print’s charming

When a poet walks into a printer’s and says, I have written a book, I want to publish it, their eyes light up like neon stars. “It has to be on sumptuous papers and beautifully bound,” says the poet, and the printer’s salesman purrs, “Right this way, madam,” and leads her into an impressively empty boardroom. He is all attentiveness, spreading paper samples before her like red carpet, laying on shitty coffee and shit-eating grins. When he phones his colleagues to check the price of this or that component he is telling them, “I have here a young lady who’s written a book of poetry, we might be quoting a poetry book!” ~ possibly to alert them that, as the poet will learn to say later that same week, “there’s some air in these prices.” She is not a chain of real estate agents, who print up their repetitive brochures week in and week out and have cycled through every local printeria and copy shop, learning how to mistrust them. She is not a pizza bar who distributes six thousand pizza-shaped leaflets every month and shaves the price of each slice they serve by one sliver of prosciutto and an anchovy. She is more like an engaged couple planning their hand-cut wedding invitation. Nothing is too good for her baby and money raises no objection. This customer’s a poet.

The trouble with this theory of sales is: poetry’s earnings are poor. Poets have no money to waste. They cannot expect much profit from their enterprise so this is a different kind of investment. Some poets have even printed books before today and have learned, via painful experience, the wily weaselly ways of printers’ salespeople.

Ten days ago I first met S, sales rep for a local printing house. He took me upstairs to the abandoned boardroom and scattered paper samples before me. He made calls, he made coffee. He was excited.

I drew out the books I have published already and pointed out to him their beauties and their flaws. His excitement dimmed visibly. He tried to rally, with a story about his little bookworm daughter, to whom he had confided after our phone call the afternoon before that he was preparing a quote for a poet, and “We might be printing a poetry book!” How old was the daughter, I wanted to know. He told me, “She’s 8. She loves poetry. She reads it all the time.” “That really is remarkable,” I said. “Seriously. I’ve been writing poetry all my life, started when I was maybe nine or ten. I don’t think I’d even seen any poems before that, it just sort of happened. And I certainly wasn’t reading poetry at the age of eight! I was reading Milly Molly Mandy.” He looked discomfited. My tone was warm and inviting, and yet… “Maybe your daughter is some sort of prodigy!” I said, brightly.

What happened in me over the course of this week is at long last I taught myself to project-manage. I was in trouble. The poetry festival is a week away and on Thursday I’d still not found an affordable printer. It was starting to seem as though S – nice guy, big innocent blue eyes, he had the little bookish daughter – was lying to me. He talked me into a more durable and expensive form of binding called PUR, based on polyurethane, which made the price leap up by seven hundred and fifty dollars. It took me days to work out that when he had added in the PUR to his second quote, the total price had gone up but not down – in other words, he had added in the PUR but had not taken out the simpler “perfect binding” method he’d first quoted on. So I would be paying for the book to be bound twice. Could this be right? I couldn’t believe anybody would be so underhanded, so shamelessfaced. He came to our house to deliver a sample of the colour prints included in my design and rambled on about how beautiful everything was. There was a crack in his character somewhere but I couldn’t find it.

I asked him about the double-bind my book was in and instead of answering, he tried to sidetrack me with faux earnestness. “Ah, that $750,” he said, “yes, that’s what it actually costs. That is what I will be paying them. That’s actually what the binders charge me.” And then in his enthusiasm to bamboozle me with extraneous detail – a technique assault specialist Gavin de Becker likens to scattering tin tacks to stop a large truck – he made a tactical error. He gave me the number of his specialist binder, a guy I’ll call W, and told me to ask him directly about the advantages of the PUR binding so that I wouldn’t have to feel S himself was “talking me into it.”

I rang W. What a lovely guy. He hesitated to drop anyone else in it. But he had to say, when I mentioned the PUR price, “Ah, no. That is not what we would charge him.” He told me printers, naturally, add in a margin of profit for themselves on every component of the job. But, he said, when you take one back out – which in this case S had neglected to do – ordinarily you leave the margin in there. “Is that a way of sort of paying themselves for the time and effort they waste quoting?” I asked. “You could say that,” said W, reluctantly.

He took me in hand and explained how the industry works. I was right, he said, to have felt that when I walk in talking about poetry they will instantly see dollar signs. At last he said, “Listen. If you’re serious about this – if you really want to go on producing books of a high quality, in short print runs, and it’s important to you to turn out beautiful work – then you need to learn how to project-manage. Call the paper merchants yourself, and ask them for a price on the paper. Call the binders – not just me, get other prices. Then call every printer and ask them the exact same questions each time, so you’re comparing like with like.” He said, “Say to the printers, listen. All I want from you is to print onto my own paper, and stack the pages. Then I’ll bind it. How much is that?”

This conversation and W’s honesty and generosity sparked a revolution in my heart. I felt a wave of confidence arching up to sweep away the nervous insecurity I’d always had because I did not understand the print process and lacked the vocabulary to find my way. I rang the paper merchants, whom we had already visited recently in our quest to find an unfashionably unslick, chalky, handmade-feeling paper (“the whole market’s gone glossy” he’d told me as we leafed through the samples) for my other print project, an album of jazz and folk and funk songs recorded in New York which I want to publish in a photographic book. The paper merchant remembered me and gave me a figure. I knew it was a good price because S, who interlarded his outright lies and his evasions with bullets of honesty for me to bite down on, had mentioned a similar price for the lovely fine papers I’d chosen, in order to justify his unjustifiably high quotes. And besides, the paper merchant begged me not to tell any printers the price we had come up with. He said, normally I charge you more, because they buy so much all the time and you have kind of walked in off the street. “With my sheaf of poetry under my arm,” I said, glowing with effort and the sense of belatedly returned goodwill.

The binder quoted me $648, a hundred dollars less than what S had sworn he was going to pay directly. We chatted about my band and his band. He described the recording equipment he had bought when a studio in Sydney closed down and how he was building a space for it under his house. After we rang off he sent me a beautiful email saying he would like to offer me PUR binding for the price of the much cheaper perfect binding, because “it’s not often you meet really genuine people in this business.” I burst into tears. Within 24 hours this impossible project which would have had to sell for forty-five dollars a copy just to break even had come clean. And just through my favourite deviations: honesty, kindness, respect, and decent real communication.

Emboldened by this progress and able, now, to brief more effectively for the quote, I rang five other printers. “It needs to be done on the Cadillac,” I said, referring to the machine S had so proudly shown us – the HP Indigo – which turns out digital prints almost indistinguishable from the traditional offset. I named the paper and told them where to find it. I asked them to quote on plain printing “supplied flat”, and also on fully completed, bound books. I chewed my nails and somehow found space, in between all of this overwhelming and stressy business talk, to clear the waters for my own work and forage through the manuscript one last time, making tiny and crucial decisions about a word that was too many here, a comma there which intruded. Resurfacing to field calls from printers’ sales reps I negotiated by comparing one quote against the other. I was awesome: I’m not normally awesome in that way. Scrabbling back and forth through my forty pages of closely-written notes and scrolling from one tab to another on the screen I brought the price down by nine hundred dollars. Camaraderie, kindness, and art will out. For now at least, in this one tiny meadow of enterprise and effort, poetry prevails.