Letterpress and hand-bound editions, conceived by consensus.
The fine press community thrives on collaboration. Thus, a new experiment: A press whose editorial and design decision-making is in the hands of its members. Our goal is to produce one letterpress and hand-bound edition per year — the rest is up to you. Please read about our experiment below.
Membership by Invitation
August 2022
For our first edition, there is no upfront cost to membership nor obligation to even order the eventual edition. Membership will be open during the month of August, after which no further members will be accepted for the first edition.
Proposals
September 2022
During the month of September 2022, member will submit an edition proposal. Proposals will consist simply of a short description (max. ~10 words) and a long description (max. ~100 words). The short description is expected to be purely descriptive, and the long description may include argumentation in favor of the proposal. Here’s an example of an excellent proposal:
Short description: “Areopagitica” by John Milton, with woodblock artwork.
Long description: Milton’s “Areopagitica” is one of the foundational texts establishing our modern notion of “freedom of expression”. Milton argued against press licensing – the process by which a text had to be approved by a censor before publication. This address would be a perfect start to Consensus Press, especially if paired with woodblock artwork, a medium strongly associated with the fine press movement.
Proposals may be however vague or specific the proposer chooses; the “boundary” of what constitutes a proposal is entirely up to each individual member. All members must submit a proposal; any who don’t by the end of the month will forfeit their membership.
Edition Selection
October & November 2022
The membership will decide among the proposals in two rounds of voting.
First round: All proposals will be given a simple up or down vote. How would you vote on the above proposal?
The ten proposals with the highest approval percentage will go to a second round. Their proposers will have the opportunity to expand upon the long descriptions (max. 1,000 words) and our Advisory Board will weigh in with a short commentary on each regarding cost estimates, craft methods, a judgement on feasibility, etc.
Second round: A ranked choice ballot. For a description of how ranked choice voting works, see here.
The member whose proposal is selected will receive the #1 copy of the edition gratis.
All members must vote in at least one round; any who don’t will forfeit their membership.
Materials & Collaborations
November & December 2022
The remainder of 2022 will be dedicated to the pre-production work that goes into a fine press edition – e.g. finding and signing contracts with collaborators, ensuring the availability of materials, typographic design work, and prototyping. Artists may be commissioned, printers and binders and typesetters must be hired, supply chains need nailing down – this sort of thing.
Major decisions will be made by vote of the membership, if not already specified in the adopted proposal.
By the end of the year, we hope to have a prototype and all contracts in place to proceed with production.
If the selected proposal proves impossible, then the runner-up will be pursued instead.
Ordering
January 2023
On New Year’s Day, we’ll reveal our prototype and open the edition to orders until the end of the month. Only members will have the right to order copies; any who don’t will forfeit their membership for the purpose of subsequent editions.
The price of the edition will be based solely on the cost of labor and materials. We will neither overprice for profit nor underprice to incentivize ordering.
Production
February through July 2023
The first half of 2023 will be dedicated to producing the edition, with monthly updates to the membership. We hope, especially, to enlist the help of our printer(s) and binder(s) to showcase their work as the edition progresses.
Shipping
August 2023
The aim is to ship the edition in August 2023. Members will be charged shipping at cost at this time. A small overage will be produced to ensure that, should anything go wrong in shipping, replacements can be made. Otherwise, however, no further copies of the edition will be made available.
2024 Edition & Beyond
If our first edition is successful, then our goal will be to pursue one edition per year going forward, using the same process. Our 2024 edition may or may not have another open invitation; this will be determined – as always! – by the vote of our members.
For now, Consensus Press is managed by a group of five founding members with the advice and input of our Advisory Board. If the experiment proves to be a success, we may hire a professional manager to run things.
Management
Advisory Board
Although Consensus Press is member-driven, an Advisory Board is in place to oversee the management of the press and provide expert input. These are widely-acknowledged experts in fine presswork, volunteering a few minutes of their time a month to nudge us in the right direction.
Our current Advisory Board: Bradley Hutchinson, acclaimed letterpress printer; David Pascoe, proprietor of Nawakum Press; Griffin Gonzales, proprietor of No Reply Press (chair); James Freemantle of St James Park Press; Jason Dewinetz, proprietor of Greenboathouse Press; Mark Askam, acclaimed collector and proprietor of Chestnut Press; Megan Gibes, lead bookbinder of Arion Press.
Our Philosophy
Consensus Press is an experiment. We hope to make the experiment a success, and a potentially exciting part of our fine press community. Still, things might go awry! As the press gets on its feet, we’ll rely on the input and patience of our members. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or suggestions as we get the ball rolling.
Our only immovable principle is that the editions which Consensus Press produces be fine press – that is, printed letterpress and bound by hand. Besides this, all power to the members. We expect the membership to be able to weed out bad, improbable, or even divisive proposals, as well as reach a consensus around the ambition and price point for each edition.
We’ll err on the side of under-regulating the process rather than over-regulating it. There are quite a few “What if…?” questions which might reasonably be asked. For example: “What if the elected proposal proves too expensive for most of the membership?” Rather than do the guesswork of regulating away such possibilities in advance (with the attending unforeseen consequences) we prefer to leave the process open-ended. Through its open-endedness, we hope the process itself will conform to the consensus of our membership. In the above case, if a member deems this possibility undesirable, they should vote down proposals for lengthy, elaborate, in-copyright (that is, expensive) editions in the first round. If a sufficient faction of the membership does so, overly-expensive projects are effectively regulated against.