Ghana which Holmes collaborated on, every image was so colourful and exciting, that there is not a single bit of white space in the book, every page is a full bleed image, with the idea of putting the name of which photographer took the photo on each page scrapped to give more attention to the images. The book is printed in a high gloss paper stock to accentuate these images even more. 

The publication ‘Shanks’ was really quite interesting as well; displaying images of a multitude of prison shanks, with a description of the materials they were made out of, the publication is small and landscape, taking on the proportions of a shank, and the metal screw device in the tope left corner which joined the pages together was reminiscent of the various metal components and instruments within the publication.

This publication, among many others made me think a lot about justifying production methods within my publication; things like the books size, cover, box and design all have a specific reason behind them however one thing I haven’t thought about was justifying the printing method. With the intention to screen print some fluorescent imagery or embellishments on the pages, I thought of some of the publications Holmes showed us, and when screen printing was specifically used in them to create bright vibrant pages, which focused on how the laborious craft of screen printing can heighten the production value and the visual and tactile intrigue of the publication. This process does not match the idea of a bouncer at all; bouncers are straight too the point, simple and do not have a tendency towards embellishing anything really, so how can this be reflected in my publication?