How Do We Find and Choose People to Represent? The simple, admittedly unhelpful answer is that we find them any way we can, and we choose to represent those whose work we like. It's a mushy, delicious process, sometimes visceral, sometimes cerebral. Let's take the two issues separately. When we began, after we stumbled onto Ron King's Antony and Cleopatra and made contact with Ron, we were referred to other (mostly) fine presses by Ron and then John Randle (Whittington Press). It was our first experience of the generosity that as a rule permeates the world of contemporary fine press and artists' books. Now, some 8 years later, we continue to have printers and book artists recommended by those we already represent.
Moreover, since we now have something of a track record, printers and book artists contact us. The process begins in a variety of ways – email, jpegs, letters, prospectuses, phone calls, work submitted over the transom and unannounced – but in all cases, we will want to see the work, actually get to hold and manipulate it, before we make a commitment.
Then we come to the choosing part of the process: one of us, usually it's both of us, but it has to be one must have what we call the Wow Experience. Talk about the inadequacy of words. But when I first opened Ron King's Antony and Cleopatra, felt actual chills up and down my spine, was sucked into the eddy of aesthetic focus – all I could say was, Wow. And something like that happens with the books we choose to represent. We find, unsurprisingly, that the books we are most successful with are the books we like the most. I really don’t think of myself as a salesperson, but I am someone who can get excited about certain things, and who likes to share that excitement. It's subjective and personal and probably ultimately indescribable. It has to do with taste and background and a million other things that only our mothers (possibly) and a therapist (with the meter running) would be interested in.
In words it sounds like a young diarist coping with first love. I like books that haunt and comfort me. Can I be fuzzier? The work has to speak to me on some level, and those levels are many. I believe in being inclusive rather than exclusive. I am reluctant to try to define what I like, even what constitutes an artists’ book or a press book. I find joy in simple things, and complex things, beautiful things, and beauty redefined, I like text, and images, quiet things, and over-the-top things, like inexpensive work as well as things I’ll never be able to afford, like humor, but more I like wit.
It’s easier to describe things that don’t appeal to me: I don’t like shoddy work, work that uses the “I am art and so I can be as sloppy as I care to be” argument, don’t like pretentious work, work that spouts its life-changing importance. One-liners, even collections of one-liners, one-look books, and gimmick books are fine, but they rarely get my commitment.
In the end, the best way for you to get an idea of what moves us is to spend a little while on our website http://www.vampandtramp.com. You'll see a variety of styles, formats, processes, prices. Somehow, all of these have produced at least a wheezing 'wow' from one of us.
